2026
/
Talk
At Intercom, about >90% of our pull requests are now authored by Claude Code. Designers prototype in production. Engineers design UI. The cost of building software has hit theoretical zero. Most of the discourse around AI and design is still about speed. I think that's the wrong frame. Building gets cheap, fast. So value moves elsewhere: to choosing what to build, why it matters, and what good looks like. To direction. This talk is about that shift, and what it means for designer and design leaders. Abstract management, gatekeeping, being removed from the work: all over. The leaders who can only manage will be valued like managers. The ones who are also in the work and shipping into the product will be valued like a team.
Top 3 Outcomes
#1
A frame for why "speed of execution" is the wrong thing to optimise for, and what to optimise for instead.
#2
A direct case for how design leadership has to refactor.
#3
A read on the signals already in the industry
Facilitating this session:

Thom Rimmer leads Product Design at Intercom, driving the design of Fin.ai—the #1 AI Agent for Customer Service. He builds fast-moving, high-performing teams that deliver AI-first product experiences with clarity and impact. Over the past two decades, he’s been both a builder and a design leader—solving complex problems, scaling teams, and embedding design into the strategic foundation of the companies.
He’s led distributed product design, brand, and research teams across SaaS and agency environments, taking products from 0→1 and building cutting-edge AI native systems.