Twenty years ago a brand identity project, interface design included, took at least a week even when it was small. Anything bigger took a month, and a whole team worked on it. The client got maybe three options, and they were variations of the same interface, because the wireframes had already been approved. Prototypes were something people talked about. In Finland only Nokia-sized companies and a few banking services actually built them.
Now a client can describe an idea to Claude Design and click through a prototype of it the same afternoon. Figma’s MCP server lets AI tools work directly with design files. ChatGPT Sites builds and publishes a website from a conversation, and I think the only thing still holding it back is that most people don’t know it exists.
I’m not a neutral party here. I’ve been building websites for almost thirty years, and I work with Claude Code and Codex myself. The tools are good. They also do exactly what you ask, and that’s where the reasons start.
Everyone wanted to look like Apple
In the early 2000s, something like 80% of my clients brought Apple’s website as their reference, whatever industry they were in. Every era has its own trends, and they often have nothing to do with what the client is trying to sell, or what they need to convince their own customers of.
It’s very common that the first thing I need to do is help a client let go of an idea they’ve become attached to. My work has always been mostly listening, and that won’t change with AI.
The brief said website
A client came to me through a recommendation to buy a fairly traditional website. They had developed a new method and wanted it presented in a form people could easily find online.
We talked for about an hour, and I started to feel that something hadn’t been said. I asked about the business. Of course, they said, the idea was to sell a service based on the method. It quickly became clear they were buying something quite different from what the brief described. Developing the method was what occupied their mind, so that’s where their focus was.
I suggested that instead of a website, we work on productising the service. About a year after our first meeting, they have turned their expertise into products that are easy to understand. They no longer quite understand why they saw it the way they did at the start. The result has very little to do with the first brief.
I saw it early because I had built similar services for the same industry several times before. Given the same brief, an AI tool would have built the website. A marketing professional can get a perfectly workable site out of these tools, but few entrepreneurs are marketing professionals. For an ordinary user, the tool would have done exactly what was asked.
Nobody opened the newsletter
The second example isn’t mine; a client told me about it. Their data showed that certain customers never opened the newsletters. An open rate close to zero is usually a warning sign, and those people get removed from the list, because on a large list they cost real money.
My client did something else. They took everyone who had never opened a single email and sent them an old-fashioned printed brochure through the letterbox. It became one of the most successful campaigns they had ever run.
They knew that someone who signs up for a newsletter is a warm lead. Leaving the emails unread didn’t prove they had lost interest.
Hook your AI up to your email marketing platform and ask it to clear out inactive subscribers. It will tell you what a great idea that is, then throw your warmest leads in the trash.
Deciding not to clean it took knowing how those particular people behave, and you won’t find that written down anywhere online.
The readers who can tell
Then there’s the text. AI-written copy can look better than what many of us would write ourselves. Readers who recognise AI text, though, notice it right away and leave the site. In client work especially, people are buying you.
So yes, you still need a designer, though probably not for the building. Once more people find out about tools like ChatGPT Sites, building a website will get cheaper still. Finding out whether a website is what you need in the first place won’t. If you’d like to have that conversation before you brief the tool, I’m happy to have it.
