How to Stay Valuable as a Designer in the Age of AI

This Delivery Fellowship panel explores how designers can stay valuable as AI reshapes product, consulting, and delivery work.

Date: Wednesday, June 3rd, 2026 at 5:30 PM
Location: Institute of Design – Illinois Tech

We’ll discuss how AI is changing design roles, where human judgment still matters, and how designers can bring empathy, context, domain knowledge, and strategy into AI-enabled work.

Agenda:
5:30 Doors Open & Networking
6:00 Opening Remarks
6:15 Panel Discussion
7:15 Q&A
7:30 Closing Remarks

You’ll leave with practical ways to adapt, stay relevant, and create value beyond what AI can automate.

Andy Schultz
Director of Design, QuillBot

• Andy Schultz is a design leader focused on AI, SaaS, growth, research, and design operations, with experience scaling products and design teams.
• As an early design leader at QuillBot, he helped build the design organization, research program, UX/UI patterns, brand systems, and product experiences that supported major user growth.
• Andy has led design work across QuillBot, ADT, Redbox, Walgreens, and Sears, bringing a mix of startup building, enterprise redesign, and product strategy

Elisa Vargas
Director of Product Design, ITHAKA

• Elisa Vargas is a systems-level UX design leader with 20 years of experience shaping platform ecosystems, AI systems, business logic, and agentic workflows.
• At ITHAKA, she leads product design for JSTOR, supporting a global academic platform used by millions of users across thousands of institutions.
• Elisa’s work focuses on translating complex systems into usable experiences, with attention to privacy, governance, human-in-the-loop review, and scalable design leadership.

Brian Herzfeldt
Service Designer, Extreme Networks

• Brian Herzfeldt is a service designer and UX/CX strategist with more than a decade of experience designing digital experiences across service, product, and systems work.
• He has worked across research, strategy, information architecture, personas, journey mapping, workflow analysis, testing, and service blueprinting for complex organizations.
• Brian’s work connects customer and business inquiry to product and service design decisions that create customer value, business value, innovation, and transformation.