Built for a large global company. The question: which of 600 IT roles will AI change, mutate, or create over the next five years?
An interactive, story-driven research piece on the trends behind the question. The role matrix is one part of it — tap a row to read the detail.
Tap Read part of the story below the matrix — a taste of how the facts can land as a scene.
Excerpt · 4 of 24 roles
| Role | 2026 | 2028 | 2030 |
|---|---|---|---|
Product Designer Product team |
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2026 Continues Designs flows, components, design systems. Uses AI as a faster sketchbook. 2028 Mutates Most production design is AI-generated. Designer's job becomes setting design intent and maintaining the system the AI generates against. 2030 Shrinks Headcount falls noticeably. Senior designer survives as art director and taste authority. Junior roles thin out the most. | |||
Software Engineer Product team |
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2026 Continues Writes code, reviews code, owns architecture decisions. AI assists, does not replace. 2028 Mutates Per Gartner, 90% use AI code assistants by 2028. Junior pipeline narrows. The day is mostly review, integration and orchestration. 2030 Mutates further Title often becomes Platform Engineer or AI Systems Engineer. Pure feature implementation is largely automated. | |||
QA Engineer Product team |
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2026 Continues Manual and automated test, exploratory testing, regression coverage. 2028 Shrinks Test generation, regression, exploratory and accessibility checks largely covered by AI. Headcount falls fast. 2030 Disappears as a discrete role QA is absorbed into platform engineering and AI evaluation pipelines. The discipline survives, the standalone role rarely does. | |||
AI Workforce Manager Newly emerging |
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2026 Does not yet exist The work is being done ad-hoc by people in product ops, engineering and HR. 2028 New Microsoft 2025: 28% of managers considering this hire. Manages mixed teams of humans and agents. 2030 Continues One of the standard functions in any IT org of meaningful size. | |||
We presented the research as a story so people could feel it, not just read it. The matrix above is the data. Below is the same insight as a scene from 2028.
Hanna gets to the office before the others. The light over the canal is soft and grey-blue. She stops by the window for a moment before sitting down.
On her screen, forty-seven user stories generated since she went home yesterday. She reads them carefully. Twenty-eight she approves. Eleven she rewrites. Eight she rejects, with a written reason, because the agents learn from rejections.
The whole loop has changed pace. Two years ago her team ran the standard sprint cycle the way most product teams did. Now most phases run faster than humans can review them. The biggest shift, the one nobody talked about loudly: developers became the fast ones. By 2028, dev outruns design.
A message from her mother. Beta, what is it you actually do these days? Hanna stares at the question for a long time. She types: I make sure the work the machines do is the work we meant.
She sends that one. It is closer.
Understand what's really going on, in a form your whole team can act on.
Turn that understanding into something your team can run with.
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I'm Simon Gullström, a Swedish concept developer and creative strategist with a background in film and storytelling.
Documentary work taught me to dig past the first answer. Commercial work taught me to communicate clearly. AI lets me think bigger and work faster. Deep Dives is where the three meet, to help you dig deeper into communication and strategy, grounded in data.
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