AI / Agentic Design Market: Who Controls the Canvas When AI Starts Acting?

This essay by Aurélie Radom examines how agentic interfaces are shifting designers' role from controlling interactions to designing agency, orchestration and attention. It discusses Miro's agentic canvas, which brings context from tools like Slack, GitHub, Amplitude and Granola into a shared space and uses Sidekicks and Flows, and Figma's design agent and Figma Make, which work directly on the canvas and open it to third-party agents via skills. The article also highlights Google DeepMind's agentic video understanding in Gemini, which lets the model decide which parts of a video to inspect. The author argues that designers now design a 'policy layer'—rules, constraints, permissions, and handoff moments—that determines what an AI system can do autonomously and what should be surfaced for human judgment. Human attention becomes a scarce resource, and the designer's job is deciding what an agent should surface and when control should return to a person.