In a recent episode of “How I AI,” Senior Designer Brian Greenbaum from Pendo told host Claire Vo that AI has reignited the creative spark design teams have been missing after a decade and a half of “MVP thinking.” For years, organizational pressure to ship minimally viable versions trained designers to limit their ambition. Instead of striving for delight, they optimized for how much design they could squeeze through each iteration.

Now, with AI-powered tools dramatically reducing the cost of design exploration, creativity feels possible again. Designers can quickly visualize ideas that would never have made it off the cutting-room floor a few years ago. And that’s genuinely exciting.

But let’s be clear: AI tools don’t allow designers to be creative. Organizational appetite does.

Companies generally don’t want to invest in delightful design

For 25 years—through the rise of Netflix, the iPhone, Google Maps, Amazon, and countless breakthrough experiences—designers have been fighting to do their best work. Leaders frequently talked about wanting to be “the Apple of X,” but when it mattered, most organizations refused to invest the time and resources required to ship truly delightful design.

Great design takes iteration. It takes craft. And, most importantly, it takes implementation time. Code can “work” long before it can be understood, desired, or loved by customers. The MVP concept—misunderstood and misapplied nearly everywhere—gave organizations convenient cover to avoid that harder design work. As Brian and Claire discuss, teams became optimized for what they could ship next, not for what would make the experience memorable or differentiated.

AI reduces the cost of design ideation, not design implementation

Modern AI design tools make it faster and easier to explore bold ideas. They still require designers to think, evaluate, and decide. Designing with AI is not the same as prompting with AI. But even when these tools accelerate concept generation, the organization must still commit to testing, validating, and—if the ideas prove valuable—implementing them. AI doesn’t make that part cheaper or faster. That still requires investment.

Culture has to shift. AI can help, but it can’t fix culture.

AI-powered design puts designers in a better position to advocate for bolder, more delightful experiences. But we should stop blaming MVPs for the constraints that have always been cultural. If a company claims to deliver an “amazing” user experience, it must live up to that promise. In most organizations, great design has simply never been an embedded value.

AI will open doors for designers to propose richer, more ambitious ideas. But until organizations decide those ideas are worth implementing, the output will remain what it has been for years: minimally viable.