Companion AI for billions
Company
Microsoft AI
Role
Member of Design Staff
History
We live in the most creative inflection point in history. It’s shifting super quick, and can feel unstable. Some skills will fade faster than we'd expect. Yet this is the best time to be alive if you care about bringing ideas to life. Curiosity is all it takes now. It doesn’t matter if you'd like to design, write, code, research, or build. Learning has never been more accessible, and our systems have never been more capable.
When I was in sixth grade, our class drew jobs from a hat. Some kids got "taxi driver," and others got “pediatrician” or “magician.” High earners kept their wits; creatives racked up hella debt as expenses rolled in. I drew the highest paying, lamest slip (petroleum engineer) and rolled my eyes thinking how silly it was that the coolest work paid out so little.
Scale
Choosing creativity used to mean accepting that trade-off. Lately, the balance is shifting. What we now have is making it possible to rally ideas into outcomes faster than ever. Artistry, craft, and raw passion are starting to scale in ways it couldn’t even a year or two ago.
Software design is a good example. A button on a screen used to be both a symbol of intent and a bridge to action. Remove the button, and you're stuck. Interfaces looked the way they did because they were maps that we could see and touch. And yet what happens when you can simply speak what you want and watch it happen? When the lines disappear? We're grappling with that question here as we begin to differentiate from OpenAI.
Intent
It seems that the function of design is shifting from drawing signposts to visualizing intent. We are moving from screens to living, adaptive, and ambient canvases. In this paradigm shift, we see a slim chance to design a system where we spend less time navigating screens, more time embedded in the real world. I think technology will fade into the background of life pretty soon-ish.
If done right, software will feel more like an oil painting than a tool. We're a handful, and fast growing. We'll soon need more designers at SVC to help 1) Make Microsoft cool to young consumers (harder challenge tbh) and 2) Replace Windows with an AI-native OS. Whatever we make, I imagine it'll be simple. We've pulled creatives from the best design-led product teams in the world to do this. In the next years, we aim to scaffold the most beautiful consumer intelligence on the planet and open the door for billions of people to act on new worlds in ways that once seemed out of reach. I wake so excited to pick up a red marker and draw.
Hiring
We're in the early stages of building something very special and are hiring principal creatives across the team, including Head of Design @ MAI. If designing emotionally intelligent companions interests you, send me a note with what you like to do for fun outside of work: hello@jivmy.com.