I shape design direction before the pixels exist.

Every RFP starts the same way: I read it manually, word by word. The real ask only reveals itself when you slow down enough to find it. Once I've built my own understanding, AI enters to pressure-test my interpretation, surface precedents, and scope opportunities I might have missed.

From there I articulate a design direction and prompting begins. The first draft is always rudimentary. What follows is a collaborative loop with other designers until we have an MVP ready to anchor a proposal deck with a before and after story that makes the impact legible to stakeholders.

Strategic design decisions are only as strong as the case you can make for them. Once I have the core components of a rationale forming in my mind — even half-baked — I use AI to help me build a compelling argument around it. Not to generate the thinking, but to sharpen it into something I can pitch and sell.

This is especially valuable in BFSI contexts, where design decisions need to land with product owners, business leads, and sometimes C-suite stakeholders who speak in outcomes, not interfaces. AI helps me translate design logic into business language without losing the rigour behind it.

I use AI to generate first-draft research artefacts — affinity maps, user journey maps, task flows, card sorting structures, and synthesised notes from raw session data. The output is never the final artefact. It's a starting point I can interrogate, reshape, and push back on with domain judgement.

Starting from a generated draft rather than a blank canvas changes the quality of the conversation in a room. It gives a team something concrete to react to, which surfaces better thinking faster than asking everyone to build from scratch.