Session Highlight: Navigating the Intersection of Business Goals and User Experience

Modev Staff Writers | October 24, 2025

As Generative AI and conversational assistants rapidly evolve, the challenge for organizations is no longer whether to integrate AI but how to do so responsibly, strategically, and with users at the center. Building an AI-driven product that simply functions isn’t enough; success now depends on whether that product aligns with real human needs while still advancing business objectives.

At AGENTIC 2025, Gillian Eiserman (Conversation Designer) and Andrew Craig (Product Owner) from General Motors share their collaborative journey of designing and scaling AI products that work well for both users and the business. Their session, AI Product Ownership: Navigating the Intersection of Business Goals and User Experience, explores how cross-functional alignment between product vision and conversation design can determine the difference between an intuitive AI experience and one that frustrates its audience.

The talk reveals how product owners and conversation designers can align around user journeys while keeping organizational outcomes in sight. For large enterprises, this balance is increasingly complex. AI in the enterprise must serve multiple stakeholders: customers, business units, and regulatory teams. The key, according to Eiserman and Craig, lies in cultivating shared understanding by mapping where user experience (UX) meets business value, and building processes that allow flexibility as AI systems evolve.

This message connects to the themes explored in The Role of Culture in AI Adoption, where organizational readiness and collaboration determine how effectively teams can scale innovation. In the AI product lifecycle, that culture of collaboration is especially vital. Conversation designers, engineers, and business leaders must move beyond siloed workflows to co-create experiences that are not only efficient but emotionally intelligent.

As AI-driven systems become more autonomous, product owners face a new challenge: how to remain human-centered in the age of autonomous agents. The shift toward agentic AI, like intelligent systems capable of operating with independence and context awareness, demands new models of oversight and empathy. Being “user-centered” no longer means just designing interfaces; it means anticipating intent, emotion, and context in real time. This philosophy parallels lessons from Agentic AI for Academic Insights at U.S. News, where intelligent systems are transforming how non-technical users interact with data and make decisions.

In practice, maintaining this balance requires flexible processes and adaptive leadership. As Eiserman and Craig emphasize, building AI experiences involves constant iteration and an openness to recalibration. Stakeholder expectations can shift as technology capabilities advance, and part of the product owner’s role is managing those expectations without compromising the integrity of the user experience. The best teams understand that innovation and usability are not opposing forces; instead, they are parallel priorities that must evolve together.

At its core, AI product ownership is about integration: merging business strategy, user empathy, and technical execution. It’s a continuous balancing act, one that reflects the broader challenges of AI adoption in the enterprise. Successful teams build bridges: between designers and developers, between creativity and compliance, and between user goals and business KPIs.

Ultimately, the most impactful AI products are not the ones that showcase the latest technology, but the ones that understand their users. When design and ownership come together, AI can become intuitive, conversational, and genuinely useful. It can serve business goals not as an output, but as a byproduct of creating authentic, meaningful user interactions.

At AGENTIC 2025, this session will equip attendees with actionable insights on how to navigate this intersection—how to align cross-functional teams, manage the push and pull between innovation and usability, and build AI experiences that drive both customer satisfaction and business impact.

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AI Product Ownership represents the next evolution in enterprise design thinking—where technology meets empathy, strategy meets creativity, and agentic systems become extensions of human intent. The future of AI products will belong to teams who can bridge that gap with precision, purpose, and care.