Pioneering AI Adoption

I led the internal push to standardize AI tools across a design and product organization skeptical of generative AI — shaping the process, running the workshops, and defining the strategic framework for how design operates when the interface thinks.

The company faced two problems at once. Tactically, leadership recognized the potential of AI for internal efficiency, but there was no standardized process for using generative AI to prototype and ship faster. Strategically, there was no shared understanding of how design's role changes when AI drives the interaction, not the user.

I framed this as one initiative: adoption requires both hands-on enablement and alignment on principles like trust, transparency, and human oversight.

I shared a repeatable 6-step workflow: Define, Scope, Plan, Build, Test, Iterate, that made AI prototyping accessible to any curious mind with no coding background. The training positioned the LLM as an "Expert Developer" the creator directs, emphasizing that success depends on one's judgment, not the tool's output.

The workshops produced tangible prototypes — not theory decks. Designers built working apps (habit trackers, Kanban tools, internal dashboards) using Gemini and Subframe, proving that AI-assisted prototyping could compress weeks of concept work into hours. This directly contributed to a later winning AI Hackathon project using Replit.

Beyond tooling, I shared a strategic critique of the industry's approach to AI product design. The core insight: most enterprise AI products are "draping a modern brain in an 80s UI" — wrapping powerful models in menus and buttons designed for a pre-AI era. This Big Flip is the shift from designer-controlled interfaces to AI-driven interactions where the designer's role becomes defining guardrails, not layouts.

This framework directly shaped product requirements for our AI lending tools, embedding principles like decision versioning, escape hatches, and transparent confidence scoring.

The work translated directly into business action: permanent AI tool subscriptions, a repeatable prototyping process now iterating in the team's workflow, and a strategic framework that informed product requirements for our two flagship AI products. I became the go-to resource for AI strategy across design, product, and engineering.