AI is changing how products are made, and design systems are changing with it. They are moving past component libraries to become living frameworks that scale taste and craft. We spoke to product leaders and practitioners about the shifts currently redefining how design systems are built, used, and maintained.
From Documentation to Digital Craftsmanship
AI provides unparalleled speed in generating outputs, but without an anchored foundation, these results can quickly drift from a team's core vision, leading to excessive rework and flattening the distinct nuance of a product. This is the crucial role of the design system. As Wayne Sun, a product designer at Figma, notes, “Design systems open the door for product experiences that scale without losing their soul. Intuition becomes substance.
Taste becomes repeatable. And design systems stop being just about consistency; they start becoming vessels for creative identity.” Paired with AI, the design system transforms from a consistency reference into an active carrier of craft, thoroughly encoding a team’s taste. This ensures that AI applies the same sensibility a designer would bring to the work at every development stage, resulting in products that scale without sacrificing their human touch.
Balancing AI Speed with System Constraints
Historically, exploring various design directions demanded significant manual effort, inherently limiting the scope of ideas a team could realistically pursue. New AI tools, such as the prompt-to-app capability of Figma Make, fundamentally change this dynamic. When anchored by a robust design system, AI outputs are not just fast, but immediately usable.
According to Figma developer advocate Jake Albaugh, “Design systems let AI-powered exploration stay grounded, leveraging shared components to rapidly pursue many different, system-aligned options.” Teams can now instantly generate dozens of variations—experimenting with layouts, colors, and arrangements—all built directly from trusted system components. This pairing makes exploration both faster and more actionable. As Albaugh concludes, “When our explorations are grounded in the design system, choosing a direction means a shorter path to production. From there, it becomes an exercise in refinement.”
The Rise of Schema-Driven Design Systems
Design systems were historically crafted for human designers and developers, who could intuitively fill in contextual gaps regarding brand and organizational standards. However, with AI taking on increasing design responsibilities, the audience for these systems is fundamentally shifting from product builders to include AI consumption. "Anything you might expect designers to infer without having it explicitly written in the system is really critical context for AI," explains Zoe Adelman, a product manager at Figma. She stresses that the crucial brand and business context that humans "can infer... AI doesn’t inherently know." Therefore, future design systems must be meticulously explicit and machine-readable.
This paradigm shift is fundamentally altering how design systems are structured and authored. Teams are now moving past simply compiling tokens and components to capturing the comprehensive reasoning behind every decision, explicitly documenting examples of quality, and making all implicit knowledge transparent. As Zoe Adelman advises, “Authors should more than ever prioritize filling any empty pockets across documentation, code, and design.” Crucially, context, constraints, and decision-making criteria are now being meticulously woven throughout the entire design system, providing AI with the exact parameters it needs to produce outputs that consistently adhere to brand and product standards.
Integration with Governance and Compliance
Traditionally, the focus of design system teams has been largely restricted to the maintenance of component libraries. AI integration is fundamentally altering this mandate. With AI tools now permeating product workflows, these teams are adopting a much broader role, shifting from mere library upkeep toward the active governance of the entire product build process. As Grant Blakeman, Staff Design Engineer at LinkedIn, states, “Our scope now includes any tools that builders without traditional product titles are using to contribute to the product.”
Design systems teams can now actively shape how work is created from the outset, embedding governance directly into the early stages of the design process. As Grant Blakeman notes, design systems teams “help provide the guardrails for LLMs to work within while enabling people across the company to contribute to the product-building process - sometimes for the first time.” This shift results in the blurring of traditional role boundaries, allowing design system teams to support a significantly wider array of contributors and tools than previously possible.
AI-Powered System Maintenance and Automation
As design systems begin to evolve in real time, their function is shifting away from being a fixed set of components to becoming adaptive ecosystems that respond directly to team usage and behavior. The focus is no longer on the status of a single file, but on ensuring the entire system reflects the latest collective decisions. In this highly interconnected environment, a single update can now automatically ripple through design, product, and engineering, ensuring instantaneous consistency across the entire organization.
In this changing environment, organizations that elevate their design systems to the level of strategic infrastructure - moving beyond simple documentation - will achieve a significant speed advantage without compromising crucial quality and detail.
