Design, AI and Culture Shifts for Good
The promise of AI in service design is real.
As a tool, used precisely, it reveals issues early, aligning teams faster, and restores space for strategic thinking. The powerful Agentic AI only works safely when organizations treat it as a partner that thinks with humans, not a shortcut that acts for them—and this is a cultural shift that must happen.
Current State of Service Design
Service design today feels like owning a house where the smoke alarms never go off: Problems don’t surface when they’re small, they erupt and disrupt. A customer melts down. A frontline employee hits their breaking point. A VP gets an angry email. Only then does anyone ask, “How long has this been happening?” The answer is always the same. Too long.
Teams move in a fog. Nobody agrees on the cause because nobody was paying attention when the first cracks appeared. Leaders argue severity instead of substance. Designers work from scraps of context and half-remembered user stories. Everyone is guessing, but nobody wants to admit they’re guessing.
So organizations fall back on the same survival pattern. Band-aids. Quick patches. A rushed workflow update. A new field in the form. A training deck. These “fixes” aren’t solutions. They’re coping mechanisms. They protect the clock, not the customer. They keep the quarterly report clean, but they leave the system weaker than before.
Inside this environment, people stop dreaming and start bracing. Talented designers and analysts get cautious. Problem-solvers become firefighters. Teams learn to avoid the truth because the truth never has a budget attached to it. The culture slowly drifts into resignation. Everyone knows what’s broken, but nobody believes the organization will slow down long enough to repair it.
This is where service design stands right now: a world full of bright minds forced to work inside workflows built for another era; the factory-centered industrial era, maybe? A world where real issues hide in plain sight until they ignite. A world that desperately needs a system that catches problems early, aligns people fast, and gives teams permission to fix the roots — not keep dressing the wounds.
Service Design using basic AI
AI won’t magically fix service design. But it can finally give the house real smoke alarms before the flames hit the ceiling.
In an AI-supported workflow, problems don’t wait for someone to complain in the hallway. The system notices patterns before humans feel the pain. Rising call volumes. Delays bottlenecking a specific step. Customers circling the same help article without resolution. Employees struggling with the same workaround for the fifth week in a row. These are tiny signals that humans miss. AI doesn’t. It catches the hairline fractures before the wall collapses.
And when it surfaces a problem, it doesn’t just drop another mystery on the team. It adds context. It shows where the issue started, who it affects, how often it repeats, and whether it’s accelerating. Suddenly the fog lifts. Teams stop arguing about severity and start understanding causality. Designers aren’t guessing anymore; they’re working with a map instead of a rumor.
AI also takes on the boring fights — the data wrangling, the cross-system comparisons, the endless retro detective work that drains teams before they even get to ideation. That frees designers and analysts to do the real thinking: diagnosing, storytelling, fixing what actually matters.
Over time, this shifts culture. When problems surface early and clearly, leaders stop throwing band-aids at symptoms. They start funding root-cause fixes because the evidence is right there because the system backs their intuition. Experiments run smaller and faster because the feedback loops are tight instead of chaotic.
Most importantly, AI exposes how often white-knuckled heroics were carrying the organization. It reveals the hidden cost of improvisation. It forces the company to face the truth: the old, factory-era workflow wasn’t designed for complexity, velocity, or modern customer expectations. And once that truth is visible, it becomes impossible to ignore.
AI doesn’t replace service designers. It restores them. It gives them space to dream again instead of bracing for whatever breaks next. It gives them permission to fix the roots, not decorate the wounds.
Service Design using Agentic AI
Agentic AI promises systems that don’t just diagnose problems, they act on them. That sounds powerful… until you drop it into organizations that can barely align on a simple process change without politics, friction, or missing context. Giving an autonomous system in that environment the power to make decisions is like letting a smoke alarm tear down a wall because it thinks it smells smoke.
Service Design using Agentic AI and Risks
The risk isn’t intelligence; it’s the fine-tuning sometimes permanent decisions without absolute clarity. Agentic AI will act on signals humans don’t agree on. It can escalate the wrong issues, patch symptoms instead of causes, or auto-adjust workflows based on outdated assumptions. And because it moves faster than people can intervene, small mistakes can spread across the entire service ecosystem before anyone notices.
This tech can also erode trust. If the AI quietly rewrites forms, reroutes tasks, or reorders steps without designers and frontline staff involved, the organization loses its shared sense of ownership. People stop challenging decisions because the system already “handled it.”