Two months after our Design Executive Council Summit 2025, we’re releasing a short video that captures the spirit, candor, and ambition of our global community of senior design executives.
It distills three days of conversation and connection into a glimpse of what it feels like when leaders shaping some of the world’s most influential companies gather with shared purpose.
For three days, executives from across the world convened under the theme “Defining Futures, Reimagining Roles.” These conversations stretched far beyond best practices. Members confronted the foundational shifts of the Intelligence Renaissance—how AI is reshaping business models, redefining enterprise value, and expanding what strategic design leadership must deliver in the decade ahead.
The Summit empowered executives to grapple with the new responsibilities of our roles: stewarding the evolution of global enterprises with strategic clarity, foresight, and customer-centricity, while preparing our teams and successors for a future arriving faster than ever.
“What was exciting about this Council gathering this year is… we really had a chance to discuss all the moving forces impacting businesses at large, and what the future state of the role will look like.”
— Gordon Ching, Founder & CEO, Design Executive Council
Member voices from the Summit
Cindy Chastain, former SVP of Customer Experience and Design at Mastercard: “We’ve been needing an organization like this for so long because there is no playbook for how design executives can successfully and effectively navigate in their environments, and there’s no playbook for future leaders.”
Kaaren Hanson, VP of User Experience at Insulet Corporation: “The role of the DXC is really to make sure that we are ahead of where we’re going—so that we’re leading and creating the path for everyone coming behind us.”
Jason Ferrell, Chief Design Officer at Humana: “There’s a therapeutic part about building lasting relationships with people who truly understand what my job is like.”
Issa Breibish, Chief Design Officer at Bentley Systems: “Leadership can be isolating. Leadership in design can be especially isolating. Finding a peer group you can talk to about real organizational challenges—and different approaches to solving them—is an incredible opportunity.”
Tom Gebauer, SVP Design and Research at Dow Jones: “I’ve never seen a group like this assembled in one place. The ability to tap into that brain trust is important for me and for the impact I bring back to my company, Dow Jones, and ultimately the outsized impact our business can have on the world.”
The mandate ahead
The Summit reaffirmed why the Council exists: to create a trusted, high-level environment where design executives can interpret market shifts, strengthen their leadership capability, and architect the next era of design’s strategic contribution at the highest levels of the enterprise.
As demographic changes, new competitive pressures, and AI reshape every industry, design executives hold both an opportunity and a responsibility to define how businesses create durable customer value with technology, to cultivate resilient and innovative teams, and to build human-centered futures anchored in vision, purpose, and values.
The DXC Summit is where this mandate takes shape. It’s where leaders begin the work of reinventing and repositioning design leadership as a defining force for business success in the Intelligence era, and where the future of the role is written, together.
Explore DXC Membership and join executives shaping the future of design leadership in global business.
