I Used to Know Who I Was Designing For.
What we’ll cover in this session.
“How AI is changing what designers do – and what that means for everyone who verifies quality.
For twenty years – since screens became the primary surface of digital products – design answered one question: what should this screen look like?
AI just made that question insufficient.
The user is no longer always a person. The deliverable is no longer always a screen. And done is no longer a moment – it’s a quality bar that has to be maintained continuously, long after the Figma file is closed and the ticket is shut.
Who is actually using this? Humans, agents, voice interfaces, embedded systems – each one encounters the same design decision completely differently. Design now has to account for users it cannot interview, observe, or watch struggle.
What am I actually designing? Prompts. Guardrails. Tone of voice rubrics for AI-generated responses. Rules that generate the experience rather than being the experience. None of it lives in Figma. All of it shapes what the user encounters.
What does done even mean? When the AI output changes every session, when the model drifts silently between month one and month three, when quality isn’t a state you ship to but a bar you maintain – the old definition of done stops working. And most teams don’t have a new one yet.
This isn’t a talk about AI tools for designers. It’s a window into how design thinking is changing at the foundation – and what that means for the people whose job it is to verify that what was designed actually works.”
Where agentic workflows actually earn their keep in a real QA pipeline — and the two places they quietly fail.
The four control surfaces to set up before an agent touches production: scope, evaluation, failure cataloguing, human-in-the-loop.
Patterns for flaky-test triage, regression pruning, and visual-diff arbitration with receipts from three production systems.
A reference architecture you can take back to Monday’s sprint planning, plus the metrics that prove it’s working.
Manthan Desai
Head of Design
Manthan Desai is a design leader with 12+ years of experience building product functions from zero. Currently Head of Design at Piramal Finance, he’s spent the last few years shipping complex financial products at scale – and developing a sharp view of what great User Exprience actually means in fast-moving product environments.
Before Piramal, he led design at Walmart, where he worked on health and wellness experiences that delivered measurable business impact. Prior to that, he was the first designer at Paytm Money, where the team built India’s first commission-free direct mutual fund platform – onboarding nearly a million users in its first year. His journey started at Zepo, designing products that helped thousands of eCommerce sellers run their businesses better.
Across these roles, Manthan has consistently operated at the edge where design meets product complexity to deliver exceptional user experiences.
Catch this session live.
One pass, every talk, no parallel tracks. Super Early Bird
ends when the next 200 seats are gone.