SydDT #127: The Human Loop – Keeping the Customer at the Core of AI

As AI rapidly accelerates product delivery, it’s easier than ever to ship features that look impressive but fail to solve real customer problems.

For SydDT’s 11th birthday celebration, we’re collaborating with our friends from GenAI Lab to bring together a panel of design and product leaders to discuss how to balance the sheer speed of AI with genuine, human-centered design.

We’re lucky to have Tarra van Amerongen, Alex Zinoviev, Riley Coleman, and Kristin de la Fuente sharing their observations and insights.

They’ll cut through the hype to explore how user research needs to adapt for generative AI models, how to design for trust and transparency, and how the designer’s role is shifting from pixel-pusher to system orchestrator.

Come join us for some fun conversations with interesting people in and around the design thinking community. New members are welcome!

SPEAKERS
Tarra van Amerongen
VP of Product & Design | Asia-Pacific, Thoughtworks
Tarra is an award-winning user experience and digital transformation leader, guiding creative, technical and business teams towards experiences that change the game.

She's worked as a practitioner, lecturer, consultant and leader with in-house teams, consultancies and agencies for the past 15 year after pivoting into design from software development.

Tarra is focused on taking a human-first approach to the application of AI, and challenges us to provide an informed view of what should remain human-first, what work means in this new paradigm, and how we stretch our craft as good design matters more than ever.

Alex Zinoviev
Head of Product, Neo Intelligence & Founder, GenAI Lab
Alex Zinoviev has spent 15+ years in product, most recently as Head of Product at Neo, an operations management platform for construction.

He founded GenAI Lab, a 1,400-member community of product and design practitioners across Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane, because he kept seeing the same gap: teams excited about AI but unsure how to adopt it without losing sight of the humans they're building for. GenAI Lab runs workshops grounded in first-hand experimentation.

Riley Coleman (they/them)
Founder, AI Flywheel
Riley started their career as service designer creating behaviour change programs for marginalised communities in the not-for-profit sector.

Before studying a masters in human-centred multimedia and transitioning to user experience design. Riley has spent the last 12 years working in design leadership roles in Australia, Germany, Netherlands and Sweden.

Now, as founder of AI Flywheel, Riley teaches human-centric AI training programs to designers and leaders. Drawing from their extensive experience in behaviour change, human-centred design and technology transformation, they’re building a community of practice around effective Human+AI products, services and operations that people can trust.

Kristin de la Fuente
Design Lead – AI Products, SEEK & GenAI Lab Design Partner, GenAI Lab
At SEEK Kristin is pioneering trust architecture for automation and agentic experiences by recognising that trust failures are often psychological failures, not necessarily technical ones.

She's designed practical mechanisms that keep customers centred and in control of agentic workflows. Working with teams to integrate Responsible AI principles and Strategic AI plays, Kristin leverages these frameworks to translate principles into concrete design decisions, ensuring they show up meaningfully in user experience.

She moves beyond shipping impressive features to ask harder questions: where should AI actually be used? How do we maintain human agency at scale? Her work makes the invisible visible turning complex AI capability into systems people can understand, trust, and actually control.

EVENT SPONSORS
This event is brought to you by Thoughtworks and Dynamic4.

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