Katrina Alcorn

Katrina Alcorn is a global product design executive and award-winning author. She has built the UX practice at Hot Studio, a boutique agency that was acquired by Facebook, and then at Autodesk, where she centralized the digital design and research teams and her team’s work led to a 5x increase in global ecommerce. Most recently, Katrina led one of the world’s largest design practices at IBM. IBM’s 3,000+ designers create software, hardware, brand, and web experiences powered by AI and used by millions worldwide. Under Katrina’s leadership, IBM Design drove major improvements to customer satisfaction and won a record number of product design awards.

Katrina is also the author of an award-winning book, “Maxed Out: American Moms on the Brink,” about the challenges mothers face in the workplace, and she’s an advocate for workplace culture that supports the reality of modern-day families.

Presentations

Leadership By Design 2024

Humanizing Technology: Ethics and Design in the Age of AI

The possibilities of AI have captivated our collective imagination. From writing poems and songs, to analyzing medical data and recommending the best treatment plan, to predicting when complex machinery will need maintenance, AI has the potential to dramatically improve how we live and work.

But what does it mean to design for AI? After all, AI systems are taught, they’re not programmed, and that means the experience we create may seem less predictable than the experiences we designed in the past.

Designing for AI requires new considerations and new ways of thinking. We must focus our design talents on a new type of relationship with machines—one that is far more dynamic than ever before. What should these relationships look like? How might we take an ethical approach to create the best experiences with AI? And what role does design thinking have in helping us design for AI?

In this presentation attendees will learn: