“You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can’t start with the technology and try to figure out where you’re going and try to sell it.” — Steve Jobs, 1997

Our 2026 theme is anchored in this timeless wisdom, which has regained its urgency as generative AI redefines the nature of production and product development. We now live in a world where "making" has been democratized by a prompt, making the tools of product creation available to everyone.

However, the democratization of output is not the democratization of insight, taste, and judgement. While anyone can now build, few are equipped to navigate the complex intersection of deep human needs and business outcomes. In this era of infinite production, the competitive moat is no longer the ability to build—it is the ability to edit, govern, and direct the experience toward meaningful value. This context frames our theme of 2026: Unlocking the Experience Advantage.

If you’re feeling the intensity and ambiguity of this moment, you’re not alone. Design executives are operating under increased expectations—facing functional blur, cost-efficiency mandates from Boards, and the seismic shifts of the Intelligence Renaissance. For those rising to enterprise-level roles, the expectation is clear: you must contribute to strategic decision-making, accountability, and governance.

For design executives looking to grow to enterprise-level roles, what does it take? What will be the key thesis that guides and enables this transition to unlock the experience advantage?

This year, our Council will focus on these evolutionary opportunities for design executives to set a new foundation with user and customer-centricity at the center for the age of intelligence. After our Summit 2025 in Silicon Valley, we defined a key shift from design leadership to experience leadership that represents a critical growth opportunity for design executives to gain greater strategic oversight over experience strategy, grounded in a design-led approach, along with the transformation and change management required to realize it.

In 2026, design executives with strategic leadership track records are being entrusted with wider influence and enterprise-level accountability.

In our member community, this has shown up in roles like Chief Design Officers, Chief Product Experience Officers, or VPs of Experience who are not only charged with functional leadership, but accountability for enterprise-wide initiatives ranging from culture change, AI-driven business transformation, to cross-functional process innovation. We're actively seeing how enterprises today are leveraging their design executives in strategic capacities that redefine what the role of a design executive looks and feels like beyond traditional remits.

The evolving scope of strategic design leadership

As design executives grow in scope, they move beyond traditional responsibilities for experience design, research, and content into adjacent domains such as service design, product management, engineering, data, analytics, and go-to-market functions.

This expansion enables enterprise capabilities—from end-to-end journey measurement, accelerated product development with generative UI, and new discovery, insight, and validation practices that turn experience into real-time business intelligence.

In 2025, we marked the arrival of the Intelligence Renaissance—a shift from intelligence constrained by humans to intelligence distributed through generative, agentic enterprise systems.

AI-era dynamics introduce new needs for how customer experience imperatives gain strategic importance in helping differentiate products and services, as well as operational imperatives to create higher-performing operating models with AI embedded. For CDOs, long-standing product, organizational, and experience challenges are being amplified by AI—creating both urgency and opportunity in an era where building is democratized.

This raises the questions that matter most for design executive advancement:

• Strategic Readiness: What is the long-term ambition of the business, and does our current organizational architecture have the "experience infrastructure" required to get there?
• Value Differentiation: Where, and in what specific ways, does experience create a defensible moat that delivers sustained value for customers, employees, and the enterprise?
• Operational Consistency: How are leaders architecting the conditions and operating models in which teams—augmented by AI—consistently deliver high-integrity experiences at scale?
• Accountability Mandate: What new forms of enterprise-level responsibility must we take on to bridge the gap between customer-centric intent and bottom-line growth?
• Metrics of Success: What are the new KPIs that measure experience not as a "feeling," but as a structural business asset?

In 2026, DXC will build on this shift and convert insights into guidance and resources for our membership community—expanding the career pathways for design executives as enterprise-level experience leaders who will be increasingly accountable for business outcomes while also contributing to and influencing them.

We will clarify not only how design-led experience leaders operate, but what direction they must take, measurements for enterprise accountability, and what distinguishes design executives operating at either functional vs enterprise-level roles.

The 2026 roadmap to unlock experience leadership

The shift from influencing and guiding outcomes to being accountable is a growth opportunity for the modern design executive. In 2026, DXC is turning this role evolution thesis into an operational reality through a four-quarter core roadmap designed to help members best position for AI-era design leadership.

• Q1 | Expanding Design as Experience Leadership: We begin by establishing a new thesis for the value, scope, and authority of the role—defining how design executives must evolve from functional heads into enterprise decision-makers.
• Q2 | Building the Operating Model for Experience: We move into redefining the mechanics of how experience leadership functions inside complex organizations, focusing on new capabilities and ways of working that define how we organize and deliver.
• Q3 | New Systems for Experience Accountability: We deepen our focus on the systems that sustain experience leadership—accountability, measurement, and governance—ensuring outcomes are owned and defensible.

• Q4 | From Framework to Field Use: The year culminates in the definition of the DXC Experience Advantage Operating Model and Role Navigator—a practical guide exclusively for members to navigate their role scope, performance, and growth in the AI era.

If you are a senior design or experience executive at an inflection point—where expectations are rising fast, and more questions arise than answers, we've set up a robust program to address these challenges alongside a group of VP to C-Level design executives of global enterprises in our membership program.

We thank our membership community for their continued engagement and leadership in helping us shape our agenda for 2026 and look forward to a productive year together.

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