Source: The UX Collective Newsletter
Google’s move into AI-assisted design signals that the next competitive battleground isn’t feature parity but ecosystem lock-in—by embedding generative design directly into their own tools rather than partnering with incumbents like Figma, Google is betting that AI commoditizes design software itself, making the real value accrue to whoever owns the foundational layer (cloud infrastructure, training data, compute). This represents a broader pattern where AI doesn’t disrupt industries so much as it inverts them, shifting defensibility from the application layer (where Figma thrived) down to the infrastructure and data layers where entrenched giants like Google already dominate.