AI and the Future of UX Teams in Financial Institutions

The most visible change over the next few years will be contraction: as AI absorbs much of the production work that has defined these teams, their size is likely to fall materially — on the order of 40 to 60 percent by 2028 (see Section 2 of the white paper). The perhaps more consequential change, however, is what that contraction does to where value sits. As routine production is automated, what remains is judgment, and judgment becomes more important per practitioner even as total headcount declines.

This makes how institutions contract as important as whether they do. Judgment has often resided quietly within production roles rather than in titles named for it, so reductions made by headcount or org chart alone risk removing the very judgment roles that leaner operating models depend on, frequently without the loss becoming visible until it surfaces in the work. A second, slower risk compounds the first: the production work being automated is also how junior practitioners have historically grown to develop the skills and experience needed for senior oversight roles. Reducing headcount without a deliberate replacement narrows the pipeline that produces the experienced people these teams will rely on. We touch on both aspects in the full white paper.

This AI-created shift should open space for what has always mattered most when designing successful products and experiences (even if it has sometimes been overlooked or undervalued): framing the problem, setting constraints, validating outputs, and governing quality, risk, and trust. The real value in AI-accelerated design work isn’t in faster production, it’s better-informed conversations happening sooner, enabling critical decision-making earlier in the process. For financial institutions, this distinction is critical.