We asked 200+ respondents across design and development about the ways they’re leveraging new AI capabilities in their work. Download the full report and check out these top takeaways.
AI may be a normal part of daily life now, but the reality of implementing AI-powered tooling in the workplace is not so simple. Teams are moving faster, but workflows are becoming messier, more complex and more challenging to scale. AI is improving productivity at the individual and small-team level—but those gains aren't necessarily translating into consistent, scalable workflows across teams.
How do we know? In our 2025 Designer-Developer Collaboration survey, we asked 200+ respondents across design and development (including hybrid and leadership roles, as well) about the ways they’re leveraging new AI capabilities in their work. You can download the full report to see everything, but these were our top takeaways:
People are using AI: 84% of people, to be precise (or at least, 84% of the people who filled out our survey). This was divided among folks who are all in—taking “an AI-first approach across [their] entire process”—and folks who have AI tools regularly integrated or in experimental phases in their current workflows. Only 16% said they were avoiding the use of AI tools entirely.
The challenge is no longer simply adoption, but rather how to turn AI usage into a reliable, repeatable process.
There’s a lot of back-and-forth right now on whether AI actually delivers its promises of improved productivity.
Our respondents were also mixed; a little over half said it was “moderately positive”, helping somewhat but with some limitations. And 33% found it to have a negative effect—split between being neutral (having no impact), moderately negative (added more work than saved), or significantly negative (disrupted workflow significantly). Only 16% felt strongly positive about it, claiming major time savings and quality improvements.
Speed isn’t an issue, but consistency is. We need tools and systems that can be trusted to produce reliable results in order to scale them across teams and businesses.
Despite all the new tooling AI has made available to us in the form of quick prototyping, design-to-code features and vibe coding … it hasn’t fixed the core design-dev “handoff” problem.
Only 21% of our participants reported “smooth handoffs and minimal issues” when we asked how they would rate the efficiency of the design implementation process. When things fall through the cracks, slower time-to-market (42%), rework (33%) and wasted time (36%) were listed as the top three consequences—all significant pain points at a time when we’re shipping new products and features faster than ever before.
This is where structured systems, shared standards and better-integrated tooling become critical.
People’s top priority coming into 2026 was the effective implementation of AI tools (39%), closely followed by building hybrid skillsets across their teams (29%). AI is reshaping the workplace, and both teams and individual roles are stretching to incorporate the disruption and turn it into something valuable.
This shift makes the path forward clear: AI needs to move from ad-hoc usage into systems, standards-aware workflows and production-ready processes that can scale. Whether or not that’s possible is something I suppose we’ll have to wait until next year’s survey to find out!
You can download the full report to see the answers to all the questions, including extra data analysis and interesting cross-sections. We think there’s a lot to learn, and the report is packed with helpful tips—as well as our own predictions on what to watch next.
Finally, if you took the survey: thank you so much! We genuinely enjoyed going through all the responses and seeing what everyone had to say. Keep an eye out for next year’s survey, and—until then—keep building and experimenting. We can’t wait to see what you’ve been working on!
Kathryn Grayson Nanz is a developer advocate at Progress with a passion for React, UI and design and sharing with the community. She started her career as a graphic designer and was told by her Creative Director to never let anyone find out she could code because she’d be stuck doing it forever. She ignored his warning and has never been happier. You can find her writing, blogging, streaming and tweeting about React, design, UI and more. You can find her at @kathryngrayson on Twitter.