The AI Shift explores how user research and design practitioners can harness generative AI to accelerate business and customer impact. It examines how workflows are evolving, clarifying what to automate, what to augment, and what to protect as distinctly human value. While centered on the opportunities created by GenAI, the insights also serve as foundations for the broader evolution of AI, including the rise of agentic AI and system-level intelligence. Produced in content partnership with Dscout, this report is grounded in field insights from leading practitioners.

Featuring:

• The design of possible worlds - Christina Vallery, Chief Design Officer at Cigna
• Innovation starts with the unseen - Janaki Kumar, Chief Design Officer, Global Banking at JPMorgan Chase
• Research as a living system - Andrew Birgiolas, Head of Product Design, Analytics, and Research at Sephora
• Designing across the stack - Dave Brown, Head of Design, GenAI at Amazon Web Services
• Research as a strategic accelerant - J.M. Downey, Head of Research and Design Strategy at AT&T

We have designed this report as a source of inspiration to help designers and researchers expand their understanding of how they can shape the emerging relationship between humans and AI.

This is not just about adapting to new tools. It’s about understanding how AI now sits between our imagination, decisions, and the artifacts we create. It’s about asking: What do we want to build, and who is it really for?

As organizations integrate AI across infrastructure, operations, and strategy, the stories here offer more than examples. They reflect how leaders like you are navigating the tension between experimentation and responsibility, between velocity and values.

Use these perspectives to refine your approach to work, drive innovation that is not just novel but also meaningful, align AI with outcomes that matter, and ensure the systems we help build serve people, not just performance metrics.

This is a call to design and research not as functions, but as forces for shaping what this next era becomes.

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