Jesse James Garrett

I’m fascinated by the emerging challenges I’m seeing among my coaching clients who are leading design for AI products. Some of them are leading new AI features within established product offerings. Others are taking brand new AI products from zero to one. And some of them have been working in the space for a while and suddenly find their work taking on newfound strategic significance for their organizations.

The themes I’m hearing, however, are universal.

Managing executive expectations is paramount. Every AI project faces extra scrutiny from above right now. That challenge is compounded by the fog of hype surrounding the technology and its capabilities, leading to executive directives that are either hopelessly vague or zigzagging from one value proposition to the next. Actively driving the dialogue about what’s possible is necessary to keep your team from having to deliver the impossible.

Stay close to your SMEs. Most of these new products aren’t trying to be everything to everyone—they’re targeting some specific use cases where the business sees an opportunity to apply the emerging technology. That means the people in your organization who most deeply understand those use cases are your best resource for setting priorities.

Keep questioning your own understanding. Unpredictability comes with the territory. One huge risk of working in an emerging space like this is that you become too attached to a model of the work that is in fact only temporarily applicable. How fully you have modeled the problem matters a lot less than how quickly you adapt to new user and model dynamics.

I can’t help but notice how much these topics have in common with the challenges we faced with establishing UX design in the early 2000s, and the mindset we had to adopt in order to continue driving value. Now as then, the leaders who can separate the signal from the noise and articulate their own viewpoint on these challenges are the ones who will make the most impact.