Jason Giles got into design because a new technology cracked a door open, and he was curious enough to walk through it before he had any business doing so. That's how he ended up at Microsoft... willing to take the risk because, as an imposter in the room anyway, he didn't feel like he had much to lose. Then the internet he'd just staked a career on nearly collapsed. He was still early enough in it that the crash became part of his education, not the end of it. Fifteen years at Microsoft on Office 365 and Xbox followed. Design leadership at DirecTV and Ticketmaster. Seven years and counting at UserTesting, currently leading a team of about 30 designers, writers, and researchers. Now he's watching a new technology crack the door open again, and a lot of the same instincts are back in play: curiosity, risk, FOMO, and sometimes not knowing where to start. AI has collapsed days of design and research work into seconds, and depending on who you ask, that either kills the profession or forces it to grow up. Jason will share a few stories from that earlier disruption - what actually held up and what didn't - before building into his talk "Why AI Makes Design Judgment More Valuable." Come with questions. There's a full Q&A built into the session, and he'd rather spend it on what's on your mind than a recap of the slides.

AI isn't coming to design, it's already here. But between the hype cycle and the panic, there's a gap: the real work of building with AI when you're shipping products, managing teams, and working with real constraints. This talk cuts through the noise. We'll explore what it actually means to integrate AI into your design practice and product workflow; not as a feature checkbox, but as infrastructure that changes how teams work. We’ll explore the practical realities of how AI is changing the shape of design work, where it genuinely speeds you up (and where it doesn't), and what it takes to lead a team through this shift without losing what makes design matter.

Many UX professionals spend years mastering research, strategy and design, yet still struggle to create impact. This talk explores the difference between UX competence and organisational competence, and why understanding people, trust, influence and alignment is often what determines whether great UX work creates real change. Drawing on lessons from consulting and enterprise environments, it challenges the idea that identifying problems is enough and argues that understanding how organisations work is just as important as understanding users.