Twisha
Shah Brandenburg
Senior Principal, Enterprise UX at Target
"Design Is the Missing Operating System: Why AI, UX, and Digital Transformation Keep Breaking"
"Design Is the Missing Operating System: Why AI, UX, and Digital Transformation Keep Breaking"
Wed May 13 - 10:30 AM EDT/New York (See in local time)
Add to Calendar
05/13/2026 10:30 AM
05/13/2026 10:50 AM
America/New_York
#WTGC2026
"Design Is the Missing Operating System: Why AI, UX, and Digital Transformation Keep Breaking"
#WTGC2026
"Design Is the Missing Operating System: Why AI, UX, and Digital Transformation Keep Breaking"
https://www.womentech.net/ringcentral
https://www.womentech.net/ringcentral
"Design Is the Missing Operating System: Why AI, UX, and Digital Transformation Keep Breaking"
"Design Is the Missing Operating System: Why AI, UX, and Digital Transformation Keep Breaking"
Don’t miss out and join visionaries, innovators, and thought leaders from all over the world at the Women in Tech Global Conference.
Vote by Sharing
Unite 100 000 Women in Tech to Drive Change with Purpose and Impact.
Do you want to see this session? Help increase the sharing count and the session visibility. Sessions with +10 votes will be available to career ticket holders.
Please note that it might take some time until your share & vote is reflected.
Session: Design Is the Missing Operating System: Why AI, UX, and Digital Transformation Keep Breaking
As organizations race to adopt AI, redesign customer experiences, and modernize their tech stacks, many are hitting the same wall: the technology works, but the experience doesn’t.This talk argues that the biggest failures in UX, CX, and AI transformation are not technical problems. They are design failures at the system level.
Drawing from real-world experience inside complex, digital-first organizations, this session reframes design as the connective tissue that aligns people, processes, data, and technology. Attendees will learn how invisible work—handoffs, language, incentives, and organizational structures—shapes user experience far more than screens or features alone.
This is a call to elevate design from execution to orchestration, and to recognize that great experiences emerge when organizations themselves are intentionally designed.
Key Takeaways
- User experience is not created at the interface. It is the outcome of how people, processes, data, and decisions are designed to work together across an organization.
- Most AI and digital transformation failures are not technology problems but upstream design failures rooted in misaligned incentives, unclear ownership, and broken handoffs.
- Invisible work—such as alignment, translation, and shared understanding, has a direct and measurable impact on customer experience and organizational effectiveness.
- Designers and technologists create greater impact when they move from polishing outputs to orchestrating systems that support coherent, human-centered experiences.
- Human-centered technology requires human-centered organizations; ethical, inclusive, and sustainable experiences emerge when organizations themselves are intentionally designed.
Bio
I am a design leader and educator working at the intersection of UX, systems thinking, and organizational transformation. As an immigrant woman in tech, I’ve spent over a decade helping global teams navigate complexity, bridging design, engineering, data, and leadership to create coherent, human-centered experiences at scale.Alongside my industry work, I teach and mentor emerging and mid-career professionals, focusing on ethical technology, inclusive systems, and sustainable leadership. My work centers on making invisible systems visible so technology can serve people, not the other way around.
