You can ask an AI tool for ten different interfaces and somehow receive ten cousins from the same rounded-card family.

AI has accelerated the familiar template problem.

Generative tools can produce polished interfaces quickly, but in my experience many feel strangely interchangeable. The same cards. The same softened gradients. The same oversized type. The same rounded containers. The same “AI assistant” panel dropped into the corner.

Technically, the output is competent.

Strategically, it is anonymous.

This is not new. Template marketplaces created the same problem years ago. When everybody buys from the same visual library, differentiation moves elsewhere.

AI simply accelerates the effect.

The solution is not to reject generative tools.

It is to give them better context.

Figma’s move toward structured MCP access and design-system-aware agents is significant because it shifts AI away from generic visual prediction and toward organisation-specific systems.

An agent that knows your real components, tokens, typography, interaction rules and production constraints is much more useful than one that knows only what a modern SaaS dashboard usually looks like.

This has consequences for agencies.

Clients can buy screens in many ways. My argument is that an agency earns its fee by making the experience coherent with the organisation, its audience and its operating model.

If AI makes the commodity layer cheaper, then agencies need to stop competing on commodity output.

The valuable work becomes:

• defining the design system
• setting interaction principles
• establishing information architecture
• connecting real data and workflows
• making automation understandable
• maintaining accessibility
• testing edge cases
• aligning the product with brand and business intent

AI can accelerate each of these areas, but it cannot replace the need for a point of view.

The danger for agencies is not that AI will design everything.

The danger is that agencies will use AI to produce more of the same things they were already producing, only faster.

That creates efficiency without differentiation.

The opportunity is the opposite.

Use AI to remove repetitive production so more attention can go into the decisions that actually make a product distinct.