The people using AI should set its strategy

Patrick Neeman argues that designers and researchers who use AI tools every week should decide which tools a team adopts, while operations staff handle contracts and security.

Patrick Neeman is a user experience designer with more than 20 years in the field and the author of a book on AI assistants for designers and product managers. He describes design and research operations teams, which used to handle licences and vendor contracts, now deciding which AI tools teams use. He argues that only people who do the work can tell when a tool's output is wrong, such as a researcher who sees that a summary invented a quote.

• Neeman cites a UX Tools survey in which 59.1 per cent of designers had built their own tool with AI in the previous six months. He reads it as a sign that official choices miss what practitioners need.
• He describes a gap between the person who approves a tool and the person who can tell when its output is wrong.
• He proposes a one-page charter that names three to five people who use AI tools weekly as the ones who decide which tools to adopt, renew or drop.
• Under that charter, operations owns security, privacy, contracts, access, token limits and maintenance, and every candidate tool is tested against ten real tasks with answers the team trusts.

Design, research and product leaders can split tool decisions this way: practitioners set the quality bar, and operations makes each choice safe. The piece is an opinion essay; its figures come from other studies, and Neeman treats the arrangement as temporary.

Derived by Working Surface from the article; more in the Playbook. Source line: Practitioners should decide what good looks like, and operations should make it safe to find out.

31 October 2026: as AI agents produce more of the work, teams move the checking to the people and records closest to the real output.