The best AI design books for UX and product designers

Josh Clark and Veronika Kindred treat AI as a design material. Something you shape, the same way you'd work with type, layout or motion.

The book looks at intelligent interfaces that adapt to the person using them in the moment. It also gives you a process to get there, including a sentient design sprint and a minimum magical product framework.

It's the most ambitious book on this list. John Maeda wrote the foreword.

Greg Nudelman draws on 35 real AI projects and starts from an uncomfortable number: most AI initiatives fail. The book is about improving those odds.

It's hands-on. You get exercises like the Digital Twin and Value Matrix that you can run with your own team, plus sections on AI design patterns, research for AI projects, bias and ethics, and designing for agentic AI.

This is a book of design patterns for products built on large language models and autonomous agents. It covers content moderation, interruptibility, transparency, permissions and oversight.

It also explains how these systems take inputs, generate outputs and make decisions on a user's behalf. That makes it easier to hold your own in technical conversations with engineering.

It's pitched at intermediate to advanced designers.

Christopher Noessel draws a clear line between two ideas that often get blurred. Agents do things for you. Assistants help you do things yourself.

Badly designed AI can de-skill the people using it and leave them over-reliant on it. This book gives you a framework and design patterns to avoid that, and to fit assistants into your existing design process.

It's the follow-up to Noessel's 2017 book, Designing Agentive Technology.

This one came out in 2022, before generative AI went mainstream. The fundamentals it covers haven't dated: building trust, designing feedback, handling errors, ethics, prototyping AI products, and working well with AI and machine learning teams.

Akshay Kore has led the design of AI products at Fortune 500 companies and high-growth startups. If you're new to designing AI products, start here.

Most of the books above focus on what to design: the patterns, frameworks and interfaces behind good AI products.

Design Orchestrator covers the other side. As execution gets cheaper, design expertise moves upwards. Vision, purpose, communication and influence become the work.

Read it alongside any book on this list. They'll help you design better AI products. This one is about making sure you're still the one setting direction.