Tell AI to build a ‘Faster Horse’: Why reframing is the last human advantage
AI is exceptional at optimisation. Give it a goal and it will refine, accelerate, and automate within that frame. It will generate better outputs, faster workflows, cleaner systems. But it cannot decide that the question itself is wrong.
That’s not a limitation of the technology. That’s design’s opening. The strategic value of design has never been execution. It’s the power of reframing ... dissolving inherited assumptions and asking what actually needs to exist. In the AI era, this difference becomes critical. As optimisation becomes abundant in an era of intelligent systems, the most valuable design capability may be the disciplined courage to ask a different question.
AI will give you better horses indefinitely. Your job is to ask why we’re still in the stable.
Stefi Peykova Krishnan
Stefi Peykova Krishnan is a co-founder of the Bulgarian Design Council and a Principal Product Designer at eHealth NSW, working inside Australia’s largest public health system. Her work sits at the intersection of design, co-creation, systems thinking and responsible AI in complex, high-stakes environments. She previously led the end-to-end design of a precision medicine platform for the Children’s Cancer Institute that supported clinical decision-making and was recognised with Best in Class for Service Design at the Australian Good Design Awards.
In the age of AI, she is especially interested in how design shapes systems, behaviour, and decision-making upstream ... before bad assumptions scale and broken models become business as usual.