What it was for
The front half of Design Thinking — sitting with users, surfacing the unstated, converging on a problem worth solving — existed because building the wrong thing was the most expensive mistake available, and humans are reliably wrong about what other humans need until they look.
The verdict
ENDURES — and appreciates. Framing the problem is pure outer-loop work: judgment about people, applied before a single revolution of the engine spins. Cheap construction makes it more valuable, not less, because the engine will now build the wrong thing faster and more convincingly than any team in history. The quality of understanding is the quality ceiling of everything downstream.
What changes
Not the skill — the position. Framing loses its monopoly on a gated "phase one" and becomes a continuous posture, refreshed every time evidence flows back through the outer loop. One trap is worth naming in advance: synthetic users. Machine-simulated research is seductive precisely because it is frictionless, and it fails exactly where this method earns its keep — at the unstated, the embodied, the thing nobody knew to say.
The strongest objection
AI can interview, transcribe, and synthesise research at scale — surely empathy is automatable too. The tools, yes; conceded gladly. The judgment about which human signal is real and which is performance remains the practitioner's, and there is no telemetry for it.