A short guide to making AI work for you
Six moves design system professionals can take to accelerate and celebrate your work
Design systems live at the intersection of people, processes, and tooling. That means they’re one of the first places we’re seeing AI quietly showing up. It’s inside IDEs, docs platforms, in your linting tools, and even part of your design handoff.
If you work on a design system, you don’t need to be an AI expert. But it will make a huge difference to show that you can work with it. Staying relevant isn’t necessarily mastery, it’s about readiness.
1. Build your prompt library
The clearer your instructions, the better AI will work. Don’t start from scratch every time, collect the prompts that deliver useful output; generating test cases, summarizing breaking changes, scaffolding new component code. Reuse them, refine them, share them with your team. Maybe even version them.
You might think of prompts like design tokens. Consistent, reusable, and of increasing value the more they’re shared.
2. Run AI on your own work
Don’t wait to be told how to use AI “right”. You can start with your own output. Run pull requests through AI for accessibility flags. Or ask for a simplified version of documentation before it’s time to ship. It’ll be a good way to understand where AI can add more clarity, and when it might struggle.
Treat AI like an extra reviewer, not an oracle.
3. Automate the most boring stuff
Every person, every team, has tasks that eat time without adding much value. Format changelogs, drafting migration notes. Why not let AI take that sting out of the last 10%. Find a task, automate it, and share the results.
Show your team that you’re not just experimenting, you’re using your results to make everyone’s life easier.
4. Track the pitfalls
AI isn’t a magic fix-all. It hallucinates, writes inaccessible code, and can product misleading or tone-deaf copy. Keep logs of where it fails for you - snippets and examples. Then you’re positioning yourself not just as a cheerleader, but someone who understands limits, too.
When you suggest adopting AI in a workflow, you’ll know when it can and can’t be trusted.
5. Talk about AI in your standup
AI exploration isn’t a secret side project.
Share what you tried to do, talk about it with your team. “I asked AI to draft our migration docs, but I still had to fix the accessibility notes.”
It isn’t about branding yourself as the AI person, but being open about experiments that you’re leaning into.
6. Celebrate your wins
It’s easy to worry about AI use being seen as “cheating”. If an AI assistant helped you find a bug faster or draft docs that shipped…celebrate it.
Accelerated work with AI is still your work. You shaped the input, you judged the output, and you made the call. The more you can celebrate those successes, the easier it gets for the whole team to embrace AI.
Final takeaway
Getting AI ready isn’t about being a master of the future. You’re showing today that you can use the tools, filter out the noise, and celebrate the successes. Help your team move faster without losing trust.