The X-Interviews | Maxed Out Innovation

Interview #10 - Katrina Alcorn on Co-Designing with AI

Katrina Alcorn on Co-Designing with AI

Today on The X-Mentor it’s Katrina Alcorn on being MAXED OUT and how AI can help us be Everything Everywhere All at Once. Well, potentially.

Katrina is a Chief Design Officer and formerly GM of Design at IBM, where she led a global practice of 3,000 designers who created award-winning products, services, and experiences powered by AI for customers across various domains and industries.

Katrina is also the author of Maxed Out: American Moms on the Brink. Winner of a Foreword IndieFab Book of the Year Award. Ultimately, she offers readers a vision for a healthier, happier, and more productive way to live and work.

In this X-Interview, Katrina and I will be discussing:

• What it’s like to be MAXED OUT.

• How AI can potentially help people live happier, and more productive lives.

• The Implications of Human-centered AI on Culture and Creativity.

• AI’s Potential Impact on Organizational Design and Business.

• Coexisting with AI.

MAXED OUT

The X-Mentor: Katrina, welcome to the The X-Mentor!

Katrina: Thank you, Greg!

The X-Mentor: In your book, MAXED OUT: American Moms on the Brink, you explained the daily life tasks of things like getting everyone appointments for the dentist, attending the parent-teacher conference, gathering information for the mortgage re-fi because interest rates dropped, finding better home and auto insurance providers, attending birthday parties for the kids, taking the kids to swimming lessons. The list goes on, and on, and on. Add to this enormous list your full-time job, which requires you to be productive and create value for your company. Then there’s what’s sacrificed, time for getting your personal needs met, your health, wellness, and fulfillment of life experiences and friendships.

Can you share more about your experiences that led you to becoming Maxed Out? Has anything changed since that time?

Katrina: I have three kids. The youngest is 16 and I completely burned out after my youngest was born. So, I first started writing about this topic about 16 years ago and then the book was published a few years later.

At that time, I was trying to describe this incredible dysfunction that I saw not only playing out in my life, but in all my friends’ lives. And then as I read about it, I realized this was a universal phenomenon. This dysfunction between our work lives and our home lives and I really felt like it was a health crisis, a public health crisis.

You know, women have been entering the workforce since the 1960s in droves, but our home lives and our expectations on women haven't really changed. We still expect women to be the primary caregiver. Men are doing more at home. But let's be honest, the expectation culturally is that women are the caregivers and men are the breadwinners. And even when we both work, there's a bias. To answer your question, has anything changed? I think that with the pandemic in some ways it’s gotten worse.

The X-Mentor: Retrospectively, or introspectively, how does that feel?

Katrina: Unfortunately, I think the topic is as relevant as ever. I know this partly because people keep reading my book and I'm still getting letters from readers saying, “This moved me. This is my life.” I think that two things happened with the pandemic.

1. It exposed just how much women's free labor is a requirement for society. When daycare closed and kids were not able to go to school anymore, moms and dads were on the front lines, but more than anything, it was moms. And when people had to stop working, it was usually the moms. So, that persists, that inequality.

2. The pandemic showed us that we can be incredibly productive working from home. And now we have this opportunity to reconsider how we work. And some of us pre-pandemic, some of us were saying for knowledge workers working from home can help square the circle, it can help by getting that two hours commute time back, or whatever your commute time may be. Moms and dads are putting that extra time into their kids, they're putting time into exercise. They're putting more time into sleeping. All these things that were so desperately in a deficit.

Now we're entering the post-pandemic stage, and some employers are asking employees to go right back to the office as if nothing has changed. And the message I'm hearing from employers is, “Well, we did it before [working in the office]. Why can't you do it now?” And I think the message they're not getting is it didn't work for us before. It didn't work.

Workers are saying, now we know that we can be productive and creative, and we can do all the things that we wanted to do in our work lives and get more balanced, so work with us on that. You know, yes, we want face time too. But does it have to be 5 days a week? What’s the right number? Three days a week? Two days? Whatever it is, there’s wiggle room there. There’s got to be a way to get that in-person time to connect and collaborate, but also get the balance and autonomy that we always needed, and that we now know is attainable.

The X-Mentor: In your book, you talk about creating this elaborate spreadsheet that divided the day into time increments for tasks, with color coding for Work, Kids, Personal. It was your husband’s idea, Brian, right? You were both very organized, you had a plan, and as consultants you knew exactly how to manage complexity and work the plan. Right?

What happened with that project plan?

Katrina: It's a real artifact, it should be studied by social scientists. It shows the effort we made.

[Laughs]

The X-Mentor: Yeah, I'd love to see that.

[Laughs]

Just walk me through what it was like trying to manage that plan. Then how that led to you coming home sick from work one day and never going back.

Katrina: Yeah, yeah. So, this spreadsheet that I wrote about, it was important to write about that because it was such a great example of how hard we tried and I want to keep saying there was nothing that unique about my husband and me, couples all over America are doing this dual income thing, families trying to raise kids and work, take care of elderly parents, or single parents doing it all...We're superheroes, you know, all of us. And if anyone reading this recognizes this is your life, you're a superhero for doing this too. It's incredible. The amount of effort and time we put into just trying to stay on track.

Now what I found was that your individual effort has a limit. There's only so hard you can try. So, at that time I wrote about early in the book was an example of how we're using all our effort, and it was working. It was working until that one extra straw that broke the camel's back. In our case, we had another kid and then it didn't matter anymore. It didn't matter how hard we tried. It didn't matter how fancy our spreadsheets were. It didn't matter how disciplined we were. There simply was not enough time in the day to do everything that was required of us to keep this family going and still work.

And I think a lot of people have this experience where you first have kids, you don't know what you're getting into. You think, “Ohh you know, it doesn’t look so hard from a distance, I can do that, my life won't change.” How many of us have said those words, or heard someone say that? And then you run up against reality. Reality is you do need to sleep, and skimping on sleep has an effect on you. Reality is we all need social connections, we need downtime. You can't give up these things that make us human in an effort to just work and take care of our kids all the time.

So, the spreadsheet represented my early naivete. Essentially, that we could just try harder and make it work.

The X-Mentor: After that unforgettable day, the day you Maxed Out, you come home, and you don't go back to work. As I was reading about all your emotions, I was also feeling how that must have felt. You wrote about things like feeling overwhelmed, like you were failing. Despair, shame, dread, feeling miserable. Delirium comes up. Then exhaustion and anxiety.

Wow, that's a litany of classical psychological symptoms. And you’re not getting relief. Animals in the wild have fight or flight response. Once an animal decides to fight the threat or make a run for safety, it instantly relieves the toxic chemicals of anxiety. Cortisol is “mopped-up” and we can go on with our life. Conversely, when you have stress building up, and you can’t fight or run, it’s just working against you. Cortisol has a toxic effect on our body when it’s not relieved. And you were not getting any relief. Right?

Katrina: Yeah, this is why more and more as I was working on the book, I started to frame it as a public health issue. We humans are also animals. We have a fight or flight response, just like any animal in the wild. That's supposed to work in a certain context. In our modern lives, where we just rush from one thing to the next, when we are chronically overworked, we don't get the normal downtime from it. We don't have that healing moment, like when the deer is shaking off all the stress. And then, again, we just go into the next fight or flight and that's what I experienced.

It took place over months, I was depressed. Then I wasn't sleeping. I started having panic attacks. And these are common symptoms of being overworked. I'm a normal person. I'm an extremely resourceful person. But we all have our limits. So, that’s what I was trying to describe, what it looks like when you try and try and try in this situation where systemically things are out of balance.

People & AI

The X-Mentor: Your spreadsheet idea didn't work. That’s us humans in the context of technology, we think if we just approach problems logically, plan every detail out fully, it's going to somehow help us emotionally. As a former Researcher for Microsoft Office, with a deep focus on Excel, I can tell you that’s just not the case. Spreadsheets were designed for balancing budgets, not our lives.

Increasingly, we are seeing people out there that are thinking about AI in this way. Which is why I wanted to first discuss your MAXED OUT story, to put some human context around this AI space and to add a hefty dose of empathy for the situation of today’s working moms. Because AI empathy is not the same as human empathy, and there are more questions than answers on whether AI empathy is real or artificial.

EDITOR’S NOTES: Related Research on AI Agents and AI Empathy.

Bill Gates is at it again, notoriously, and forever defending “Clippy.”  But this time BillG has moved beyond the Bot and is now talking about The Future of Agents. BillG said in a recent GateNotes blog, “Imagine that agents become so good that everyone can have a high quality of life without working nearly as much. In a future like that, what would people do with their time?”

BillG is talking about how AI Agents are going to change the way the software industry works. It's going to change the way that we use computers. It’s literally going to blow up the software industry as we’ve once known it, he predicts. Bill said that “computers are still pretty dumb. To do any task on a computer, you have to tell your device which app to use.” BillG continues, “In the next five years, you won’t have to use different apps for different tasks. You’ll simply tell your device, in everyday language, what you want to do. And the software will be able to respond personally because it will have a rich understanding of your life.”

Jacob Nielsen, who has been a critic of Bill Gates for decades, vehemently agrees with BillG on AI Agents.

Jacob Nielsen and Sarah Gibbons have also recently published AI Empathy: Is It Still Empathy, which examines the differences between human empathy and AI “empathy.” Jakob and Sarah debate the topic.

The X-Mentor: Katrina, what are your thoughts on how AI can help us live happier, healthier, or more productive lives?

How might AI have helped you when you were MAXED OUT?

Katrina: Yeah, I have so many thoughts. So, let's start with the positive vision because there's many, many things that could go wrong. But let's start with what could go right. I think what we're learning very quickly about AI is this stuff could be really powerful. What we've realized is:

1. AI can be a powerful collaborator for humans.

2. AI can help us come up with more innovative ideas.

3. AI can also eliminate the boring stuff.

Ezra Klein, I love his podcast. He's the New York Times columnist who maybe eight months ago had a podcast about AI and he said something that really caught me. He said, “Let's be honest, a lot of us have to talk ourselves into our jobs being meaningful. And the truth is, most of what we do is not meaningful. And we have to brainwash ourselves, to get ourselves out of bed every morning doing this.” And he used an example from his own life. Not to pick on writers (of which I am one), but he said, “You know, I used to write marketing copy. AI can now write marketing copy. Is that a terrible thing?” Well, the truth is, you know, a lot of what I wrote was drivel. It was not meaningful. I was just trying to convince people to do something they didn't want to do.

The big picture here is AI could take out a lot of the stuff that we do that's not very meaningful. It could take out a lot of the boring, repetitive stuff. It could make up for our human weaknesses. You know, AI is incredibly good at crunching data, and it never needs a bathroom break. So, there's a lot that AI can do that is complementary to what we do. And it also can be a source of creative collaboration. And all of this means there's potential. It doesn't mean we're going to get there. Rather, it means there’s potential for AI to free up our time for more meaningful pursuits.

The X-Mentor: Beyond your spreadsheet and thinking about some of those daily tasks, how might AI Agents help? For example, maybe your Agent knows how to pick up the kids, so you’ve authorized the agent to automatically schedule an Uber, right? You don't have to go grocery shopping, because your Agent knows what needs replacing, when to order and at what price, and where to deliver. Your spreadsheet captured a number of tasks that have some digital component today that AI might automate. Right?

Katrina: Having an agent plan out my kids’ camp schedules in the summer, three kids, three different ages, that would have been incredible. Like the amount of time that I put into coordinating with other moms and researching. To your point, yes, there is a lot that we could outsource, absolutely.

The X-Mentor: Things like finding the insurance for your home and auto, an agent could negotiate the right amount of insurance for the right price, so you only pay for what you need, to borrow a phrase. Then doing all the research and legwork for investing in retirement. So much of our lives are already digital now. But the things that require physically being somewhere, you know, like going on the field trip with your kids, maybe that's where the quality time comes in because you’ve ‘recovered’ time from the tasks that your agent handled for you. Now you can spend more quality time with the kids. Right?

Katrina: Field trips with the kids – that's a great example of something I would not want to outsource. That was precious time and I look back on it fondly.  I wish I’d had more of it.

By the way, Bill Gates wasn't the first one to have this idea that we were going to free up our time. John Maynard Keynes, famous economist, he predicted in the 1930s that we would be working a 15-hour work week. And a lot of people said, you know, the Internet was going to bring so much productivity that we were not going to need to work as much. That hasn't come true. If you think about the impact of the Internet on us, it's definitely made some types of work easier. I used to be a journalist, so just doing research, it's so much easier than having to make trips over to the library and look things up. But we're also a lot more distracted and the Internet has also given us more things to do and has given us social media and for many of us, that's not a nice-to-have, it's a must have. It’s a job requirement to participate in that.

So, you know, it's hard to say what will happen with AI. Is it going to give us other things to do like the internet did? I think the question we should be asking ourselves is what kind of lives do we want to live and where do we get meaning from our lives? There are some things you can outsource and there's some things you don't ever want to outsource. What you can't outsource is the love. And love takes time, and it should, you know.

The X-Mentor: Agreed. Absolutely.

Thinking about what you were saying about the John Maynard Keynes prediction and also, you know, what you were just saying about the internet (i.e., World Wide Web) there was another prediction in 1945 by Vannevar Bush, an American inventor and science administrator, who had envisioned a “memory extension” storage and retrieval system known as Memex. It was never built, but it is widely thought to have influenced the concept of hypertext and the Internet. So, just thinking about how some things take time to develop, it’s possible a 15-hour work week may come true. To your point, today we’re still debating whether to work in an office. So, a 15-hour work week doesn’t seem likely to enter the conversation anytime soon.

Back to your experience of becoming Maxed Out, will there ever be a case where stress from life and work is totally alleviated?

Katrina: No, probably not. I think, look, raising kids is hard work, taking care of elderly parents is hard work. Taking care of a loved one, any loved one who needs your help, is hard work. You know, I don't think we can take the pain out of the human condition entirely. We wouldn't be human if we did.

But I don't want to lose sight of this ideal that has potential to be real, which is,

The Human Race is discovering this new form of intelligence that really could make our lives easier. And if we capitalize on this opportunity, we have this potential to rediscover what is meaningful to us as humans.

I think there's a lot of things that could get in the way of doing that, including setting our own obstacles for ourselves. I do worry about AI being developed with a profit motive. So how do the benefits get shared in a way that keeps society sustainable? I don't know. And I think that's what we're going to be figuring out in the next few years.

Creativity & Cultural Shifts

The X-Mentor: We did experience a creative and cultural renaissance between the 14^th century and the 17^th century that was really centered on humanism, realism, and innovation. Artists like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo Buonarroti were renowned for changing the way we saw and represented our world.

That was a major cultural shift.

What are some of your thoughts around the potential for an AI-fueled cultural shift?

Katrina: I've been reading so much about AI, I don't remember where this came from, but it was someone opining about the people who will benefit most from AI—at least in the workplace—are the people with the lower skills because AI is going to raise the floor. Up until now, it was considered very important to have coding skills. AI is just getting rid of that requirement. AI can code and suddenly that makes coding a commodity. It's fungible. Anyone can do it with a little AI support.

You know, there's an argument that some of the creative pursuits like writing and design, there are parts of that that AI can do for you. So, what does that mean about creativity? What is the nature of creativity? If the machine can make beautiful works of art, it can write elegant code...and it's only going to be getting better and better...I think we're fundamentally creative beings and so I think we will continue to be creative. But what that looks like will start to shift.

The word that keeps coming up for me with AI is collaboration. In the past, whether you're an architect, or whether you're an industrial designer...every designer would have to start with a blank sheet of paper when they have a new design problem to solve. There’s nothing scarier than the blank sheet of paper. There are so many decisions that have to be made for that first prototype, and it can be, you know, almost paralyzing.

AI can fix that for us. For example, if you look at what Autodesk is doing—where I used to work before IBM—they're using generative AI for design. So, the designer sets the parameters that let's say you're designing a floor plan. The designer says I want to maximize desk space and access to natural light. These two things could be in conflict, but the system can come up with many, many, many solutions. Many more than a human would ever have time to come up with or the wherewithal to produce that volume of output. Then the human can go through these AI-generated “first drafts” and start to curate and figure out which ones have the most potential, and then build on those designs until they come up with the final ones.

It's not that we're not being creative anymore, but the form that creativity is now taking is shifting.

The X-Mentor: Many people have been reading The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Ruben.

Katrina: Yeah, I have that book—it's great.

The X-Mentor: Rick Rubin describes himself as a tastemaker, he has good taste. He was the Producer on Tom Petty’s Wildflowers album, which you and I have recently talked about. He’s not a musician. He claims he can’t sing. He doesn't know what any of the knobs do in a recording studio. His job is to listen to the music and nudge artists in a certain way and direction. He’s been extremely successful by every measure.

The role of the artist has never been to paint the canvas. And the canvas is not art. The role of the artist is to bring something from beneath the surface up to the surface. And as Paul Klee, one of my favorite artists, wrote in his Diaries, “The artist is like the tree trunk, bringing up from beneath the surface, the beauty of art which unfolds in the branches of space and time.” To paraphrase Klee, “Neither the artist nor the canvas is the beauty of art, it has merely passed through them.” So, in this way, the manifest object of art, the esthetic object (i.e., the canvas and paint) is just a byproduct of the creative process. The work of art is a matter of the arts, expressiveness, esthetics, values and more.

Similarly, neither AI, nor its digital canvas, is the art. One is the “tree trunk” and other is the “object.”

Rick Ruben puts it this way in his book, “Everyone Is a Creator.” “Creativity is a fundamental aspect of being human. It’s our birthright. And it’s for all of us.”

Maybe this is where AI is potentially going to shift the form of creativity?

Katrina: I think the creativity for humans with AI comes in two parts.

1. Prompt - The creativity for the human starts with the prompt. It's in the parameters we set. For example, I want to maximize natural light and heads-down desk space. I want to pair these two ideas together in a new type of design.

2. Curating - Cycling through all these interesting ideas and figuring out which one has the spark, which one has the kernel of brilliance that is going to solve the problem or express the thing I'm trying to express.

It's not only cycling through ideas and looking for the right one. It's not just curation. It's what is the prompt? What is the question we're asking? What is the thing we're trying to juxtapose? So that the system can come up with ideas.

Organizations & Business Outcomes

The X-Mentor: There are implications for organizational design, right? In Issue #8 of The X-Mentor | Teaming, I write about managing personal innovation preferences and profiles of teams. AI is now sparking conversations around the possibilities of applying generative AI to team design and managerial roles. For example, I can see the potential of certain innovation profiles (e.g., Implementers) being automated, while human resources shift toward more idea curation and conceptual areas, where human creativity is needed.

You’ve previously mentioned AirBnB CEO, Brian Chesky, who announced at Figma’s Config conference that they were “getting rid of Product Managers.” Basically, what Chesky did with Product Managers was shift their role over to a more traditional role that’s more involved in marketing and in-market success.

Katrina: Yeah, yeah.

The X-Mentor: So, that’s essentially arranging the way that we humans work by pushing us more towards a conceptual role, right?

Katrina: Yeah, yeah. Where humans are asking the question, “What is the big idea?” and having a sense of what outcome we're trying to drive. What new “big idea” we're trying to bring to life. And what’s changed with AI is now you don't need to spend 30 years honing your [painting] skills to bring that to life.

The X-Mentor: Yeah, yeah, the idea of craft kind of takes on a different meaning.

Back to Rick Ruben, he thinks all these ideas are floating all around us everywhere and it's just a matter of us humans being able to tune-in and retrieve ideas more energetically – again, that role of TASTE.

Katrina: Right.

The X-Mentor: How does AI change the way that we think about business and value creation?

Katrina: One way to look at it is AI is good at the things that humans are not so good at, right. Like I said before, AI is good at the boring repetitive tasks. AI is incredibly good at math. AI is tireless about reviewing data and surfacing insights and patterns from the data. Humans can do some of these things, but we don't do it as well as AI. So, when we leverage AI technology in the right way, it will make us smarter. I think it'll make us more creative. It'll make us more efficient and probably more productive.

We're already seeing this play out in a number of different ways. So just to name a couple of things that I'm seeing that I think have enormous potential. Code hinting for developers where the improvements that are coming out of code generation from AI. It's just happening so quickly, and you know, more and more we're finding that AI can write some pretty good code, often better than a human can write. Not always, but it's getting there. Does that mean it will replace development entirely? I think probably not.

I think you need humans in the loop.

One of the phrases that's going around a lot, “We still need humans in the loop.” It may mean that we need fewer developers. The same thing could be said of writers and designers. Which is scary to say, as a writer and designer. I've already started using ChatGPT. When I have an e-mail that I don't want to write and I'm dreading it. ChatGPT takes out the fear of the first draft. I just say, Here's my notes. Here's what I'm trying to get across ChatGPT, and it does a first draft. I've never just used a ChatGPT first draft, but it gives me a starting point and then the whole process just feels easier, and it goes faster.

So, any kind of first draft essays, presentations, website design. And it's like AI is going to be our partner in these things. And then there's the generative AI design I was talking about where the human sets a parameter and then the machine comes up with ideas beyond our wildest imagination that we can then develop further. In all these examples, I think AI is our collaborator. In some cases, it may be critiquing our work to make it better. It can be used to help us be more accurate. But there's still a human involved.

The X-Mentor: You just talked about the role of emotions as it relates to your first draft of your e-mail and leaning on ChatGPT to “take the fear out.”

Today, we seem to rely more on quantitative data, which is not typically, or directly, measuring human emotions. I see these metrics that businesses are using that are not aligned to human emotions or human perceptions. They are proxy metrics, like NPS. NPS is measuring an arbitrary behavior that might happen at some random time in the future. NPS does NOT measure actual behavior of humans making recommendations based on their experiences during interactions with our brand, products, or services.

Then there’s CSAT (Customer Satisfaction). Which is closer to measuring human emotions. But often that's tied to executive compensation. And we know how that contributes to deleterious dark patterns.

What I see is the need for leading metrics that tie emotions more directly to business outcomes. Today, these lagging metrics that show up a month or several months after it's rolled up to the executive suite are not useful, actionable, or reliable. They don’t analyze or visualize customer journey costs, nor do they associate human emotions with revenue and profitability. That’s a gap that needs to be closed.

We need metrics and measurement at the practitioner level, and specifically at the journey level, where we can see “live data” that is connected to revenue, or cost, and customer perceptions of their experiences as they interact with our offerings. This is a concept called Journey Economics.

We need to directly tie resulting behaviors to revenue. Why? Because emotions are the number one driver of business outcomes, meaning they drive the positive economic behaviors of customers. And that leads to Better Business Outcomes.

And so just thinking about that aspect of shifting in the business and the practices, what might this AI technology do to elevate emotions as a “Driver” of business outcomes?

Katrina: Yeah. OK. So, backing up a bit, I think we like to think that we're rational creatures. I've taught some leadership training and when we asked participants what influential tactics people use and what they think is most effective, often people will say rationalizing with data is really valuable. The truth is we're extremely emotional creatures, all of us.

Often, we'll cherry pick data to support what we believe intuitively versus the other way around. And so, I think, emotions rule the day in a lot of our decision making, even in a business context, even without us even knowing it. And that's where bias comes in, all kinds of, you know, distortions come in. AI can be a check and balance on that. People are worried about AI amplifying bias, and that is a concern. But guess what? Where did the bias come from? Well, the bias is in the data because humans are biased. So, you know, AI doesn't, at least at this point in its evolution, doesn't have thoughts or feelings about that.

So, I think if we care about making more rational decisions, there are ways to leverage AI in our decision-making process to check our assumptions, to check if we are driving the kind of outcome we say is important. And when you talk about leading versus lagging metrics, I don't know how AI fixes that. For example, companies that obsess about revenue but don't obsess about the customer experience or whether people are actually adopting the products. We just have to get people to care about that second part. We humans need to understand that early indicators like adoption and sentiment lead to revenue later. There is a leap of faith that must take place.

The X-Mentor: We have talked about this notion of the love language of the executive suite. Revenue, cost, risk, retention, profitability, margin, signals that are all inward looking inside the organization, right.

Why are we so inwardly focused on our business? You know, I look at performance management, it’s all about FOSH (Finance, Operation, Sales, HR) It's all corporate looking inside of itself and not understanding how that outside-In view contributes. I.e., “The power of putting customers first.”

Katrina: Yeah, yeah.

The X-Mentor: I'm wanting to see the script flip in the C-Suite to say, no, it's outside-in. Right.

Katrina: Yeah. Yeah, I think so. I think that’s a human problem that humans need to fix. Where I think AI can help is AI can help connect the dots for us when there's complicated data involved. When there's sentiment analysis involved, I think good strategists can leverage AI to draw those connections.

And I think what you're really getting at is a belief system. So, at the end of the day, do you believe the mission of your company is to create things—products, services, experiences—that people love? Or do you think at the end of the day your mission is to increase revenue? I think there are ways that AI can help us connect the dots like I said. But really what you're getting at is a human mindset problem. And I don't know if AI ultimately solves it. It's a human problem. It's: What do we value? Do we agree on the mission?

The X-Mentor: AI agents are flipping the script. Your agent, according to BillG, will bring the world to you. It's changing the direction of the way value flows. That, to my mind, has serious implications for business status quo.

Katrina: Yeah, yeah. And there are some things AI is going to make possible that weren’t possible, like hyper personalizing an interaction with data. That creates a new opportunity for connection with individuals that just wasn't scalable before without AI. More will be revealed in time as this technology evolves.

Coexisting with AI

The X-Mentor: What are your parting thoughts on AI and humans coexisting together?

What might that look like? What would make it healthy and productive for us all?

Katrina: Well, there's so much hype around AI right now. I think it’s important that we keep grounding ourselves around what we believe. What we think is important, what we value—because that grounding is going to help determine what we do with this technology. I think AI has the potential to make us more productive, to make us more accurate in our work, and to make better decisions.

If you think about a doctor deciding what treatment a patient needs for cancer, there's so much decision support that we could get from AI. AI can help us be more innovative. Again, hyper-personalize the way a business interacts with customers, for example.

What's not yet determined is how our values will play out, how we will make sure that everyone benefits from AI and not just a powerful few who own the technology. That's where our human values are going to have to come into play more than ever.

The X-Mentor: To those “human” values, does that elevate design? The value of design?

Katrina: Yeah, I think designers will be asked to take on higher levels of abstraction and complexity because we're designing AI systems.

We're not just using the output of AI; we're also designing how it works.

And I think it's going to call on designers to bring a higher level of ethics to our work than we've ever had before.

We’re going to need to become experts in data and understanding how it can be used and how it can be misused. And we're going to need to help our teams think through the ethical implications of what we're doing. And that's new. That's a big change for our profession.

The X-Mentor: What about design being more engaged in the business? The value creation for the business is derived from design creating value for customers. What needs to change?

Katrina: I would argue that that has always been our job. That's always been a huge part of our job and that will continue with AI. In the past, I think a lot of business leaders have not understood that. So, we still have that hill to climb.

The X-Mentor: I'm always asking, how can we better prepare our new designers that are entering the workforce to be more business literate? To better understand how value is created, and how their work contributes to the business bottom-line.

Learning Figma doesn’t make you a designer. It’s what you do with the resources you have that makes you a good designer.

Katrina: Yeah, that's right. That's right. And so, designers will need to continue to think through what outcome am I trying to drive—it's human outcomes and it's also business outcomes.

The X-Mentor: Katrina Alcorn, thank you so much for being on the X-Mentor! This has been super interesting for me, and I'm sure our readers are going to find it interesting as well.

Katrina: I enjoyed it immensely. Thank you, Greg!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

Katrina Alcorn is the author of Maxed Out: American Moms on the Brink, a Chief Design Officer, and former GM of Design at IBM.

Greg Parrott is The X-Mentor and publisher of The X-Interviews.