5 November 2026 · 7 min read

AI in the design process: what it speeds up and what it can’t replace

Short answer: AI now speeds up most of the repetitive parts of design: summarising research, first drafts of text, quick layout options, code and checks. It doesn’t replace the parts that decide whether a website works: understanding your customers, deciding what to build and what to leave out, and taking responsibility for the result. Used well, it gives you more options and more testing in the same time. Used badly, it gives you a generic site full of confident mistakes.

Almost every designer uses AI now. In the 2026 AI in Design Report, a survey of 906 designers in over 60 countries, 91% said they use AI at least once a week and 75% every day. So the question isn’t whether your designer uses it, but how. Here’s where it fits into each step of a website or app project, and what that means for you.

Where AI fits into each step

1. Research

Reading through competitors’ websites, customer reviews, survey answers and interview notes takes hours. AI can summarise them in minutes and point out patterns: what customers keep praising, what they complain about, what nobody explains well. The designer still has to check the summary against the source, because AI happily invents patterns that aren’t there.

2. Structure and content

AI is good at first drafts: a page list, an outline, ten ways to phrase a headline, questions customers might ask. It’s bad at the facts that make your business different, such as your prices, your process, your area and your real customer stories. Those have to come from you. A good rule: AI can draft, but every sentence that goes live should be checked and rewritten by someone who knows the business.

3. Layouts and options

Generating rough layouts and variations is now quick, which means a designer can explore more directions before choosing one. The skill shifts from drawing boxes to judging which option actually helps your customers find what they need.

4. Visuals

Mood boards, colour ideas, icons and placeholder images can all be generated. Real photos of your team, your work and your premises still beat generated ones for trust. Generated images of “happy customers” are easy to spot and can make a small business look less real, not more.

5. Building

This is where AI has changed the most. A large share of the code on many new websites is now written with AI help, and half of the designers in the same 2026 survey said they had shipped AI-generated code to a live product. It’s faster, but the code still needs someone who can read it, test it on real phones and fix what it gets wrong.

6. Checks before launch

AI is a patient checker: spelling, broken links, missing descriptions for search engines, text that’s hard to read, colour contrast, and how pages behave on different screen sizes. These checks used to be skipped when time ran out. Now there’s little excuse.

What AI can’t do (yet)

• Know your customers. It knows what websites usually say. It doesn’t know why people choose you over the business down the road.
• Decide what to leave out. Ask AI for a website and you get everything a website could have. Good design is mostly choosing the few things that matter.
• Be right every time. It writes wrong facts, made-up statistics and broken code in the same confident tone as everything else.
• Keep a brand consistent. Left alone, AI drifts towards the average, which is why so many new sites look the same.
• Take responsibility. If the site breaks, leaks data or misleads customers, a person has to answer for it. A tool can’t.

An AI website builder or a designer?

AI builders such as Wix’s AI site builder, Framer and Squarespace can generate a whole site from a few sentences in minutes. They’re a reasonable choice when:

• you’re testing an idea and need something online this week;
• you need a simple one-page site and have very little budget;
• you’re happy to rewrite the text and swap the images yourself.

If you like the idea of a builder but not the set-up, I can build your site on Wix, Squarespace or WordPress for you. They fall short when the website needs to bring in work: when you need to stand out locally, explain a service people compare carefully, take bookings or payments in a specific way, or rank in search for what your customers actually type. The generated site is a starting point, not a finished one. More in Wix, Squarespace or a custom website.

Does AI make websites cheaper?

Partly. Some steps that used to take days now take hours, especially building and checking. For simple sites, that can bring prices down. For anything more involved, the time saved usually goes into the things that were often cut before: more options, more testing, better content and more care on phones.

What hasn’t changed is where most of the value is: working out what your business needs. That part was never the slow typing, it was the thinking. Typical UK prices are in how much a website costs in the UK, and the difference between designers who think and designers who only draw is in cheap vs expensive designer.

Risks to watch for

• Wrong information. Prices, opening hours, legal text and claims about your services must be checked by a person.
• A generic look and voice. If your site reads like everyone else’s, customers have no reason to pick you.
• Images you don’t have the right to use. Ask where generated images come from and whether they can be used commercially.
• Your data. Customer lists, contracts and private details shouldn’t be pasted into AI tools without thought. Ask your designer how they handle them.
• Search. Search engines don’t punish text because AI helped write it, but they do favour pages that are genuinely useful and accurate. Mass-produced filler rarely ranks for long.

How I use AI in my own work

I use AI every day, the same way I’d use a fast, tireless assistant: to summarise research, draft and check text, explore layout options, write and review code, and run checks on every screen size before launch. This website was built that way: I designed it and made the decisions, AI helped write and test much of the code, I reviewed every change myself before it went live, and everything was checked on real screens.

What I don’t hand over: understanding your business and customers, deciding what goes on the site and what doesn’t, the final wording and the final look. That’s the part you’re paying a designer for, and it’s the part AI is worst at.

If you’re a designer yourself, the step-by-step version is in my AI design workflow.

Questions to ask your designer about AI

1. Which parts of my project will you use AI for?
2. Who checks the text, facts and code it produces?
3. Will any of my data or my customers’ data go into AI tools?
4. Are the images real, licensed or generated, and can I use them commercially?
5. If AI saves you time, where does that time go: a lower price, more testing, or more options?

Clear, relaxed answers are a good sign. A designer who won’t say whether they use AI at all is a less good one. For the rest of the hiring checklist, see what to prepare before hiring a web designer.

Common questions

Will AI replace web designers?

It’s replacing parts of the job, mostly the repetitive production work. The parts that depend on understanding a business, its customers and its trade-offs are still done by people, and they matter more now that producing a generic site is easy.

Can AI build my whole website?

It can produce a working site from a short description. Whether that site brings in customers depends on the content, structure and details AI doesn’t know about your business, so expect to rewrite and adjust a lot of it.

Is AI-written content bad for SEO?

Not by itself. Search engines look at whether a page is helpful, accurate and original. AI-assisted text that’s checked and filled with real information can rank well; unchecked filler usually doesn’t.

How do designers use AI in 2026?

Mostly for research summaries, first drafts of text, layout options, code, design systems and checks such as accessibility and testing on different screens. Surveys in 2026 found that around nine in ten designers use AI every week.

Should a website say it was made with AI?

There’s no general rule for business websites in the UK. What matters more is that everything on the site is true and that generated images aren’t passed off as real photos of your work or customers.

Tatiana · UX/UI, web & product designer in the UK with 10+ years across B2B and B2C. I design and build websites, online shops, web products and apps for businesses of every size. Back to the site