From Consumer to Prosumer
How Consumer AI Tools are Enabling Individuals to Become the Next Creators
(Click above if you want the voice version of the below!)
History repeating itself
Think about Justin Bieber for a second. Before YouTube, a kid like him would have needed to get lucky with a record deal or spend years performing in small venues hoping to be discovered. Instead, he posted some videos online and boom, stardom found him. That's the power of platforms that put creation tools in everyone's hands.
The same thing happened with Instagram. Suddenly people who weren't professional photographers or models were building huge followings and even making careers out of posting pictures and telling stories. A whole new job of "influencer" was born practically overnight.
Now, we're on the verge of a new revolution. Consumer AI tools are shifting the landscape once again. This time, the leap isn't just from consuming to creating content, it's from creating content to building digital products, experiences, and even businesses. In our last post we shared how we built two private sites using Lovable. Soon, anyone will be able to build digital experiences for others, not just themselves.
We're witnessing the rise of the "prosumer"; individuals who don't just consume, but use powerful tools to produce, innovate, and shape the digital world. The line between user and creator is blurring fast.
And who knows? Maybe Sam Altman's 2023 prediction of a billion-dollar company run by a single person, powered by AI will come true sooner than we think.
What we hear from the trenches
Today we are introducing a new series called “Doers” where we will be chatting with those in the forefront that can talk from first experience and can share their insights and show us what's possible.
Here we are with our first guest: Hal ElShanti, Creative Technologist (as he likes to be called) from Property Finder, a Dubai-based real estate tech company. What's fascinating about Hal's experience is how he's seeing the traditional way of building digital products completely flip on its head (click above to listen to our conversation).
So let's dive in with Hal and see what this new reality looks like from someone who's living it every day.
Over to you Hal!
New Ways of Building
Thanks for having me! I’m Hal, Creative Technologist at Property Finder and I’m fascinated by the collision of design, code, and AI, and how that’s reshaping product creation from the ground up.
Six months ago, I was a traditional designer who used Figma most of the time to create mockups which took days and weeks. Today, I'm shipping production-ready React code, interactive prototypes in a matter of hours,. Not because I became a developer but because AI tools bridged the gap between my creative vision and technical execution.
In the old days (like, literally just a couple years ago), making something digital meant you needed a whole team of specialists: designers to make it look good, product managers to figure out what to build, and engineers to actually code it. The process took forever with all the back-and-forth between these different experts. But now, AI tools are letting one person do what used to take an entire team. The walls between "I can design" and "I can code" are coming down fast. And that's changing everything about how we create new experiences in the digital world.
The Great Convergence: When Tools Become Accessible to All
What's driving this transformation? The convergence of three forces:
Design - No longer confined to static mockups
Code - No longer exclusive to developers
AI - The bridge that connects everything
And this convergence is happening through consumer-accessible tools, making it accessible to all:
For Design: Galileo, Lovable, polymet.ai, magicpatterns, subframe, animaapp, Builder.io, Locofy, and Uizard
For Prototyping & Development: Windsurf, Cursor, V0, Bolt, Replit
Leading Consumer AI Tools: How many Logos do you recognize?
These aren't enterprise tools with massive price tags. They're consumer products that happen to be powerful enough for professional work. Making consumer prosumers!
As the industry evolves, we're seeing new tools like Subframe that use pre-built UI components backed by production-ready code, not theoretical designs. The future design tool isn't just about creating visuals; it's about generating functional, interactive experiences where design and code are inseparable.
This shift is creating entirely new ways of working:
Designers are shipping code
Product managers are creating prototypes
Developers are designing interfaces
And basically all of a sudden everyone is a Unicorn!
PRD = Product Requirement Document. This is a doc that is created by Product managers (PMs) so that engineers/developers can write code to launch the feature/improvement etc
The Evolution of Product Development: From Waterfall to AI-Orchestrated Workflows
As AI reshapes how we build digital products, it’s helpful to step back and look at how product development workflows are evolving from the rigid processes of the past to the fluid, AI-accelerated approaches emerging today.
Yesterday: The Waterfall Era
Product development followed a strict, linear process commonly referred to as a “waterfall” approach:
Requirements → Design → Development → Testing → Deployment
Each step was handled by a different specialist, often in isolation. Designers worked in static tools like Sketch and Figma (Post 2020). Developers waited for handoff documents. Testing happened only at the end. Handoffs were slow, and documentation heavy. This approach prioritized control over speed. But the tradeoff? It often took months to ship even a single feature.
Today: The Agile Era
Thanks to Agile methodologies and collaborative tools like Figma dev mode and Slack, there is more interaction between different specialists, reducing time to market. Cross-functional teams work in parallel during 2-3 week sprints, with overlapping workflows replacing linear handoffs. Daily standups replace formal documentation, and continuous feedback loops enable rapid course correction. But still, due to the substantial time devoted to coding and coordination, the process can often take a couple of sprints (one month) to realise value.
Tomorrow: Lean UX on Steroids (AI-Orchestrated Workflows)
Now comes the real transformation.
In the very near future, AI tools will condense the entire process dramatically. A single person will go from concept to interactive prototype in hours. Not days. Not weeks. Hours.
ChatPRD (an AI tool to help PM to refine PRDs) transforms ideas into structured requirements in minutes. Tools like Lovable Replit and v0 generate functional designs and convert them directly into production-ready code. Windsurf and Cursor enable fast implementation with AI-assisted development. What emerges is essentially "Lean UX on steroids" - the build-measure-learn cycle compressed from weeks to hours.
This shift is profound. What once required separate specialists and weeks of handoffs can now be accomplished by one curious individual with the right AI tools. We're moving from coordinated team efforts to democratized product creation, where individual creativity combines with AI capabilities to enable unprecedented speed and accessibility.
In this new AI-enabled model, the best results come from orchestrators, individuals who can:
Dream up a solution
Translate it into a usable prompt
Rapidly iterate using AI tools
Judge what’s good enough to test or launch
Just like Justin Bieber still had to sing well, the “prosumer” must bring vision, taste, and grit. AI won’t give you your product’s soul. You still need that yourself.
The Consumer AI Advantage
What makes this revolution different? It's consumer-first, which is super exciting to us!
Accessible: No enterprise licenses needed
Affordable: Often free or low-cost to start
Intuitive: Built for individuals, not IT departments
Powerful: Professional capabilities in consumer packaging
This democratization means anyone from a student to a startup founder can build products that previously required entire teams.
Will we see plumbers making their own invoicing apps? Maybe. But for now, we're seeing the first wave of "soft tech builders" with PMs, designers and marketers crafting tools they used to only spec.
Some are excited. Some are overwhelmed. Tools like V0 and Cursor assume a certain fluency in systems thinking.
The Consumer Revolution no one can't ignore
This isn't just another tech trend, it's a fundamental shift in how digital products get built.
For consumers, the revolution is liberating. Teachers build lesson planners. Small business owners create custom CRMs. Parents design family tracking apps. These aren't developer. They are everyday people with problems and AI tools that make solutions possible.
For enterprises, this same trend is both opportunity and threat. Smart companies will empower employees to become internal prosumers, reduce dependency on large dev teams, and move faster than competitors stuck in traditional cycles. Those who ignore it risk being outpaced by nimble solo entrepreneurs, or even their own customers building better solutions independently.
The barrier to digital creation has never been lower. The prosumer age is here.
So...do you have an idea? A feature you wish existed? A problem you want to solve?
The tools are there. The only thing standing between you and your ideas is the decision to start.
Welcome to the age of the empowered individual.
Welcome to consumer AI!!
Hal
Tools we used:
ElevenLabs to clone our voices for the Podcast
GenFM for podcast generation
ChatGPT for images and charts
Google Docs for collab editing
Our previous posts: