Arin Bhowmick, Chief Design Officer, SAP, Dan Makoski, Former Chief Design Officer, UnitedHealth Group, Greg Petroff, Former Chief Design Officer, Cisco Security, Victoria Spaulding-Burford, VP Product Design, Salesforce (virtual), Gordon Ching, Founder and CEO, Design Executive Council
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TechTranscript
00:00Good afternoon, everyone.
00:10We're almost at lunch, and we're in between you
00:12and your lunch break.
00:13So we have an exciting panel today.
00:15As yesterday, many of us went on our tour.
00:18We saw AI is front and center.
00:21And today, what we've assembled today
00:22is a really exciting panel to really unpack
00:25what is customer connection in the age of AI,
00:28and what is the role and value of design leadership.
00:32So to kick it off, I have me with Arun Bhomik,
00:36chief design officer at SAP.
00:37Do you want to tell us a little bit about your context?
00:40Yeah, I am the chief design officer at SAP.
00:42SAP is the number one business application vendor.
00:48Over 90% or 97% of world's business transaction
00:53flows to SAP system.
00:54So it's really about scale at SAP.
00:59And second, we have Dan McCoskey,
01:02former chief design officer at United Health Group.
01:04Tell us a little bit about your experience.
01:06Yeah, so after 25 years of leading design organizations
01:11as a chief design officer, I decided last year
01:13to take a bit of a focus on designing for my own passion.
01:20So I'm now a chief design advisor,
01:22working with select CEOs in how they can elevate design
01:26in a more powerful way.
01:28And we have Greg Petroff, former chief design
01:30officer at Cisco Security.
01:32Hi, everybody.
01:33Yeah, I am spending the moment right now
01:35sort of learning about how we can use AI to change
01:38the practice of how we work.
01:40And I'm very excited about the things
01:42we're learning in that space.
01:44And we can't forget about Victoria over there in Atlanta.
01:46Hello, Victoria, virtually.
01:49She is the VP for Data Cloud at Salesforce,
01:52overseeing product design and user experience.
01:54Tell us a little bit about your context, Victoria.
01:57Hello, and thank you.
01:59I am, as Gordon said, I'm the vice president
02:03of product design and usability, user experience at Salesforce.
02:10And Salesforce, you may not have heard of it,
02:13the number one CRM, or customer relationship management
02:16company in the world.
02:20And it's largely AI now.
02:22We're becoming agent-led.
02:24So to hear you say how AI is really taking over.
02:28At the end of the day, we pride ourselves
02:30on being the customer company, the number one customer
02:34company.
02:35And our goal is to help build bridges between other companies
02:40and their customers.
02:42So help them become customer companies as well.
02:46Yes, and very shortly, we're going to unpack
02:47what are these digital agents.
02:50So to give some context to this panel,
02:52over the last few decades, we've seen a transformation
02:55from the internet and mobile era and cloud computing.
02:59Many of these design leaders have grown up
03:02in those contexts when we first got our devices,
03:04first got access to social technologies.
03:07But now we're in the intelligence era of AI.
03:11What's different about this era from any other era
03:14we've seen in technology and transformation?
03:17Victoria, do you want to kick us off?
03:19What's different?
03:21Sure.
03:22So we have all been familiar with predictive artificial
03:25intelligence, where we can predict next best action
03:30type of intelligence, and generative,
03:33where we can start to generate new questions and answers.
03:38What's different about this era, this agentic era,
03:42as we call it, in a word is autonomy.
03:45It's intelligent autonomy.
03:48These are pieces of software that
03:52have been personified as well.
03:55And they can act intelligently on their own,
03:58independent of the human operator, which
04:04really changes the scale of how your company can
04:09reach its customers, and also how
04:13they can serve their internal employees as well.
04:16So it allows us to make independent decisions
04:21on the fly, react to data that it's ingesting real time
04:25and retrieving through different technologies
04:28to drive innovation, to make decisions,
04:31to be personal coaches, to extend your hours of operation,
04:3724-7 operation.
04:39And to really nurture the relationship with people.
04:43And so that sounds amazing, right?
04:46We can just get rid of people.
04:47We can have all agents.
04:49But no, not so quickly is what we would position,
04:53that it is really important that we take a step back and not
04:57just run rampant with agents all over the world.
05:02And instead, pause and take a look at our data strategy.
05:05What are the problems that we need solving
05:09that agents really can benefit versus where
05:11we need the human creativity?
05:13And then also, we need the human engineering
05:17to provide the proper oversight and ensure
05:20we're not introducing bias into these agents,
05:23because they can amplify problems as well
05:27as the benefits that they bring.
05:28So it's really important that in this moment
05:31of incredible disruption, that we as design leaders
05:36amplify our voices in the conversation.
05:39Greg, I know you talk a lot about knowledge.
05:42What is different about knowledge in the age of AI?
05:44We all have so much access to knowledge now.
05:47What's going to transform?
05:48Yeah, thanks.
05:49I think there's a couple of things that
05:51are going on right now.
05:52The ability to have context of the IP of your company is new.
05:58Corporations have enormous volumes of information
06:01at their disposal.
06:02But finding meaning and insight out of that data
06:04has always been difficult. And that tacit knowledge
06:07was owned by certain people in the organization,
06:09but not by all.
06:10And one of the things that's interesting about AI
06:12is it's democratizing that and allowing
06:15you to find new insights in your organization as a whole.
06:17So I think you'll hear people talk about knowledge graphs
06:21quite a bit right now.
06:21And it's really this notion of taking
06:23the structure of the information that you have in an organization
06:26and organizing it in a way that it
06:28serves the purposes of your organization, your customers,
06:31and the benefits that you want to provide to them.
06:34And the ability for everyone in an organization
06:36to have access to that and to understand that with more
06:38clarity is one of the things that we're starting
06:41to see materialize in AI.
06:43That's so exciting.
06:45Arun, I know you're fully aware of how much investment
06:49is going into the world of AI.
06:50Give us some light on that.
06:53So as of last week, Menlo Ventures
06:56set out a study across the top 600 customers in the US.
07:01And they basically said the spend
07:04was approximately $2.3 billion in 2023 for AI.
07:09It's $13.8 billion in 2024.
07:13And then beyond that, it's going to be a quarter of a trillion.
07:17So it's exponential.
07:20And part of the interesting finding
07:22is, how is this being funded?
07:26The funding, the 60% of the source of the funding
07:29is coming from innovation projects.
07:31And 40% is basically funneling in regular R&D,
07:37and marketing, and other function budgets
07:39into AI with the promise of return on investment.
07:43IDC just released a paper as of last week with Microsoft.
07:47And they said the expectation is for every dollar spent,
07:51there's a $4 ROI on AI.
07:53So there lies the business problem and opportunity.
07:57Dan, you talk a lot about what is human centeredness
08:01as you work with CEOs.
08:02Help us understand that.
08:04Yeah, well, it's been so cool to hear
08:06some of the other speakers in fields like architecture
08:09and entertainment, where a design leader and conversation
08:12are expected and normal.
08:14In the world of software and technology,
08:16it's not always expected that you're going
08:18to have design at the table.
08:21And to me, the heart of AI, the A is artificial.
08:25It's the tech, the Silicon Valley capability side.
08:28But the I is intelligence.
08:30This is a human idea.
08:32And that's what designers do best.
08:34Who are we designing for?
08:35What do they need?
08:36How can we connect our business capabilities
08:38to their lives for meaning?
08:41And we've seen studies that show 80%, I think, of AI projects
08:44are currently failing, largely because it's
08:47a lot of CTOs throwing tech quickly at problems
08:51without really understanding the human element.
08:54So a lot of my work advising CEOs
08:56has been, let's think about purpose and people
09:01and experiences in a more profound way.
09:03Let's bring it to something really tangible.
09:06What does this actually let us as humans do?
09:09What's different about my life today versus tomorrow
09:11as these experiences start coming out?
09:14Victoria, do you want to lead the way?
09:18Imagine a world where you're looking
09:21to go to Walt Disney World and any of its locations.
09:27But you've never been there.
09:29You want to bring your family.
09:30You don't know much about it, other than it's costly,
09:35and that they have many, many options.
09:39You could call the 1-800 number.
09:40You could go on the website.
09:42You can look at what's up.
09:43It can be very overwhelming doing a search such as that.
09:47And to understand what makes this resort right for me
09:51and my family with our unique needs.
09:55In a world where you know everything about this person
09:58because they're online, they've been on your website,
10:01if I'm Disney, I can listen to other aspects
10:05of that potential customer's interactions,
10:09both with our site and with other search engines.
10:13And you can then start to talk to them
10:16in language that makes sense to them
10:19and bring your company to them, help
10:21them understand the differences of the options that
10:24are available to them in a way that's very human-centric.
10:27I love how Vance said that.
10:30It's about human-centric and natural.
10:32And I can have a conversation with this artificially
10:36intelligent agent who can actually make decisions.
10:39They can also look at my history.
10:42Have I been to Disneyland before or other theme parks
10:46in the Purview?
10:47Have I also purchased merchandise
10:51from the Disney website?
10:52I can use all of that to influence what options out
10:57of this plethora of data, what is it that we're now,
11:00petabytes of data out there about not just all
11:05of business offerings, not just the context of the world
11:08that this person is in and where they are,
11:11but also about them themselves so that we can provide
11:15the best hotel option.
11:17We can stay within a budget.
11:18We can serve up when's the best time of year for you to go,
11:23right, if we know you have two small kids that
11:25are in elementary school.
11:27That's what's different about this new era.
11:31It is not just predicting what you need.
11:34It's also being intelligent, right size, right channel.
11:37So it's not just typing on a laptop in a conversational box
11:40with a chatbot anymore.
11:44That's what makes it next level,
11:45because you're bringing together that data
11:47plus machine learning, the large language models,
11:51as well as action in service of a specific business goal
11:56to meet a specific human need.
11:59And so that's what's next level.
12:01We're seeing artificial intelligence and agents
12:04show up in health care, right, being your personal exercise
12:08and nutrition coach as well, and also looking at your health
12:13data from your continuous glucose monitor, your blood
12:18pressure kit, and suggest healthier options for you that
12:24is contextually relevant to you.
12:26And so that's what changes the game,
12:29because it extends the reach of the company.
12:32And it's also bringing what humans
12:36need designed appropriately, without bias.
12:39It brings it in a way that they can consume it
12:42as a whole, so that they can consume it easily as well.
12:46Yeah, and I think one of the things of AI
12:48is, how does it help humans from the mundane?
12:51Maybe things we hate doing, spending times
12:54doing over and over again.
12:56You work in a world where there is a lot of mundane tasks
12:59for the ordinary professional.
13:01What are some contexts in HR and so forth where AI comes in?
13:06Yeah, I think, again, getting back to my point,
13:09we specialize in working on business software
13:12and applications.
13:12So these are software that you would use day-to-day
13:15to get your jobs done, whether you're an HR professional,
13:18whether you're an inventory clerk, or a warehouse manager,
13:23or a supply chain analyst.
13:24You look across the board.
13:26And the question is, can AI actually
13:28help get your job done better?
13:31Save you time, so you can spend more time to think
13:34through what's more important.
13:36So as an example, I'm sure a lot of you manage teams.
13:41You've got employees.
13:42And one of the common things that most managers
13:45do at the end of the year is performance evaluations
13:48and goal setting.
13:50Setting a goal sounds simple.
13:52You've got to write it up.
13:54Do you have fun writing it up?
13:56Do you really know your employee well enough
13:57to be able to formulate that message?
13:59What if AI was an enabling technology that
14:02gave you the negative information that
14:05lets you generate the goals based
14:07on the context of the skill the person has
14:10and the broader OKRs that you carry?
14:13So those are little fragments of AI
14:15when embedded in the workflows, how people get their job done.
14:21That gives the benefit statement.
14:23I would still say that, for me, AI is an enabling technology.
14:31It is there for us to serve a means to end.
14:35Experience is the product.
14:37And so when you think about AI, if you can successfully
14:40think about the use cases, then what problem
14:42are we trying to solve?
14:44And if you can net that, then like any other user-centered
14:47design process, AI is going to be adopted.
14:50Because at the end of the day, businesses care about adoption.
14:54So if you build AI that doesn't serve a purpose, guess what?
14:58Trust is broken.
14:59And once trust is broken, it's very, very hard
15:02to get it back.
15:03So I think we have, as a design leader,
15:05many interesting challenges to go through.
15:08Greg, you're a huge proponent of thinking about new innovation
15:11structures, new innovation processes.
15:14How does this new era enable a new kind of innovation?
15:18How are design organizations needing
15:21to be changed or evolved?
15:22Give us a little bit of light on the changing dynamics.
15:26Yeah, that's a great question, Gordon.
15:27And I think one of the things that we're tasked with
15:31is there's AI and purpose of the products
15:33that we create and serve.
15:34And there's also AI that we use in developing those products
15:38for our customers to serve.
15:39And I think there's a great conversation going
15:41on right now about how do we use those tools to build
15:44better products, better services, better outcomes
15:47for humans and our customers.
15:49And I think the area that's most interesting to me right now,
15:52where I'm spending a lot of my attention,
15:53is around product discovery.
15:55And this is really trying to understand product market fit,
15:58understanding your customer base,
16:00understanding their behaviors, their trust quotients.
16:04Are they willing to accept something?
16:06What are their levels of trust with the technology?
16:09And one of the things that you can do,
16:11especially right now with RAG models,
16:13Retrieval Augmented Generative tools,
16:17you can actually build custom models
16:19from the IP of your own organization
16:21and use that to drive insights.
16:24And every time I've done that with teams recently,
16:26we have identified new things that we
16:29should be following up on and learning fast and quickly
16:33with that content.
16:34So I think one of things that's really interesting right now
16:36is the ability to really understand
16:39the content that you have at your disposal,
16:41find meaning in it quickly, and then using that
16:44to iterate and test faster.
16:45And that is going to change the way that we work.
16:47We can move faster, and we can actually
16:49be more on target with the outcomes that we're delivering
16:52and have more efficacy at the end of the day
16:55for the end user of the products that we build.
16:58Dan, let's connect that back to your thought about the failure
17:01rates.
17:02What is that kind of essential role
17:04of the design leader and designers in this next era?
17:08We're all very familiar with human-centered design
17:10practices.
17:12But to Greg's point, things are moving faster.
17:14We can achieve insight sooner.
17:16So how is that going to impact the bottom line?
17:19Yeah, I mean, there's this really famous model
17:22about innovation happening at the intersection of business,
17:26technical, and human factors.
17:28You may have all heard this before.
17:30And it's very obvious to designers
17:33that we have to work at the intersection of viability,
17:36feasibility, and desirability.
17:38The desirability conversation just isn't always there.
17:41Having been a chief design officer in these C-suite
17:44meetings, it's a lot about quarterly returns,
17:47about viability.
17:48It's a lot about feasibility.
17:50Can we do this from a technology perspective?
17:54But just one little example, Gord, to bring this home.
17:57How many of you here in the last week
18:00have said, hey, Google, hey, Siri, or hey,
18:04Apple to Alexa, to a speaker?
18:07Anybody here?
18:08Do you guys use that experience?
18:09A couple?
18:11Not many.
18:12It's pretty annoying.
18:13Well, that was actually created about 10 years ago
18:17by a design team at Motorola that
18:20was using design research methods
18:22to allow ordinary people to role play
18:24the future in their homes using foam core
18:28and other kind of materials.
18:30And when we saw people speaking naturally to screens,
18:33we were inspired and said, we can build that.
18:36And when Google bought us and they
18:38saw how much people loved the hey, Moto experience,
18:41they said, let's just make one change.
18:42Instead of hey, Moto, let's call that hey, Google.
18:45We were like, great.
18:46That's awesome.
18:47Now, AI has advanced so much in those days.
18:50But when you put design at the heart of your technology
18:53process, you start with real people and real needs.
18:57And it makes it much less likely that you'll
18:59get to something that will fail because it's just
19:02technologists throwing things out into the wild.
19:04I think there's also a lot of anxiety
19:07about AI's impacts on jobs.
19:10What does that next generation designer look like?
19:14What skills do they need to learn or unlearn?
19:17Arun, let's kick it off there, and we'll go to Victoria.
19:20I think the important aspect of a designer
19:23is end-to-end thinking.
19:26Sometimes we lose that while we are working on design.
19:29So systems thinking is an attribute
19:32that we need to carry forward.
19:33That's one.
19:34A, and part B is, you've got to understand the technology
19:38you're designing for.
19:40So for a designer to understand how to adopt, apply, embed AI,
19:45they need to understand the ramifications of it.
19:48How can it be used?
19:49Third, typically, designers don't look into data.
19:53They look at designing experiences
19:55based on the use case.
19:57Unfortunately, it's garbage in, garbage out for AI.
20:01So it's important that designers expand their notion
20:04to understand a little bit on data lineage, data quality,
20:07where it's coming from.
20:09And the fourth question they've got to ask themselves
20:11is more on the ethical-moral side.
20:14Is this thing going to help or hurt the user?
20:16Simple question.
20:18So being the moral compass sometimes
20:20is hard in a business setting, but that's
20:22the role we have to play.
20:24Victoria?
20:27Yes, I want to double down on the data piece and the ethic.
20:32These models are incredibly complex,
20:35and they're learning with every interaction
20:38and every transaction.
20:39And it's really important that we recognize that,
20:43like I said, garbage in, garbage out.
20:46The power of the artificial intelligence of the agentic era
20:50is the data.
20:51And so that isn't always the most comfortable place
20:55for designers or design makers.
20:57Understanding data, data hygiene, data governance,
21:01how these training models work that we're not
21:05introducing in here.
21:07Humans have biases, and humans train models.
21:11So then the models then exponentially
21:15increase the adverse impact of it.
21:18So we have to be very careful about that.
21:21And we really do need to understand the data.
21:23And it's not just the data that you own within your company.
21:27What makes agents super powerful and relevant
21:32is that they're able to process real-time,
21:37fractions of a millisecond time.
21:39They can process data from outside of their company.
21:43So I'm at Salesforce, and the Data Cloud product.
21:48And we like this, our agent group runs on Data Cloud,
21:51because that's exactly the layer where my team and I spend
21:56most of our time looking at what data are we
22:00using to measure success?
22:02What data are we using to understand accurately
22:08with low hallucinations, as we call it,
22:11accurately understand the context
22:13that that user is operating within?
22:16And that there's no one size fits all, right?
22:18So not every novice user of your product
22:21uses it the same way or uses it the same way.
22:24And that's true not just here at Salesforce,
22:27but across many industries and sectors.
22:33I'll just add a little bit to Victoria's point.
22:36I think one of the talk about agentic or agentive design,
22:42it depends on how you look at it,
22:44it's really about thinking about agents
22:47as a additional persona that we have to design for it.
22:52So human-centered design, you would
22:53design for the humans at the end of it.
22:56Human-machine interaction is human and machines
22:59interacting with each other.
23:01Now you've got humans, agents, machines.
23:04So that trifecta, you have to design for.
23:06So the natural language processing,
23:08understanding the way to interact with agents
23:11becomes a key factor in how the design profession has
23:14to evolve as well.
23:15So there's a lot of rush to AI design solutions, right?
23:19And so, Daniel, you highlight a little bit
23:21about the pressures of quarterly cycles.
23:24And all public companies are accountable to that.
23:26So what is that important dimension
23:28for next generation designers to consider cost, speed?
23:33Maybe things won't be as perfect as we
23:35hope it to be as designers.
23:36So what's that kind of contrast?
23:38I'd love you and Greg to expand on that dimension.
23:40Well, I think generally, design, particularly
23:44in the world of software and technology,
23:46needs to be more able and capable of having business
23:49conversations, period.
23:50Whether it's AI or whether it's just
23:52talking about how we work, how many folks
23:55we should have relative to developers or product
23:57managers, et cetera.
23:59And I think with the world of AI,
24:01some of the conversations I've seen
24:02is there's a lot of CEOs who don't really
24:05understand design.
24:06They just think of them as those black turtleneck
24:08wearing creative people in the corner that
24:10make stuff look pretty in a very superficial way.
24:12They think of it as on that level.
24:14And they're like, I've heard that AI can actually
24:16do that stuff automatically.
24:17Do we really need to hire more designers?
24:19So I think it's not only having designers
24:24learn the language of business, but also continuing
24:27that executive education to really help leaders understand
24:32that design, yes, we do make things look beautiful
24:34and gorgeous and incredible.
24:36But we also care about how people feel and their needs
24:41and the societal implications and accessibility and, and,
24:44and, all the human sides of the equation.
24:48And actually, when you have that conversation with leaders,
24:51they realize, I need you in my AI strategy
24:55because we have ethics, we have societal issues that
24:58are being raised that we don't know how to deal with.
25:01And design is great to weigh in on those.
25:04Yeah, just to build on that and something that Victoria said,
25:07I think we're in a moment where we
25:10can drive an enormous amount of context
25:12about the humans in the loop and then deliver solutions
25:16in a very different way.
25:17Most of us now, when we use software,
25:19we go look for something, and then we have to find it,
25:22and then we need to act on it, and then we
25:23need to move forward with it.
25:24And there's a process to do that.
25:26But these systems are changing.
25:29For those of you who are using AI,
25:30maybe not everybody is right now, but for those of you
25:33are, you start to recognize that you're having
25:35a relationship with the agent.
25:38And that relationship is becoming intimate over time
25:41because it starts to know things about you.
25:43And these systems are actually just
25:44starting to have sentiment analysis
25:46so that they can understand if you're under duress
25:48or if you're sad or if you're happy,
25:50and then will, of course, correct their answers to you
25:53based on your own emotional state.
25:55So the intentional decisions that we
25:58need to make on the products that we create
26:00need to reflect the brand of the company, the value proposition
26:04that you're creating, the outcomes that users
26:07and customers are expecting, and do it
26:09in the most human way possible.
26:11And to do that well, design needs
26:13to be in the middle of the conversation, for sure.
26:15And to kind of wrap it up and make it actionable,
26:18what is that one thing you want this audience to take away
26:21as we think about how can companies
26:23be successful in this age of AI and benefit
26:26as many humans as possible?
26:28Victoria, give us that one sentence
26:29and we'll roll through the panel.
26:35Greg?
26:36I would just say make the think.
26:39Get your hands in the making of the process and learn it.
26:43The faster that you use the tools,
26:45the quicker you'll learn how to take advantage of them.
26:47Dan?
26:48If AI is helping us automate what's ordinary,
26:52it'll freeze us up to think about what humans can do
26:54that's extraordinary.
26:56So raise the bar on how you contribute to a project.
26:59Arun?
27:00At the end of the day, you're designing for humans.
27:02AI is just a technology.
27:04And Victoria?
27:07Yes, my takeaway would be get involved,
27:11even in the conversations that make you uncomfortable.
27:14And that's especially important now,
27:17especially important for designing.
27:19Know your value and lean in on all of our skills
27:22that we've learned to build this new age of thinking.
27:29Awesome.
27:30Well, thank you to our panelists for sharing today.
27:31I hope we usher a strong future for humanity
27:34as we think about the next era of design and AI.
27:38Next up, we have lunch.
27:40I'm here to tell you that it's been an illuminating morning
27:43learning from so many different guests.
27:46And we're now gonna break for lunch,
27:47which will be held in two locations,
27:49depending on your registration.
27:51Those of you who have signed up in the China Design Session
27:54will gather in the Grand Salon 1 and 2.
27:57Everyone else will be here at the Vista,
27:59which you'll find by walking out of the ballroom
28:02and heading directly up the escalators
28:03beyond the foyer to Level 2.
28:05There will be ushers standing by the doors to direct you.
28:08And we'll see everyone back here at Main Stage
28:09for more great conversations at 2 p.m.
28:12So let's give a round of applause to these great panelists.