The Rise of the AI Natives
Ready or not, here they come
I’ve been working and teaching at the intersection of UX Design and front end development for over twenty years. My students cover a broad age range, from 20 to 40~ish, but the younger ones are more likely to be “Digital Natives”. This doesn’t make them better students, but if you were exposed to Photoshop or Google Docs in the sixth grade, it means you’ve spent a third your life using these tools. With this mental model in place, it’s just much easier to learn software and create things. The older adults generally have a harder time learning the tools, but make up for it in terms of discipline and work experience.
In 2010 I was teaching ‘one day web design’ workshops, and many of my students were older adults who explained that they didn’t really want to take this class because they were “real designers”, but needed to stay employed. I don’t want to make any stereotypes about age here, and there have been many exceptions, but the younger people have certainly been more adaptable over the years. There wasn’t some exclusionary age cutoff, just a flexibility that comes from being a digital native.
You probably know where I’m going with this, and before you consider becoming an “AI Native”, I’ll offer a few caveats. As Mary Meeker pointed out in her Internet trends report, the pace of change is unprecedented, and the tech world seems to be obsessed with speed. If you want to “move fast and break things” (on steroids) and work really hard, this might be for you. However, if you are wary of the “Cult of Productivity”, and want a work-life balance, you might want to sit this one out. While I consider myself to be an AI Native because I’m immersed in it, I don’t really want to work this hard.
We all know how bad the job market is and I am in the awkward position of trying to convince (mostly) young people that they should work really hard in the face of uncertainty. And while it’s tempting to say “Learn the latest AI skills”, it would be at the cost of their foundational classes. It’s more important to teach critical thinking skills and the principles of design, than shiny new software. However, if they can become more fluent with AI, combined with their natural ability to pick things up quickly, my next crop of students will have a distinct advantage. A big part of my curriculum next fall will revolve around Anthropic’s AI Fluency Course, which I wrote about on Medium. While the numbers are still evolving in my head, I think I’ll spend about 80% of my time teaching Design and about 20% of the time teaching them to be AI Natives.
What does it mean to be an AI Native? Here are three articles I’m reading this week that have helped inform my perspective.
Jakob Nielsen, the Godfather of UX writes in his newsletter :
AI-native companies tend to rely more on generalist staff than specialists, since AI provides any required specialized expertise. With extensive AI help, it becomes more important that all staff understand the full business end-to-end. The article quotes one founder as saying, “Our moat is going to become speed.” (Meaning that the lean AI-first organization can out-execute anybody else and adapt to the expected immense changes in the economy over the coming decade.)
As an example of the new workflows enabled by being AI-native, the article cites the founder of Daydream for prototyping 15–20 different ideas in parallel, which is an entirely different approach than legacy product development that proceeds linearly. When design, research, and implementation are all expensive, you can’t afford to test 19 ideas that will be discarded, but doing so makes the one surviving idea much stronger.
CIO Magazine (Chief Information Officer) has this article:
An AI-native organization is one that embeds AI into the core of its operations. In other words, AI drives strategic decision-making, optimizes critical processes and fuels growth from the ground up. An AI-native company does not think of AI as a shiny new tool but as a fundamental shift to its business identity, leveraging human-like intelligence delivered by technology.
Eventually, as AI adoption spreads, “ambient AI” will become the new normal, inducing a fully symbiotic and synchronized co-piloting between humans and AI. AI will augment human and business performance by driving real-time insights and actionable decisions. In this new normal, employees will no longer need to “make the case” for AI because the value will be clear and indispensable.
Elana Verna offers an account of what it’s like to be an AI Native employee at Lovable. This is brutal, and the best thing I’ve read in weeks.
Can everything be done this way? Absolutely not. But even when we do go cross-functional (aka my design and dev teams jump in), things still move at crazy speed - because everyone’s using AI to cut the fluff, skip the handoffs, and just… get things done faster.
Most (not all) of the AI-native employees I’ve seen are young (at least compared to me, LOL) - fresh out of school, sometimes not even graduated yet. And honestly? That’s their superpower. They haven’t been indoctrinated with our corporate bullshit. They’re not weighed down by legacy processes, approval chains, or the deep-rooted belief that "things just take time." They see a problem and start building.
So there it is, a snapshot into the future of the workplace. Maybe not every workplace, but if you’ve decided that this is the path you want to pursue, I’ll be writing about it a lot. Getting some value from my newsletter? You can always buy me a coffee.
