All About AI: DDX ‘26 in Munich

Hosting the Pre-Event at our Munich office meant we got to set the tone before DDX officially kicked off. No pressure, right? The question put into the space was deliberately simple: what does it actually mean to build with AI, not just use it?

Every product team is "using AI" right now – just think of all the chat boxes bolted onto existing flows. But building with AI is something else entirely, and that's what the room came together to discuss.

A deep cut

Out of everything said across the afternoon, one sentence has refused to leave us alone:

AI has commoditized shipping. The bottleneck isn't speed anymore. It's the organizational setup and finally: judgment.

For years, the AI conversation has been about shipping faster, prototyping faster, and iterating faster. But if everyone has access to the same tools, speed stops being a differentiator. What separates good products from forgettable ones is, in fact, the human part: knowing what to build, when to stop, and when to push back.

That's judgment that can't be prompted. When shipping is cheap, every bad decision ships faster too. The teams that win aren't the ones generating the most output. They're the ones with the clearest sense of what's worth shipping in the first place.

AI, pizza, and tattoos

We don’t want what our speakers said to go into the ether, so let’s take a quick look back at their presentations.

Bernd Volf from wonderful.ai touched on how the role of digital product people changes with AI. He opened the afternoon with an honest framing: the roles we've built our careers around weren't designed for a world where the system can generate output on its own. The difference between swimming and sinking isn't talent: it's willingness to move toward the new shape of the job.

Paul Krauss from Team One Developers argument hit close to home with his argument: shopping is increasingly happening through AI agents, not on websites. The storefront becomes invisible when the customer never opens it, which raises uncomfortable questions about where the brand actually lives. (Which is something we've been thinking about too!)

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Now when it comes to who does what when AI builds the interface, the point Gus Iwanaga from commercetools made landed hard: most product teams are still treating AI as something they control. Spoiler – in most cases, they don't. And while AI is already shipping the interfaces, those same teams are still debating in meetings.

Next up, Laura Müller from Henkel spoke about the ever-changing role of a UX designer. Laura opened with a quietly defiant line: change has always been part of our DNA. Then she crossed out "adapt or get left behind" (literally, on a slide) and reframed the question as who do you want to become? Her five archetypes (Navigator, Guardian, Crafter, Architect, Catalyst) gave designers a more useful map than the usual doom narrative.

And to close the day, Amit Patel (Experience Haus) hosted a panel with Paul Lafata (Verizon), Doug Powell (iF), and Laura Fehre (Figma). The thread running through it was that it's not about the tools, but about building teams and leaders who can move, learn, and experiment as fast as the world is changing, all while protecting the kind of thinking that doesn't fit in a sprint.

Then came the part of the day with drinks, pizza, a DJ, and a tattoo artist. Because if you're going to throw a pre-event, you may as well send people home with something to remember the day by.

AI eats DDX

The next morning it was time for another talk, this time by our CEO, Felix, who took the main stage at DDX to give the talk he’d been thinking about for a long time: "AI Eats the Interface – What's Left of Your Brand?"

If your brand only lives in the visual layer, it doesn't survive the agent layer. The designers who'll matter next aren't the ones generating interfaces fastest, they're the ones making brand intent legible to machines. That's not a crisis for design, but the most interesting brief we've ever had.

What's next

Huge thanks to the DDX team and everyone who came through, brought sharp questions, and stuck around past the last slice of pizza. The topics of the day are still with us, and will surely resonate in our day-to-day work.

Interested in continuing the conversation? Reach out! We're always up for the kind of chat that makes you slightly uncomfortable in the best way.

See you at the next one, DDX!