Margarida Barreto has spent over 20 years moving through every layer of design fashion, illustration, branding, UX, and now AI-integrated creative direction. In this episode, she brings a practitioner's clarity to one of the most misunderstood shifts in the design profession: AI hasn't removed the designer's job. It has relocated the most important part of it.
She draws a clean line between how AI accelerates visualization, research, iteration, mockups, and what it cannot replace: the judgment of what deserves to exist, why a brand matters, and what a client actually needs beneath what they say they want. For Margarida, the time AI frees up doesn't disappear. It moves into deeper thinking, more considered client relationships, and the kind of creative decisions machines can analyze but never feel.
Margarida admits she was fooled by an AI-generated video of a dancing parrot. Not a cautionary tale about technology, but an honest reckoning: even experts operate with blind spots, and transparency about that is what actually builds trust. She closes with a quiet provocation that as AI saturates our feeds with content that looks alike and means nothing, the things that will hold the most value are the ones that can still answer the question: why does this exist?
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