When the Product Becomes the Creator

Foreword.. why I'm publishing this now

I wrote this in early 2025 after a long conversation with the CTO of one of the largest creative-software companies in the world. He asked me what I thought was happening to creative tools. I gave him the honest answer. He suggested I write it down.

So I did. I shared it with him. I also shared it with the board of the company I was CEO of at the time, and with another company that was actively talking to me about a strategic role. It was meant as a warning, and as a blueprint. Neither organisation acted on the specifics.

That's fine. Strategy papers don't always find their moment. Sometimes the moment finds them.

In the last few weeks, the major AI labs have shipped products that read like this document's table of contents. Claude Design. GPT's design canvas. Gemini's new design primitives. "The brief is the interface." "Full self-designing systems." "Modality-agnostic creative engines." Not paraphrases. Near-quotations.

I'm publishing the paper exactly as I wrote it, with only light edits for anonymity where necessary. The specifics that mattered most are intact. Read it and decide for yourself whether the eighteen-month-old analysis holds up.

.. SB

The following is a working document capturing my evolving thoughts on the seismic shifts underway in the creative-tools landscape. This perspective is grounded in a career spent living at the intersection of creativity and technology.. as a user, a builder, and a former CEO of a creative-tools company. I've spent that career watching, and helping shape, how people create.

The convergence of AI, design, and intent is rewriting the playbook. Below are the most pressing trends and risks I see unfolding, along with thoughts on what the next phase of creative enablement could look like.

What I'm Seeing

Creation no longer starts where the tools begin.

Designers, marketers, and business users increasingly expect intelligent collaboration from their "tools."
AI-native apps are collapsing once-distinct disciplines.. copywriting, layout, design systems.. into a single interface that behaves more like a creative partner than a toolkit.
Design-primitive toolsets are being overtaken by intent-centric systems.

The role of the designer is being rewritten.

Just as the web removed developers from certain layers of the creative loop, AI is now removing.. or radically redefining.. the designer's role.
The marketer or strategist can brief a system directly. If the output is high-quality, why start in InDesign, Illustrator, or even Figma?
We're witnessing the end of pixel-pushing.. and the beginning of pixel-manifestation.

The interface is becoming the brief.

We're transitioning into a world where the brief is the interface.
Natural language, intent, and multimodal inputs are replacing timelines and canvases.
Tools that require a human to "open a new doc and begin designing from scratch" will increasingly feel outdated.
This shift fundamentally reorders what UX in creative tools means.

Multimodal intelligence is arriving.. fast.

The latest models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google confirm it. We're entering an era of true creative convergence.
These engines aren't merely simulating creativity; they perform it, blending language, logic, and vision into a unified flow.
That convergence of art and science.. once reserved for suites like Photoshop and After Effects.. is now embodied inside the model itself.

Time compression is real.

Twelve months ago, "creative AI" still felt experimental.
Today, AI-native competitors to every incumbent are shipping usable, even inspiring results.
The rate of improvement is exponential. What once took teams weeks now takes prompts and minutes.

The Strategic Risk

Solving for the past, not the future.

Any platform.. legacy or challenger.. that defines itself strictly as "a tool for designers" risks becoming an island.
If designers evolve toward curator, director, or intent-setter, building for yesterday's workflow may cost tomorrow's relevance.

The AI-native challenger ecosystem is growing.

Products like Bolt, Loveable, and dozens of stealth AI-first startups are training their systems to take creative direction straight from the founder, CMO, or strategist.
They optimise for intent-to-output pipelines, not pixel-precision tools.
The longer established players delay decisive moves, the harder it will be to reclaim creative authority.

Under-leveraged data is a sleeping giant.

Adobe, Canva, Figma, and every major creative platform sits on decade-plus troves of real-world creative data. What was briefed, what was built, what was revised, what performed.
That dataset is Tesla's driver footage for creativity.. the raw material for a full self-designing engine.
If the incumbents don't model and operationalise it, someone else will.. perhaps with synthetic data, perhaps with a different wedge entirely.. and catch up faster than the cap-table math suggests.

Where I Think the Opportunity Lies

Reframe the mission without losing the soul.

Unlocking creativity remains the north star for everyone in this industry.
But the how must change. The next wave of products won't just help people create faster. They'll help them create differently.. starting with a brief, collaborating with an AI partner, and stepping in as taste-master or art director.

Build toward a Full Self-Designing system.

The industry should stop simply adding smarter widgets and start architecting something new.
A modality-agnostic, AI-native creator that understands visual hierarchy, brand tone, business context, and design intent.
This isn't a plugin or an "assistant." It's a collaborative engine that lets users steer creativity instead of wrestle with it.
Call it FSD for design. The concept is the thing; the naming will take care of itself.

Invest in modality-agnostic thinking.

The best future platforms won't care whether the output is a video, a deck, a microsite, or a TikTok ad.
They'll respond to what the user wants to say, not what the tool was built to make.
The next frontier is a canvas-less system.. creativity beginning with vision, not format.

Activate the feedback-as-brief pattern.

A specific example worth calling out. Products like MarkUp.io and Adobe's Frame.io already have users behaving like "intent prompters".. leaving precise, contextual, timestamped feedback on creative work.
That's not a comments feature. That's a training dataset for intent-to-output AI, sitting under everyone's nose.
Whoever owns one of those surfaces and understands what they're actually holding is a move or two from a much bigger game.
The ones who think they own a review tool will be reclassified as historical.

Lead the narrative before someone else does.

AI is both an accelerant and a reputational wedge.
The winners here will position themselves as torchbearers of a new creative renaissance.. neither a legacy brand retro-fitting AI, nor a start-up chasing a fad.
Love your creatives. Empower them. Help them see how AI can unlock, amplify, and accelerate their impact.
The companies that do this with conviction will earn the right to define the next era. The ones that don't will be remembered as the ones who were there when it happened, and didn't move.

This paper was written in February 2025 as a private working document. It is published here largely as written, with light edits for anonymity and clarity. The arguments, predictions, and structural thinking stand as they did eighteen months ago.

Simon Berg builds at the intersection of creativity and technology. He writes about what he's seeing, what he's building, and why creativity matters more than ever.