Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for having me. I'm Micki Van Cleave, the chief design officer at JPMorgan Chase.And I am really excited to be here today because this topic is urgent for all of us, inclusive, accessible design. We've all had that moment where a digital experience makes you feel capable and confident. You've also had the opposite moment where you get stuck and you feel uncertain and you think, is this just me? It is not just you. That feeling is what I'm here to talk to you about today. Inclusive and accessible design is not a bonus feature or a check mark on a to do list. It is the difference between trust and frustration. And in an AI world, we can help more people than ever, or we can exclude more people than ever.

I'm gonna anchor us with a simple image. We're building a puzzle. If we start with the wrong pieces or skip steps, we can still ship a product, but it's not gonna work for everyone or deliver the experience customers deserve. In an AI world, those misses are gonna scale very fast. A small exclusion becomes a pattern repeated at scale, and it tells a whole group of people this was not built with you in mind. Our corner pieces are critical. Empathy, accessibility, real human needs, and quality. If you don't get them right, you can't trust what you build out of them. Empathy, it's not a vibe, guys. It's a method. It's how we understand what people are trying to do, what's in their way, and what they're anxious about. Accessibility is the door.

If the door is, if the door is locked, nothing else is gonna matter. You can have the smartest AI on the planet, the cleanest UI, the best conversion funnel, and it still is gonna fail for a decent portion of your customers. And real human needs, they keep us honest, not what we think users should do, what they actually need to do in the real world under real constraints. And quality is the proof. It is the reliability and clarity of the experience in the moments that matter. It turns what turns good intent into something customers can really count on time and time again. This is also where I'll say something directly. Accessibility is not a specialty lane for one person on your team.

It has to be the quality bar for which all product is handled and everybody on the team is responsible for it. Now let's talk about the edges of our puzzle. The process is what connects values to outcomes. Discovery and research is where inclusion is won or lost. And if we only talk to average users or we only test the happy path, you actually bake exclusion into the foundation of your product. Ideation and prototyping are where we explore this safely. Prototypes are a massive gift because they let us learn early when the stakes are low. And the earlier you learn, the less expensive it is, the less political it is, and the less risky it is for your end users. This is the part I want everyone in the room to take back to your teams. You need to bring your design teams in at the beginning.

And I don't mean at the point where you're deciding what it should look like, how it should feel, and how it should function. Pull design in so they can shape the strategy. These are folks on your teams who are trained to think about all the paths, not just the happy path. And when brought in early, design is not just decoration, it's direction for the product you wanna build in the future. Alright. This is where it starts to get real. Because the outcome you're looking for in accessible design is not a compliant experience. Frankly, that bar is pretty easy to hit. It's a usable experience, an experience that brings dignity and access to more people in more context with more confidence. When we say products for all, we mean you design for edge cases on purpose because edge cases reveal the truth about a system.

When we say accessible experiences, we mean accessibility is built in, not sprinkled on the top as a final feature. And designing with intention means we can explain why we made a choice, and design is all about making choices. What trade off did you make? Who is this helping? Who might this hurt? What risks are we willing to take? That's how you scale trust, by being intentional and by peep by keeping humans at the center of everything you do, all humans. I bet you're amazed it took me this long to talk about AI. This is where the stakes get even higher, though. I think of AI as a teammate at Chase, a very powerful one, but not necessarily a neutral one. AI can help us fill in gaps, accelerate work, personalized experiences.

But if you don't use it carefully, it can also amplify bias, hide decision making, and create a false sense of confidence that the solution you're building is really right for the end user. You have to guide AI with empathy. You have to clear about who we're designing for and what good looks like for them. Without that, remember, you're building the bias into the system, And we have to reduce that bias proactively. That means asking who is represented in the data and, very importantly, who is missing. You have to test for harm, not just accuracy. And you have to design for transparency so that customers understand what is happening and why. And creating controls so that agentic experiences empower people, not trap them into something they weren't expecting.

In an AI world, inclusive design is about the system's behavior because the experience isn't only what the screen says, it's what the system actually accomplishes. And then comes the question everybody asked, which is how do you scale this? The centerpieces. By embedding inclusion into the way that teams work, it's not by relying on individual heroics. It's about relying on a shared understanding of who your design target is and that that design target is inclusive. At Chase and my design team, we have deliberately moved beyond baseline accessibility checks. Fundamentals like alt text, color contrast, readable content, they still matter, but they're table stakes. We've prioritized that if a customer cannot operate the product, they can't truly use it, and frankly, the product might as well not exist.

We've pushed inclusive thinking beyond the screen, such as fully keyboard navigable experiences across platforms, partnering to enable live visual interpretation for blind and low vision customers. It's not just about UI compliance for us, but end to end experience ownership and ensuring that Chase customers feel the dignity in the design. Accessibility is a continuous commitment, though. It's built into our design systems. Content standards, research practices, product delivery life cycles, Accessibility is never a one time project for us. It's an ongoing responsibility that evolves with our products, our customers, and with technology. Inclusive outcomes happen when all teams are building the same thing together with the same definition of good, not in a hand off chain, in a shared loop. That's why cross functional teams matter so much, and that is what is really important to remember when you add AI as a teammate into your teams.

If it's increased handoffs, you're gonna increase siloed outcomes. Figure out a way to decrease outcomes while advancing technology. When we share responsibility, inclusion doesn't get relegated to a late stage check. It becomes a set of decisions we make from day one. And when we share language, we stop talking past each other. We can be crisp about things like accessible, explainable, safe, human in the loop, and done. We can ensure that our design has never created others of any of our customers. And diverse perspectives perspectives in the room help you catch what a single viewpoint will miss. If the room you are sitting in looks, thinks the same as you do, so will your product.

If the room is broader, the experience gets stronger, safer, and much more resilient for the customers that we serve. And I wanna say this in a women in tech room. Women have been doing the work of inclusion for a very long time. So the next step is making it operational, measurable, and scalable so that it doesn't depend on individual willpower interest. It becomes how the organization builds because it's the right way to do it. If we want this to stick, we have to measure it, but not with a single score or a checkbox. What matters is whether inclusion is showing up constantly in how you design, write, and deliver experiences.

We look first at user stories, real examples where a design, content, or service change removed friction or improved access. Those stories help teams understand the impact in human terms, not abstractions. Next, we rely on feedback and learning loops, research insights, usability testing, accessibility reviews, partner feedback. These all tell us what's still hard, what's still broken, and where we need to improve next. The point isn't to ever have a gotcha moment, but rather to keep teams learning, and we intentionally celebrate the wins for our team. This work can be incremental and often invisible when it's done well, so it's really too important to call out progress. It reinforces behaviors that you want teams to repeat. A quick reminder, the goal is not perfection on day one. The goal is momentum, learning with every release and steadily raising the bar across the portfolio over time.

Here's what I believe about the future, especially the future with our AI teammates. It's adaptive. It's definitely a Gentic, and boy is it moving fast. That's why inclusion cannot be an afterthought. If we do not design for everyone, we will scale exclusion at a speed that will shock everybody. So here is my challenge for everybody listening. Pick one moment in your product life cycle where inclusion tends to show up too late and choose to move it upstream. Own it. Bring a designer in early. Add an accessibility gate before development. Test with a broader set of users, not your traditional user base, and make transparency a requirement for all AI decisions. Just pick one. Pick one, make it your pet project, and make yourself personally responsible for shifting that experience for the greater good. Because designing for everyone isn't extra work.

It is the work. It's the baseline, and it's the only thing that really matters. Thank you so much for attending this talk. I am so excited for everything to come, and keep thinking about all of your users, and keep thinking about how to use your agentic teammates in ways that bring dignity and humanity into your products.