As a person who routinely struggles to spell restaurant on his own, I love technology. I’ve gone headfirst into AI tools like Claude and Sora just to see what they can help me accomplish. Ideas appear in seconds, prototypes take hours, and choices multiply without limit. It feels like creativity on demand. But when everything seems possible, focus becomes the first casualty.

That’s where discipline and design principles matter most. They help keep the main thing the main thing. They remind teams that speed means nothing if you don’t know where you’re going.

Automotive design is a perfect example. Nothing about creating a connected vehicle feature is simple. Every decision touches hardware, software, regulations, and customers who just want the thing to work. When we built Ford’s Wallbox ecosystem, the team faced exactly that level of complexity. We had to connect the physical charger, the IoT setup app, FordPass controls, and an e-commerce experience that explained the what, why, and how up front. Each new layer risked blurring the intent.

The guiding phrase was simple: Don’t make me think. It wasn’t just a UX goal; it was a compass that guided every decision we made. Every feature had to prove it made the experience easier, faster, or more intuitive. If it didn’t, it didn’t ship. That principle gave the team speed without chaos.

That principle wasn’t poetic. It was survival. Complexity doesn’t show up all at once. It piles up quietly in a corner like dirty laundry. Meeting by meeting. Feature by feature. Soon, the experience that once felt simple starts asking users to chip-in on the hard work instead of handling it for them.

The introduction of AI changes the stakes but not the truth of complex problems. It gives us new tools to explore ideas, but it doesn’t decide what matters. It can predict what users might want, but it can’t choose what a brand should stand for. That still takes a human touch.

In automotive, where every feature has to balance ambition with safety and a bottom line, the flood of AI-generated ideas can be both a gift and a curse. Without real principles, teams can end up chasing novelty instead of value. With them, AI becomes a creative partner that accelerates iteration while keeping the work anchored in purpose.

The best teams and designers know that progress and focus need to be attached at the hip. They build systems that move fast but never lose their sense of direction. They use AI to remove friction, not to replace their thinking. They understand that good design isn’t about adding more options - it's about standing behind decisions so someone else doesn’t have to fix them later.

I say all this to say, AI will expose teams that never built on solid ground. The ones chasing motion rather than progress will burn out under the weight of their own experiments. The ones anchored by the principles they define will move twice as fast with half the noise. That’s how you keep the main thing, the main thing.