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From the International Monetary Fund warning 40% of jobs will be affected, to Goldman Sachs saying 300 million jobs could be permanently affected, AI’s impact has been focused on big numbers. But AI’s power won’t just be in job displacement: it will also change how and with whom people work.
“If we track the trajectory of AI software design and development, we will start to see a more apparent shift in how roles like [user experience], engineering, and product management interact,” says Hari Subramonyam, assistant professor at Stanford University. He is the co-author of a recent paper that suggests generative AI isn’t simply changing what software teams build, but how teams work together.
Subramonyam and his colleagues conducted studies with 39 software professionals, looking at how teams designed products and tools. They discovered that individual roles were being redefined within businesses thanks to the use of generative AI.
The rise of AI assistance and prompting in developing software and tools means that the interactions between teams changes, too. The central prompt changes a team’s behaviour, says Subramonyam. “This further collapses traditional role boundaries and what emerges is a model of joint authorship and joint design work to specify, steer, and constrain the generation behaviour.”
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Negotiation, not handing over
In this new world, that behaviour is no longer a relay race, says Subramonyam, but an active discussion. “The behaviour is no longer handed off across roles, but negotiated and iterated through prompt prototyping,” he explains. That may initially cause friction, as what were once clearly defined and delineated roles blur, but in the long run might be beneficial, say those within the industry.
“For many software engineering tasks, the real problem is to get stakeholders aligned, work together, and break down the silos,” says Sebastian Gierlinger, vice president of engineering at Storyblok.
Those silos can be a burden, he says, as user experience, product management, and software engineering work separately. “This use of AI encourages earlier collaboration, and heads off future headaches and misalignment, reckons Gierlinger. If cross-functional teams can pre-align on their goals through negotiation – and are compelled to speak the same language used by generative AI tools.
That’s something Renuka Nadkarni, chief product officer at Aryaka, a secure access service edge firm, says her company is experiencing first-hand as they adopt AI throughout the development process.
London • June 16 & 17, 2025
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Working well together
“Software development practices at Aryaka are shifting from sequential workflows to parallel co-creation, increasing productivity and fostering a more cohesive and agile development environment,” she says. That means “every team member has the tools to ideate, prototype, and validate, regardless of formal role”.
Productivity has increased as a result, says Nadkarni, with user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) engineers creating interactive mock-ups that engineers can quickly iterate on, speeding up the development cycle. For more minor tweaks, it’s also possible for subject matter non-experts to intervene, meaning more highly skilled and specialist software engineers can focus on what they need to do.
“Designers making minor updates to a design system, such as changing colours or layout dimensions, can directly update the CSS files to reflect these changes without needing to wait for an engineer to perform the task,” points out Rakesh Ravuri, senior vice president for engineering at digital transformation company Publicis Sapient.
Of course, the risk of riling up specialists if those changes go wrong can be an issue – but it’s one that needs to be managed ahead of time, says Ravuri. “It’s natural to experience some tensions and concerns as roles overlap,” he says. “However, when a team focuses on achieving higher quality outcomes, they often quickly recognize that time can be more effectively utilized by each role engaging in high-value activities rather than routine and well-understood tasks.”
