If you’re a leader tasked with generating business and org. value through ML/AI and analytics, you’ve probably struggled with low user adoption.
Making the tech gets easier, but getting users to use, and buyers to buy, remains difficult—but you’ve heard a ”data product” approach can help. Can it?
My name is Brian T. O’Neill, and on Experiencing Data—one of the top 2% of podcasts in the world—I offer you a consulting designer’s perspective on why creating ML and analytics outputs isn’t enough to create business and UX outcomes.
How can UX design and product management help you create innovative ML/AI and analytical data products?
What exactly are data products—and how can data product management help you increase user adoption of ML/analytics—so that stakeholders can finally see the business value of your data?
Every 2 weeks, I answer these questions via solo episodes and interviews with innovative chief data officers, data product management leaders, and top UX professionals.
Hashtag: #ExperiencingData.
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161 - Designing and Selling Enterprise AI Products [Worth Paying For]
Episode 161
Tuesday, January 21, 2025 • Duration 34:00
With GenAI and LLMs comes great potential to delight and damage customer relationships—both during the sale, and in the UI/UX. However, are B2B AI product teams actually producing real outcomes, on the business side and the UX side, such that customers find these products easy to buy, trustworthy and indispensable?
What is changing with customer problems as a result of LLM and GenAI technologies becoming more readily available to implement into B2B software? Anything?
Is your current product or feature development being driven by the fact you might be able to now solve it with AI? The “AI-first” team sounds like it’s cutting edge, but is that really determining what a customer will actually buy from you?
Today I want to talk to you about the interplay of GenAI, customer trust (both user and buyer trust), and the role of UX in products using probabilistic technology.
These thoughts are based on my own perceptions as a “user” of AI “solutions,” (quotes intentional!), conversations with prospects and clients at my company (Designing for Analytics), as well as the bright minds I mentor over at the MIT Sandbox innovation fund. I also wrote an article about this subject if you’d rather read an abridged version of my thoughts.
Highlights/ Skip to:
AI and LLM-Powered Products Do Not Turn Customer Problems into “Now” and “Expensive” Problems (4:03)
Trust and Transparency in the Sale and the Product UX: Handling LLM Hallucinations (Confabulations) and Designing for Model Interpretability (9:44)
Selling AI Products to Customers Who Aren’t Users (13:28)
How LLM Hallucinations and Model Interpretability Impact User Trust of Your Product (16:10)
Probabilistic UIs and LLMs Don’t Negate the Need to Design for Outcomes (22:48)
How AI Changes (or Doesn’t) Our Benchmark Use Cases and UX Outcomes (28:41)
Closing Thoughts (32:36)
Quotes from Today’s Episode
“Putting AI or GenAI into a product does not change the urgency or the depth of a particular customer problem; it just changes the solution space. Technology shifts in the last ten years have enabled founders to come up with all sorts of novel ways to leverage traditional machine learning, symbolic AI, and LLMs to create new products and disrupt established products; however, it would be foolish to ignore these developments as a product leader. All this technology does is change the possible solutions you can create. It does not change your customer situation, problem, or pain, either in the depth, or severity, or frequency. In fact, it might actually cause some new problems. I feel like most teams spend a lot more time living in the solution space than they do in the problem space. Fall in love with the problem and love that problem regardless of how the solution space may continue to change.” (4:51)
“Narrowly targeted, specialized AI products are going to beat solutions trying to solve problems for multiple buyers and customers. If you’re building a narrow, specific product for a narrow, specific audience, one of the things you have on your side is a solution focused on a specific domain used by people who have specific domain experience. You may not need a trillion-parameter LLM to provide significant value to your customer. AI products that have a more specific focus and address a very narrow ICP I believe are more likely to succeed than those trying to serve too many use cases—especially when GenAI is being leveraged to deliver the value. I think this can be true even for platform products as well. Narrowing the audience you want to serve also narrows the scope of the product, which in turn should increase the value that you bring to that audience—in part because you probably will have fewer trust, usability, and utility problems resulting from trying to leverage a model for a wide range of use cases.” (17:18)
“Probabilistic UIs and LLMs are going to create big problems for product teams, particularly if they lack a set of guiding benchmark use cases. I talk a lot about benchmark use cases as a core design principle and data-rich enterprise products. Why? Because a lot of B2B and enterprise products fall into the game of ‘adding more stuff over time.’ ‘Add it so you can sell it.’ As products and software companies begin to mature, you start having product owners and PMs attached to specific technologies or parts of a product. Figuring out how to improve the customer’s experience over time against the most critical problems and needs they have is a harder game to play than simply adding more stuff— especially if you have no benchmark use cases to hold you accountable. It’s hard to make the product indispensable if it’s trying to do 100 things for 100 people.“ (22:48)
“Product is a hard game, and design and UX is by far not the only aspect of product that we need to get right. A lot of designers don’t understand this, and they think if they just nail design and UX, then everything else solves itself. The reason the design and experience part is hard is that it’s tied to behavior change– especially if you are ‘disrupting’ an industry, incumbent tool, application, or product. You are in the behavior-change game, and it’s really hard to get it right. But when you get it right, it can be really amazing and transformative.” (28:01)
160 - Leading Product Through a Merger/Acquisition: Lessons from The Predictive Index’s CPO Adam Berke
Episode 160
Tuesday, January 7, 2025 • Duration 42:10
Today, I’m chatting with Adam Berke, the Chief Product Officer at The Predictive Index. For 70 years, The Predictive Index has helped customers hire the right employees, and after the merger with Charma, their products now nurture the employee/manager relationship. This is something right up Adam’s alley, as he previously helped co-found the employee and workflow performance management software company Charma before both aforementioned organizations merged back in 2023.
You’ll hear Adam talk about the first-time challenges (and successes) that come with integrating two products and two product teams, and why squashing out any ambiguity with overindexing (i.e. coming prepared with new org charts ASAP) is essential during the process.
Integrating behavioral science into the world of data is what has allowed The Predictive Index to thrive since the 1950s. While this is the company’s main selling point, Adam explains how the science-forward approach can still create some disagreements–and learning opportunities–with The Predictive Index’s legacy customers.
Highlights/ Skip to:
What is The Predictive Index and how does the product team conduct their work (1:24)
Why Charma merged with The Predictive Index (5:11)
The challenges Adam has faced as a CPO since the Charma/Predictive Index merger (9:21)
How Predictive Index has utilized behavioral science to remove the guesswork of hiring (14:22)
The makeup of the product team that designs and delivers The Predictive Index's products (20:24)
Navigating the clashes between changing science and Predictive Index's legacy customers (22:37)
How The Predictive Index analyzes the quality of their products with multiple user data metrics (27:21)
What Adam would do differently if had to redo the merger (37:52)
Where you can find more from Adam and The Predictive Index (41:22)
Quotes from Today’s Episode
“ Acquisitions are complicated. Outside of a few select companies, there are very few that have mergers and acquisitions as a repeatable discipline. More often than not, neither [company in the merger] has an established playbook for how to do this. You’re [acquiring a company] because of its product, team, or maybe even one feature. You have different theories on how the integration might look, but experiencing it firsthand is a whole different thing. My initial role didn’t exist in [The Predictive Index] before. The rest of the whole PI organization knows how to get their work done before this, and now there’s this new executive. There’s just tons of [questions and confusion] if you don’t go in assuming good faith and be willing to work through the bumps. It’s going to get messy.” - Adam Berke (9:41)
Links Referenced
151 - Monetizing SAAS Analytics and The Challenges of Designing a Successful Embedded BI Product (Promoted Episode)
Episode 151
Tuesday, September 3, 2024 • Duration 49:57
Due to a technical glitch that ended up unpublishing this episode right after it originally was released, Episode 151 is a replay of my conversation with Zalak Trivdei from this past March . Please enjoy our chat if you missed it the first time around!
150 - How Specialized LLMs Can Help Enterprises Deliver Better GenAI User Experiences with Mark Ramsey
Episode 150
Thursday, August 29, 2024 • Duration 52:22
“Last week was a great year in GenAI,” jokes Mark Ramsey—and it’s a great philosophy to have as LLM tools especially continue to evolve at such a rapid rate. This week, you’ll get to hear my fun and insightful chat with Mark from Ramsey International about the world of large language models (LLMs) and how we make useful UXs out of them in the enterprise.
Mark shared some fascinating insights about using a company’s website information (data) as a place to pilot a LLM project, avoiding privacy landmines, and how re-ranking of models leads to better LLM response accuracy. We also talked about the importance of real human testing to ensure LLM chatbots and AI tools truly delight users. From amusing anecdotes about the spinning beach ball on macOS to envisioning a future where AI-driven chat interfaces outshine traditional BI tools, this episode is packed with forward-looking ideas and a touch of humor.
Highlights/ Skip to:
(0:50) Why is the world of GenAI evolving so fast?
(4:20) How Mark thinks about UX in an LLM application
(8:11) How Mark defines “Specialized GenAI?”
(12:42) Mark’s consulting work with GenAI / LLMs these days
(17:29) How GenAI can help the healthcare industry
(30:23) Uncovering users’ true feelings about LLM applications
(35:02) Are UIs moving backwards as models progress forward?
(40:53) How will GenAI impact data and analytics teams?
(44:51) Will LLMs be able to consistently leverage RAG and produce proper SQL?
(51:04) Where can find more from Mark and Ramsey International
Quotes from Today’s Episode
“With [GenAI], we have a solution that we’ve built to try to help organizations, and build workflows. We have a workflow that we can run and ask the same question [to a variety of GenAI models] and see how similar the answers are. Depending on the complexity of the question, you can see a lot of variability between the models… [and] we can also run the same question against the different versions of the model and see how it’s improved. Folks want a human-like experience interacting with these models.. [and] if the model can start responding in just a few seconds, that gives you much more of a conversational type of experience.” - Mark Ramsey (2:38)
Links
149 - What the Data Says About Why So Many Data Science and AI Initiatives Are Still Failing to Produce Value with Evan Shellshear
Episode 149
Tuesday, August 6, 2024 • Duration 50:18
Guess what? Data science and AI initiatives are still failing here in 2024—despite widespread awareness. Is that news? Candidly, you’ll hear me share with Evan Shellshear—author of the new book Why Data Science Projects Fail: The Harsh Realities of Implementing AI and Analytics—about how much I actually didn’t want to talk about this story originally on my podcast—because it’s not news! However, what is news is what the data says behind Evan’s findings—and guess what? It’s not the technology.
In our chat, Evan shares why he wanted to leverage a human approach to understand the root cause of multiple organizations’ failures and how this approach highlighted the disconnect between data scientists and decision-makers. He explains the human factors at play, such as poor problem surfacing and organizational culture challenges—and how these human-centered design skills are rarely taught or offered to data scientists. The conversation delves into why these failures are more prevalent in data science compared to other fields, attributing it to the complexity and scale of data-related problems. We also discuss how analytically mature companies can mitigate these issues through strategic approaches and stakeholder buy-in. Join us as we delve into these critical insights for improving data science project outcomes.
Highlights/ Skip to:
(4:45) Why are data science projects still failing?
(9:17) Why is the disconnect between data scientists and decision-makers so pronounced relative to, say, engineering?
(13:08) Why are data scientists not getting enough training for real-world problems?
(16:18) What the data says about failure rates for mature data teams vs. immature data teams
(19:39) How to change people’s opinions so they value data more
(25:16) What happens at the stage where the beneficiaries of data don’t actually see the benefits?
(31:09) What are the skills needed to prevent a repeating pattern of creating data products that customers ignore??
(37:10) Where do more mature organizations find non-technical help to complement their data science and AI teams?
Quotes from Today’s Episode
Links
148 - UI/UX Design Considerations for LLMs in Enterprise Applications (Part 2)
Episode 148
Tuesday, July 23, 2024 • Duration 26:36
Ready for more ideas about UX for AI and LLM applications in enterprise environments? In part 2 of my topic on UX considerations for LLMs, I explore how an LLM might be used for a fictitious use case at an insurance company—specifically, to help internal tools teams to get rapid access to primary qualitative user research. (Yes, it’s a little “meta”, and I’m also trying to nudge you with this hypothetical example—no secret!) ;-) My goal with these episodes is to share questions you might want to ask yourself such that any use of an LLM is actually contributing to a positive UX outcome Join me as I cover the implications for design, the importance of foundational data quality, the balance between creative inspiration and factual accuracy, and the never-ending discussion of how we might handle hallucinations and errors posing as “facts”—all with a UX angle. At the end, I also share a personal story where I used an LLM to help me do some shopping for my favorite product: TRIP INSURANCE! (NOT!)
Highlights/ Skip to:
(1:05) I introduce a hypothetical internal LLM tool and what the goal of the tool is for the team who would use it
(5:31) Improving access to primary research findings for better UX
(10:19) What “quality data” means in a UX context
(12:18) When LLM accuracy maybe doesn’t matter as much
(14:03) How AI and LLMs are opening the door for fresh visioning work
(15:38) Brian’s overall take on LLMs inside enterprise software as of right now
(18:56) Final thoughts on UX design for LLMs, particularly in the enterprise
(20:25) My inspiration for these 2 episodes—and how I had to use ChatGPT to help me complete a purchase on a website that could have integrated this capability right into their website
Quotes from Today’s Episode
“If we accept that the goal of most product and user experience research is to accelerate the production of quality services, products, and experiences, the question is whether or not using an LLM for these types of questions is moving the needle in that direction at all. And secondly, are the potential downsides like hallucinations and occasional fabricated findings, is that all worth it? So, this is a design for AI problem.” - Brian T. O’Neill (8:09)
Links
147 - UI/UX Design Considerations for LLMs in Enterprise Applications (Part 1)
Episode 147
Wednesday, July 10, 2024 • Duration 25:46
Let’s talk about design for AI (which more and more, I’m agreeing means GenAI to those outside the data space). The hype around GenAI and LLMs—particularly as it relates to dropping these in as features into a software application or product—seems to me, at this time, to largely be driven by FOMO rather than real value. In this “part 1” episode, I look at the importance of solid user experience design and outcome-oriented thinking when deploying LLMs into enterprise products. Challenges with immature AI UIs, the role of context, the constant game of understanding what accuracy means (and how much this matters), and the potential impact on human workers are also examined. Through a hypothetical scenario, I illustrate the complexities of using LLMs in practical applications, stressing the need for careful consideration of benchmarks and the acceptance of GenAI's risks.
I also want to note that LLMs are a very immature space in terms of UI/UX design—even if the foundation models continue to mature at a rapid pace. As such, this episode is more about the questions and mindset I would be considering when integrating LLMs into enterprise software more than a suggestion of “best practices.”
Highlights/ Skip to:
(1:15) Currently, many LLM feature initiatives seem to mostly driven by FOMO
(2:45) UX Considerations for LLM-enhanced enterprise applications
(5:14) Challenges with LLM UIs / user interfaces
(7:24) Measuring improvement in UX outcomes with LLMs
(10:36) Accuracy in LLMs and its relevance in enterprise software
(11:28) Illustrating key consideration for implementing an LLM-based feature
(19:00) Leadership and context in AI deployment
(19:27) Determining UX benchmarks for using LLMs
(20:14) The dynamic nature of LLM hallucinations and how we design for the unknown
(21:16) Closing thoughts on Part 1 of designing for AI and LLMs
146 - (Rebroadcast) Beyond Data Science - Why Human-Centered AI Needs Design with Ben Shneiderman
Episode 146
Tuesday, June 25, 2024 • Duration 42:07
Ben Shneiderman is a leading figure in the field of human-computer interaction (HCI). Having founded one of the oldest HCI research centers in the country at the University of Maryland in 1983, Shneiderman has been intently studying the design of computer technology and its use by humans. Currently, Ben is a Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Maryland and is working on a new book on human-centered artificial intelligence.
I’m so excited to welcome this expert from the field of UX and design to today’s episode of Experiencing Data! Ben and I talked a lot about the complex intersection of human-centered design and AI systems.
In our chat, we covered:
Ben's career studying human-computer interaction and computer science. (0:30)
'Building a culture of safety': Creating and designing ‘safe, reliable and trustworthy’ AI systems. (3:55)
'Like zoning boards': Why Ben thinks we need independent oversight of privately created AI. (12:56)
'There’s no such thing as an autonomous device': Designing human control into AI systems. (18:16)
A/B testing, usability testing and controlled experiments: The power of research in designing good user experiences. (21:08)
Designing ‘comprehensible, predictable, and controllable’ user interfaces for explainable AI systems and why [explainable] XAI matters. (30:34)
Quotes from Today’s Episode
The world of AI has certainly grown and blossomed — it’s the hot topic everywhere you go. It’s the hot topic among businesses around the world — governments are launching agencies to monitor AI and are also making regulatory moves and rules. … People want explainable AI; they want responsible AI; they want safe, reliable, and trustworthy AI. They want a lot of things, but they’re not always sure how to get them. The world of human-computer interaction has a long history of giving people what they want, and what they need. That blending seems like a natural way for AI to grow and to accommodate the needs of real people who have real problems. And not only the methods for studying the users, but the rules, the principles, the guidelines for making it happen. So, that’s where the action is. Of course, what we really want from AI is to make our world a better place, and that’s a tall order, but we start by talking about the things that matter — the human values: human rights, access to justice, and the dignity of every person. We want to support individual goals, a person’s sense of self-efficacy — they can do what they need to in the world, their creativity, their responsibility, and their social connections; they want to reach out to people. So, those are the sort of high aspirational goals that become the hard work of figuring out how to build it. And that’s where we want to go. - Ben (2:05)
145 - Data Product Success: Adopting a Customer-Centric Approach With Malcolm Hawker, Head of Data Management at Profisee
Episode 145
Tuesday, June 11, 2024 • Duration 53:09
Wait, I’m talking to a head of data management at a tech company? Why!? Well, today I'm joined by Malcolm Hawker to get his perspective around data products and what he’s seeing out in the wild as Head of Data Management at Profisee. Why Malcolm? Malcolm was a former head of product in prior roles, and for several years, I’ve enjoyed Malcolm’s musings on LinkedIn about the value of a product-oriented approach to ML and analytics. We had a chance to meet at CDOIQ in 2023 as well and he went on my “need to do an episode” list!
According to Malcom, empathy is the secret to addressing key UX questions that ensure adoption and business value. He also emphasizes the need for data experts to develop business skills so that they're seen as equals by their customers. During our chat, Malcolm stresses the benefits of a product- and customer-centric approach to data products and what data professionals can learn approaching problem solving with a product orientation.
Highlights/ Skip to:
Malcolm’s definition of a data product (2:10)
Understanding your customers’ needs is the first step toward quantifying the benefits of your data product (6:34)
How product makers can gain access to users to build more successful products (11:36)
Answering the UX question to get past the adoption stage and provide business value (16:03)
Data experts must develop business expertise if they want to be seen as equals by potential customers (20:07)
What people really mean by “data culture" (23:02)
Malcolm’s data product journey and his changing perspective (32:05)
Using empathy to provide a better UX in design and data (39:24)
Avoiding the death of data science by becoming more product-driven (46:23)
Where the majority of data professionals currently land on their view of product management for data products (48:15)
Quotes from Today’s Episode
“My definition of a data product is something that is built by a data and analytics team that solves a specific customer problem that the customer would otherwise be willing to pay for. That’s it.” - Malcolm Hawker (3:42)
Links
144 - The Data Product Debate: Essential Tech or Excessive Effort? with Shashank Garg, CEO of Infocepts (Promoted Episode)
Episode 144
Tuesday, May 28, 2024 • Duration 52:38
Welcome to another curated, Promoted Episode of Experiencing Data!
In episode 144, Shashank Garg, Co-Founder and CEO of Infocepts, joins me to explore whether all this discussion of data products out on the web actually has substance and is worth the perceived extra effort. Do we always need to take a product approach for ML and analytics initiatives? Shashank dives into how Infocepts approaches the creation of data solutions that are designed to be actionable within specific business workflows—and as I often do, I started out by asking Shashank how he and Infocepts define the term “data product.” We discuss a few real-world applications Infocepts has built, and the measurable impact of these data products—as well as some of the challenges they’ve faced that your team might as well. Skill sets also came up; who does design? Who takes ownership of the product/value side? And of course, we touch a bit on GenAI.
Highlights/ Skip to
Shashank gives his definition of data products (01:24)
We tackle the challenges of user adoption in data products (04:29)
We discuss the crucial role of integrating actionable insights into data products for enhanced decision-making (05:47)
Shashank shares insights on the evolution of data products from concept to practical integration (10:35)
We explore the challenges and strategies in designing user-centric data products (12:30)
I ask Shashank about typical environments and challenges when starting new data product consultations (15:57)
Shashank explains how Infocepts incorporates AI into their data solutions (18:55)
We discuss the importance of understanding user personas and engaging with actual users (25:06)
Shashank describes the roles involved in data product development’s ideation and brainstorming stages (32:20)
The issue of proxy users not truly representing end-users in data product design is examined (35:47)
We consider how organizations are adopting a product-oriented approach to their data strategies (39:48)
Shashank and I delve into the implications of GenAI and other AI technologies on product orientation and user adoption (43:47)
“If your AI product is trying to do a wide variety of things for a wide variety of personas, it’s going to be harder to determine appropriate benchmarks and UX outcomes to measure and design against. Given LLM hallucinations, the increased problem of trust, model drift problems, etc., your AI product has to actually innovate in a way that is both meaningful and observable to the customer. It doesn’t matter what your AI is trying to “fix.” If they can’t see what the benefit is to them personally, it doesn’t really matter if technically you’ve done something in a new and novel way. They’re just not going to care because that question of what’s in it for me is always sitting behind, in their brain, whether it’s stated out loud or not.” (29:32)
“We integrated the teams and relaunched the product. Charma became [a part of the product called] PI Perform, and right away there was re-skinning, redesign, and some back-end architecture that needed to happen to make it its own module. From a product perspective, we’re trying to deliver [Charma’s] unique value prop. That’s when we can start [figuring out how to] infuse PI’s behavioral science into these workflows. We have this foundation. We got the thing organized. We got the teams organized. We were 12 people when we were acquired… and here we are a year later. 150+ new customers have been added to PI Perform because it’s accelerating now that we’re figuring out the product.” - Adam Berke (12:18)
“Our product team has the roles that you would expect: a PM, researcher, ux design, and then one atypical role–a PhD behavioral scientist. [Our product already had] suggested topics and templates [for manager/IC one-on-one meetings], but now we want to make those templates and suggested topics more dynamic. There might be different questions to draw out a better discussion, and our behavioral scientists help us determine [those questions]... [Our behavioral scientists] look at the science, other research, and calibrate [the one-on-one questions] before we implement them into the product.” - Adam Berke (21:04)
“We’ve adapted the technology and science over time as they move forward. We want to update the product with the most recent science, but there are customers who have used this product in a certain way for decades in some cases. Our desire is to follow the science… but you can’t necessarily stop people from using the stuff in a way that they used it 20 years ago. We sometimes end up with disagreements [with customers over product changes based on scientific findings], and those are tricky conversations. But even in that debate… it comes down to all the best practices you would follow in product development in general–listening to your customers, asking that additional ‘why’ question, and trying to get to root causes.” - Adam Berke (23:36)
“ We’re doing an upgrade to our platform right now trying to figure out how to manage user permissions in the new version of the product. The way that we did it in the old version had a lot of problems associated… and we put out a survey. “Hey, do you use this to do X?’ We got hundreds of responses and found that half of them were not using it for the reason that we thought they were. At first, we thought thousands of people were going to have deep, deep sensitivities to tweaks in how this works, and now we realize that it might be half that, at best. A simple one-question survey asked about the right problem in the right way can help to avoid a lot of unnecessary thrashing on a product problem that might not have even existed in the first place.” - Adam Berke (35:22)
“[People] don’t understand when you interact [with GenAI tools] and it brings tokens back in that streaming fashion, you’re actually seeing inside the brain of the model. Every token it produces is then displayed on the screen, and it gives you that typewriter experience back in the day. If someone has to wait, and all you’re seeing is a logo spinning, from a UX experience standpoint… people feel like the model is much faster if it just starts to produce those results in that streaming fashion. I think in a design, it’s extremely important to take advantage of that [...] as opposed to waiting to the end and delivering the results some models support that, and other models don’t.”- Mark Ramsey (4:35)
"All of the data that’s on the website is public information. We’ve done work with several organizations on quickly taking the data that’s on their website, packaging it up into a vector database, and making that be the source for questions that their customers can ask. [Organizations] publish a lot of information on their websites, but people really struggle to get to it. We’ve seen a lot of interest in vectorizing website data, making it available, and having a chat interface for the customer. The customer can ask questions, and it will take them directly to the answer, and then they can use the website as the source information.” - Mark Ramsey (14:04)
“I’m not skeptical at all. I’ve changed much of my [AI chatbot searches] to Perplexity, and I think it’s doing a pretty fantastic job overall in terms of quality. It’s returning an answer with citations, so you have a sense of where it’s sourcing the information from. I think it’s important from a user experience perspective. This is a replacement for broken search, as I really don’t want to read all the web pages and PDFs you have that *might* be about my chiropractic care query to answer my actual [healthcare] question.” - Brian O’Neill (19:22)
“We’ve all had great experience with customer service, and we’ve all had situations where the customer service was quite poor, and we’re going to have that same thing as we begin to [release more] chatbots. We need to make sure we try to alleviate having those bad experiences, and have an exit. If someone is running into a situation where they’d rather talk to a live person, have that ability to route them to someone else. That’s why the robustness of the model is extremely important in the implementation… and right now, organizations like OpenAI and Anthropic are significantly better at that [human-like] experience.” - Mark Ramsey (23:46)
"There’s two aspects of these models: the training aspect and then using the model to answer questions. I recommend to organizations to always augment their content and don’t just use the training data. You’ll still get that human-like experience that’s built into the model, but you’ll eliminate the hallucinations. If you have a model that has been set up correctly, you shouldn’t have to ask questions in a funky way to get answers.” - Mark Ramsey (39:11)
“People need to understand GenAI is not a predictive algorithm. It is not able to run predictions, it struggles with some math, so that is not the focus for these models. What’s interesting is that you can use the model as a step to get you [the answers]. A lot of the models now support functions… when you ask a question about something that is in a database, it actually uses its knowledge about the schema of the database. It can build the query, run the query to get the data back, and then once it has the data, it can reformat the data into something that is a good response back." - Mark Ramsey (42:02)
(41:44) Are executives and directors aware of the skills needed to level up their data science and AI teams?
“People know this stuff. It’s not news anymore. And so, the reason why we needed this was really to dig in. And exactly like you did, like, keeping that list of articles is brilliant, and knowing what’s causing the failures and what’s leading to these issues still arising is really important. But at some point, we need to approach this in a scientific fashion, and we need to unpack this, and we need to really delve into the details beyond just the headlines and the articles themselves. And start collating and analyzing this to properly figure out what’s going wrong, and what do we need to do about it to fix it once and for all so you can stop your endless collection, and the AI Incident Database that now has over 3500 entries. It can hang its hat and say, ‘I’ve done my job. It’s time to move on. We’re not failing as we used to.’” - Evan Shellshear (3:01)
"What we did is we took a number of different studies, and we split companies into what we saw as being analytically mature—and this is a common, well-known thing; there are many maturity frameworks exist across data, across AI, across all different areas—and what we call analytically immature, so those companies that probably aren’t there yet. And what we wanted to draw a distinction is okay, we say 80% of projects fail, or whatever the exact number is, but for who? And for what stage and for what capability? And so, what we then went and did is we were able to take our data and look at which failures are common for analytically immature organizations, and which failures are common for analytically mature organizations, and then we’re able to understand, okay, in the market, how many organizations do we think are analytically mature versus analytically immature, and then we were able to take that 80% failure rate and establish it. For analytically mature companies, the failure rate is probably more like 40%. For analytically immature companies, it’s over 90%, right? And so, you’re exactly right: organizations can do something about it, and they can build capabilities in to mitigate this. So definitely, it can be reduced. Definitely, it can be brought down. You might say, 40% is still too high, but it proves that by bringing in these procedures, you’re completely correct, that it can be reduced.” - Evan Shellshear (14:28)
"What happens with the data science person, however, is typically they’re seen as a cost center—typically, not always; nowadays, that dialog is changing—and what they need to do is find partners across the other parts of the business. So, they’re going to go into the supply chain team, they’ll go into the merchandising team, they’ll go into the banking team, they’ll go into the other teams, and they’re going to find their supporters and winners there, and they’re going to probably build out from there. So, the first step would likely be, if you’re a big enough organization that you’re not having that strategy the executive level is to find your friends—and there will be some of the organization who support this data strategy—and get some wins for them.” - Evan Shellshear (24:38)
“It’s not like there’s this box you put one in the other in. Because, like success and failure, there’s a continuum. And companies as they move along that continuum, just like you said, this year, we failed on the lack of executive buy-in, so let’s fix that problem. Next year, we fail on not having the right resources, so we fix that problem. And you move along that continuum, and you build it up. And at some point as you’re going on, that failure rate is dropping, and you’re getting towards that end of the scale where you’ve got those really capable companies that live, eat, and breathe data science and analytics, and so have to have these to be able to survive, otherwise a simple company evolution would have wiped them out, and they wouldn’t exist if they didn’t have that capability, if that’s their core thing.” - Evan Shellshear (18:56)
“Nothing else could be correct, right? This subjective intuition and all this stuff, it’s never going to be as good as the data. And so, what happens is, is you, often as a data scientist—and I’ve been subjected to this myself—come in with this arrogance, this kind of data-driven arrogance, right? And it’s not a good thing. It puts up barriers, it creates issues, it separates you from the people.” - Evan Shellshear (27:38)
"Knowing that you’re going to have to go on that journey from day one, you can’t jump from level zero to level five. That’s what all these data maturity models are about, right? You can’t jump from level zero data maturity to level five overnight. You really need to take those steps and build it up.” - Evan Shellshear (45:21)
"What we’re talking about, it’s not new. It’s just old wine in a new skin, and we’re just presenting it for the data science age." - Evan Shellshear (48:15)
“What’s in our data? Can the right people change it when the LLM is wrong? The data product managers and AI leaders reading this or listening know that the not-so-secret path to the best AI is in the foundational data that the models are trained on. But what does the word *quality* mean from a product standpoint and a risk reduction one, as seen from an end-users’ perspective? Somebody who’s trying to get work done? This is a different type of quality measurement.” - Brian T. O’Neill (10:40)
“When we think about fact retrieval use cases in particular, how easily can product teams—internal or otherwise—and end-users understand the confidence of responses? When responses are wrong, how easily, if at all, can users and product teams update the model’s responses? Errors in large language models may be a significant design consideration when we design probabilistic solutions, and we no longer control what exactly our products and software are going to show to users. If bad UX can include leading people down the wrong path unknowingly, then AI is kind of like the team on the other side of the tug of war that we’re playing.” - Brian T. O’Neill (11:22)
“As somebody who writes a lot for my consulting business, and composes music in another, one of the hardest parts for creators can be the zero-to-one problem of getting started—the blank page—and this is a place where I think LLMs have great potential. But it also means we need to do the proper research to understand our audience, and when or where they’re doing truly generative or creative work—such that we can take a generative UX to the next level that goes beyond delivering banal and obviously derivative content.” - Brian T. O’Neill (13:31)
“One thing I actually like about the hype, investment, and excitement around GenAI and LLMs in the enterprise is that there is an opportunity for organizations here to do some fresh visioning work. And this is a place that designers and user experience professionals can help data teams as we bring design into the AI space.” - Brian T. O’Neill (14:04)
“If there was ever a time to do some new visioning work, I think now is one of those times. However, we need highly skilled design leaders to help facilitate this in order for this to be effective. Part of that skill is knowing who to include in exercises like this, and my perspective, one of those people, for sure, should be somebody who understands the data science side as well, not just the engineering perspective. And as I posited in my seminar that I teach, the AI and analytical data product teams probably need a fourth member. It’s a quartet and not a trio. And that quartet includes a data expert, as well as that engineering lead.” - Brian T. O’Neill (14:38)
“While many product teams continue to race to deploy some sort of GenAI and especially LLMs into their products—particularly this is in the tech sector for commercial software companies—the general sense I’m getting is that this is still more about FOMO than anything else.” - Brian T. O’Neill (2:07)
“No matter what the technology is, a good user experience design foundation starts with not doing any harm, and hopefully going beyond usable to be delightful. And adding LLM capabilities into a solution is really no different. So, we still need to have outcome-oriented thinking on both our product and design teams when deploying LLM capabilities into a solution. This is a cornerstone of good product work.” - Brian T. O’Neill (3:03)
“So, challenges with LLM UIs and UXs, right, user interfaces and experiences, the most obvious challenge to me right now with large language model interfaces is that while we’ve given users tremendous flexibility in the form of a Google search-like interface, we’ve also in many cases, limited the UX of these interactions to a text conversation with a machine. We’re back to the CLI in some ways.” - Brian T. O’Neill (5:14)
“Before and after we insert an LLM into a user’s workflow, we need to know what an improvement in their life or work actually means.”- Brian T. O’Neill (7:24)
"If it would take the machine a few seconds to process a result versus what might take a day for a worker, what’s the role and purpose of that worker going forward? I think these are all considerations that need to be made, particularly if you’re concerned about adoption, which a lot of data product leaders are." - Brian T. O’Neill (10:17)
“So, there’s no right or wrong answer here. These are all range questions, and they’re leadership questions, and context really matters. They are important to ask, particularly when we have this risk of reacting to incorrect information that looks plausible and believable because of how these LLMs tend to respond to us with a positive sheen much of the time.” - Brian T. O’Neill (19:00)
The software engineering teams creating AI systems have got real work to do. They need the right kind of workflows, engineering patterns, and Agile development methods that will work for AI. The AI world is different because it’s not just programming, but it also involves the use of data that’s used for training. The key distinction is that the data that drives the AI has to be the appropriate data, it has to be unbiased, it has to be fair, it has to be appropriate to the task at hand. And many people and many companies are coming to grips with how to manage that. This has become controversial, let’s say, in issues like granting parole, or mortgages, or hiring people. There was a controversy that Amazon ran into when its hiring algorithm favored men rather than women. There’s been bias in facial recognition algorithms, which were less accurate with people of color. That’s led to some real problems in the real world. And that’s where we have to make sure we do a much better job and the tools of human-computer interaction are very effective in building these better systems in testing and evaluating. - Ben (6:10)
Every company will tell you, “We do a really good job in checking out our AI systems.” That’s great. We want every company to do a really good job. But we also want independent oversight of somebody who’s outside the company — someone who knows the field, who’s looked at systems at other companies, and who can bring ideas and bring understanding of the dangers as well. These systems operate in an adversarial environment — there are malicious actors out there who are causing trouble. You need to understand what the dangers and threats are to the use of your system. You need to understand where the biases come from, what dangers are there, and where the software has failed in other places. You may know what happens in your company, but you can benefit by learning what happens outside your company, and that’s where independent oversight from accounting companies, from governmental regulators, and from other independent groups is so valuable. - Ben (15:04)
There’s no such thing as an autonomous device. Someone owns it; somebody’s responsible for it; someone starts it; someone stops it; someone fixes it; someone notices when it’s performing poorly. … Responsibility is a pretty key factor here. So, if there’s something going on, if a manager is deciding to use some AI system, what they need is a control panel, let them know: what’s happening? What’s it doing? What’s going wrong and what’s going right? That kind of supervisory autonomy is what I talk about, not full machine autonomy that’s hidden away and you never see it because that’s just head-in-the-sand thinking. What you want to do is expose the operation of a system, and where possible, give the stakeholders who are responsible for performance the right kind of control panel and the right kind of data. … Feedback is the breakfast of champions. And companies know that. They want to be able to measure the success stories, and they want to know their failures, so they can reduce them. The continuous improvement mantra is alive and well. We do want to keep tracking what’s going on and make sure it gets better. Every quarter. - Ben (19:41)
Google has had some issues regarding hiring in the AI research area, and so has Facebook with elections and the way that algorithms tend to become echo chambers. These companies — and this is not through heavy research — probably have the heaviest investment of user experience professionals within data science organizations. They have UX, ML-UX people, UX for AI people, they’re at the cutting edge. I see a lot more generalist designers in most other companies. Most of them are rather unfamiliar with any of this or what the ramifications are on the design work that they’re doing. But even these largest companies that have, probably, the biggest penetration into the most number of people out there are getting some of this really important stuff wrong. - Brian (26:36)
Explainability is a competitive advantage for an AI system. People will gravitate towards systems that they understand, that they feel in control of, that are predictable. So, the big discussion about explainable AI focuses on what’s usually called post-hoc explanations, and the Shapley, and LIME, and other methods are usually tied to the post-hoc approach.That is, you use an AI model, you get a result and you say, “What happened?” Why was I denied a parole, or a mortgage, or a job? At that point, you want to get an explanation. Now, that idea is appealing, but I’m afraid I haven’t seen too many success stories of that working. … I’ve been diving through this for years now, and I’ve been looking for examples of good user interfaces of post-hoc explanations. It took me a long time till I found one. The culture of AI model-building would be much bolstered by an infusion of thinking about what the user interface will be for these explanations. And even the DARPA’s XAI—Explainable AI—project, which has 11 projects within it—has not really grappled with this in a good way about designing what it’s going to look like. Show it to me. … There is another way. And the strategy is basically prevention. Let’s prevent the user from getting confused and so they don’t have to request an explanation. We walk them along, let the user walk through the step—this is like Amazon checkout process, seven-step process—and you know what’s happened in each step, you can go back, you can explore, you can change things in each part of it. It’s also what TurboTax does so well, in really complicated situations, and walks you through it. … You want to have a comprehensible, predictable, and controllable user interface that makes sense as you walk through each step. - Ben (31:13)
“You need to observe how your customer uses data to make better decisions, optimize a business process, or to mitigate business risk. You need to know how your customers operate at a very, very intimate level, arguably, as well as they know how their business processes operate.” - Malcolm Hawker (7:36)
“So, be a problem solver. Be collaborative. Be somebody who is eager to help make your customers’ lives easier. You hear "no" when people think that you’re a burden. You start to hear more “yeses” when people think that you are actually invested in helping make their lives easier.” - Malcolm Hawker (12:42)
“We [data professionals] put data on a pedestal. We develop this mindset that the data matters more—as much or maybe even more than the business processes, and that is not true. We would not exist if it were not for the business. Hard stop.” - Malcolm Hawker (17:07)
“I hate to say it, I think a lot of this data stuff should kind of feel invisible in that way, too. It’s like this invisible ally that you’re not thinking about the dashboard; you just access the information as part of your natural workflow when you need insights on making a decision, or a status check that you’re on track with whatever your goal was. You’re not really going out of mode.” - Brian O’Neill (24:59)
“But you know, data people are basically librarians. We want to put things into classifications that are logical and work forwards and backwards, right? And in the product world, sometimes they just don’t, where you can have something be a product and be a material to a subsequent product.” - Malcolm Hawker (37:57)
“So, the broader point here is just more of a mindset shift. And you know, maybe these things aren’t necessarily a bad thing, but how do we become a little more product- and customer-driven so that we avoid situations where everybody thinks what we’re doing is a time waster?” - Malcolm Hawker (48:00)
“Data products, at least to us at Infocepts, refers to a way of thinking about and organizing your data in a way so that it drives consumption, and most importantly, actions.” - Shashank Garg (1:44)
“The way I see it is [that] the role of a DPM (data product manager)—whether they have the title or not—is benefits creation. You need to be responsible for benefits, not for outputs. The outputs have to create benefits or it doesn’t count. Game over” - Brian O’Neill (10:07)
We talk about bridging the gap between the worlds of business and analytics... There's a huge gap between the perception of users and the tech leaders who are producing it." - Shashank Garg (17:37)
“IT leaders often limit their roles to provisioning their secure data, and then they rely on businesses to be able to generate insights and take actions. Sometimes this handoff works, and sometimes it doesn’t because of quality governance.” - Shashank Garg (23:02)
“Data is the kind of field where people can react very, very quickly to what’s wrong.” - Shashank Garg (29:44)
“It’s much easier to get to a good prototype if we know what the inputs to a prototype are, which include data about the people who are going to use the solution, their usage scenarios, use cases, attitudes, beliefs…all these kinds of things.” - Brian O’Neill (31:49)
“For data, you need a separate person, and then for designing, you need a separate person, and for analysis, you need a separate person—the more you can combine, I don’t think you can create super-humans who can do all three, four disciplines, but at least two disciplines and can appreciate the third one that makes it easier.” - Shashank Garg (39:20)
“When we think of AI, we’re all talking about multiple different delivery methods here. I think AI is starting to become GenAI to a lot of non-data people. It’s like their—everything is GenAI.” - Brian O'Neill (43:48)
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