Leader Spotlight: Why UX leadership matters more in the AI era, with Ephie Risho
Ephie Risho is Director of UX at Applied Systems, a technology company for the global insurance industry. Over the course of his career, he has held UX and product leadership roles at Applied Systems, Schedulicity, Briebug, and Workiva, helping organizations strengthen product discovery, scale design teams, and build customer-centered software. Outside of work, Ephie is also the author of several fantasy and urban fantasy novels, an interest that informs his perspective on storytelling, creativity, and product design.
In our conversation, Ephie discusses the differences between leading UX in enterprise and nonprofit environments. He shares how AI is changing the role of designers rather than replacing them, as well as how creativity and storytelling shape better product experiences. Ephie also talks about building and designing trustworthy technology in the age of AI.
Building products around real user needs
You lead UX across large enterprise platforms while also leading product strategy for a much smaller nonprofit. How has moving between those two environments changed your perspective on what great product and UX leadership actually looks like?
There are major distinctions between the two. In a large enterprise company, things take longer to build because there are so many moving pieces, including the number of customers with active accounts. You’re working with so many different people and creating new technology, so you can’t just do things on a whim. You have to plan ahead, be strategic, and ensure what you’ve built is well-vetted and tested before you ship anything.
It’s refreshing to work in a small nonprofit space where we can ship things quickly and experiment. There’s a lot of fun about that, but at the end of the day, it’s the same principle — we’re working to solve real user needs and deliver a product that works for them.
In either space, it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that everybody will want a specific feature or product. You can go ahead and build it, only to realize that nobody actually wanted it in the first place. That’s where strong UX leadership comes into play. You have to ask, “Who’s asking for this and why? What’s going to make our users’ lives better?” It’s important to think about the whole workflow.
This is also how I approach AI — you don’t want to build an AI product or feature just because it’s trendy and cool. You need to think about the biggest pain points. Whether it’s a massive company processing millions of dollars per day or a small nonprofit using your software sparsely, what tasks are tedious for them? This is true across all industries, and this is where AI can come in.
Do you have any learnings from working in a smaller space that you leverage in an enterprise role?
One thing I oversee in both spaces is leveraging AI for auto-filling forms. You may think that’s a no-brainer, but it isn’t. AI has to understand the various ways people answer the same question across different forms, so you have to train it for your industry. Working in the nonprofit space gave me an appreciation for how difficult seemingly simple problems can be. We had people handwriting forms, writing in the margins, and drawing little sketches of what they meant. It made me appreciate the broader AI challenges we’re solving in the enterprise, and it gave me better language to work with our AI developers.
Do you feel that running product has made you a better UX leader, or has leading UX made you a better product leader?
I’d say it’s a blend of both. My background is primarily in UX, and bringing that experience into product leadership has been incredibly useful.
People will say, “We’re facing this huge product problem we’ve got to solve.” I can put on my UX hat and think, “We could solve this very easily.” The user might be asking for some elaborate feature that will involve months of work, but maybe we only need to move one interaction or change one button. Suddenly, we’ve gone from months of development to a couple of days.
It’s been fun bringing that mindset into product leadership. You don’t just want to build something viable — you want it to be usable and simple. That’s my UX mantra with everyone I manage: “Keep it simple.” The elegant solutions that look obvious are often the hardest to arrive at.
Enterprise software especially gets complicated over time because every customer requests something new. The customers who pay the most are often the ones who want something built specifically for them. That’s when I wear my product hat, even though my official role is UX. For example, early in my time at Applied Systems, we had a customer with a long list of requested features. Instead of trying to solve all 30 requests, I asked, “What have they consistently told us are their biggest problems?” We reframed the conversation around outcomes instead of outputs. Rather than talking feature by feature, we focused on what would actually make their team’s life better. That one larger outcome was going to move the needle far more than checking off dozens of individual requests, and the shift changed our relationship with the customer.
Why AI makes UX more valuable
Are there UX practices that have become less valuable because of AI? Which have become more important?
The days of what we used to call “pixel pushing” are coming to an end. Think about spending endless hours making a prototype look perfect — AI can do a lot of that now. That begs the question: what should the UX designer be doing?
I’d argue the role of UX is more important than ever because AI can generate so much so quickly. We had a product manager take something that had been on a six-month roadmap and come up with a working solution in just two days using vibe coding. The developers spent another two weeks validating and refining the product before it shipped.
Where did UX come into play? We stepped back and asked, “What is the user trying to accomplish? What are their biggest pain points? How can we smooth those over?” That’s where UX adds value.
Right now, we’re seeing roles start to blur. Even though a product manager may wear a UX hat and a developer hat, that doesn’t mean those responsibilities become their job. We still need specialists, but we also need to be willing to move outside our lanes.
I like the idea of T-shaped professionals. You go deep in your own discipline, but you broaden what you’re capable of across others. I’m seeing more of that at my company, and I’m doing it myself. Recently, I’ve been pushing code for the first time in my life. For example, one of my hobbies is doing blind wine tastings with friends. I wished there was an app for it, so I vibe-coded one. It’s improving so quickly that I’m now planning to release it.
The most important thing UX professionals can do today is stay connected to real users. Talk to real humans; don’t just rely on AI. AI-generated work might earn a passing grade, but it’s rarely A-level work. For example, my wine app looked great at first, but once I actually started using it, I realized the database wasn’t very good, and parts of the experience didn’t work well. After iterating, I got it much closer, but I still had to test it with real people.
One friend I tested with is in his 60s. He immediately needed to zoom the screen, and that completely broke the experience. I never would have discovered that sitting at my computer. You don’t know what you’ve missed until you watch someone use your product. The important lesson here is that AI gets you started, but it doesn’t get you finished.
How do you quantify whether design is creating business value?
Measuring UX value is difficult because it’s closely tied to product success. One of the biggest successes I’ve seen was when a designer did user research on a roadmap initiative that already had designs, planning, and development scheduled. The research showed users simply didn’t need it, so we decided not to build it. To me, that’s an enormous UX success. We saved weeks of engineering time, product time, UX time, release effort, adoption work, and, ultimately, a tremendous amount of money.
Instead, the research uncovered something users actually wanted — and it was much simpler. Sometimes the greatest value UX delivers isn’t launching a feature. It’s preventing the wrong one from being built.
Creativity as a competitive advantage
There’s a growing narrative that AI is commoditizing design. Do you agree? Are there parts of the discipline becoming even more valuable?
Absolutely. AI is creating many solutions, and if you aren’t pushing beyond those initial ideas, everyone will produce the same things. There’s something positive about that because users benefit from familiar patterns. If somebody has seen a particular interaction before, they’ll probably understand yours immediately.
What worries me is that it can stifle the human creativity that’s required to solve problems in better ways. Sometimes the right answer isn’t the big, flashy solution — it’s the simple change that removes friction. Those are the kinds of solutions that still require human creativity.
My brother recently opened a restaurant and was frustrated with the software he was using. My first instinct was to imagine building an entirely new inventory and recipe management system. Then I actually talked with him, and found that his software worked fine. All he wanted was for his recipes to print differently.
My brain had immediately jumped to a huge, exciting project when all he really needed was one small improvement. That’s the opportunity — talk to the user before you start building.
How do you stay creative as AI becomes more capable, and how does that creativity influence your work as a product and UX leader?
I’ve recently caught myself thinking, “I’ll just ask AI,” only to realize AI doesn’t actually know the answer — I just need to think. We have to be intentional about protecting our creativity.
For me, that happens outside of work. I’m an author, and I love building worlds and characters. That creativity carries back into my product work.
Storytelling helps in two ways. One is communicating vision and helping people understand a product direction in a relatable way. The other is thinking about the user’s story. What’s their journey today? Where are the pain points? What’s the ideal journey? What’s the gap between those two? I think about that the same way I think about writing novels. There’s a beginning, some conflict in the middle, and a successful ending.
I’m also a big fan of Jeff Patton’s user story mapping. Just like a movie storyboard lays out every scene, you can map a user’s journey with sticky notes. As you walk through it, you start asking, “Do we really need these steps?” If someone can accomplish the same goal with four steps instead of 20, everybody wins. Less is more.
That way of thinking is influencing the work my teams are doing around agentic AI. We’ve already built several AI capabilities into our software, like autofill, but that’s only one step. Our vision is for AI agents to assist throughout the workflow while keeping a human in control.
Imagine an email arrives. An AI agent reads it, moves it into the system, identifies which form is needed, autofills it, identifies what’s missing, drafts a response requesting the remaining information, and then pauses for human review. Instead of a user completing six different steps, they review one workflow.
Further, I try to disconnect every day. I’ll take a walk at lunch, get away from the screen, look into the distance, maybe walk with my wife. When I come back, I usually have better ideas. You have to give your brain space to do its work.
Designing AI people can trust
That’s good advice. What are the biggest mistakes you’re seeing product or UX teams make as they integrate AI into their work?
The biggest mistake is trusting AI the first time through. People generate a summary, a prototype, or some research synthesis and immediately share it because it looks impressive. Someone else will read it closely and discover that the conclusions are wrong or that the sources were misunderstood. The first draft is rarely A-level work.
The other mistake is the opposite: not using AI enough. People get overwhelmed because it’s capable of so much. I’m experimenting with using AI to analyze financial markets. It can process more information than I ever could, but many people still use it only as a chatbot.
Start connecting it to your analytics platform. Connect it to your research repository. Ask it questions about user behavior. Those are the kinds of workflows where AI becomes incredibly powerful.
How do you build trust into AI experiences?
Trust is the biggest challenge. Everyone we’ve shown our concepts to says the same thing: “I don’t trust AI.” Honestly, I don’t blame them — we’ve all seen AI make mistakes. That’s why we’re focused on principles like transparency, keeping a human in the loop, making actions explainable, and allowing people to undo or edit what AI has done. Those things have to be designed intentionally.
For large enterprise software, that’s a significant effort, and a large portion of our UX team is focused on AI experiences because getting trust right takes a lot of work.
What advice would you give UX designers who are early in their careers on the skills they should focus on building?
First, learn how to do real user testing. Talking to real people is becoming the most important part of the job. Second, don’t be afraid of AI — but don’t trust it blindly either. I’ve seen AI produce impressive-looking work that completely fell apart once I verified it. I even tried using AI to organize my taxes. It made enough mistakes that I eventually started over, but I still used AI where it was appropriate. I used Expensify to scan receipts and compile the information, for example, and it worked flawlessly because it was designed for that purpose.
Use the tools and be smart about them. Don’t accept AI slop. I’ve told my whole team that if they don’t embrace these new tools, they’ll get left behind. The people who are learning how to work with AI are already doing things they couldn’t have done just a few months ago. We’re living through a true revolution in what people are capable of, and it’s a very exciting time.
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