About
Manish Vashist is an Executive Director and design leader at EY Studio+, with over 25+ years of experience across consulting, customer experience, digital transformation, enterprise UX, service design and innovation. He has led multidisciplinary teams across design, research, technology and business transformation, helping organisations simplify complexity, improve customer journeys and build more intelligent digital experiences. His work spans large-scale transformation contexts across telecommunications, enterprise platforms, customer service, digital channels, self-service, assisted service, onboarding, loyalty and B2B experience design. At EY Studio+, Manish focuses on AI-led customer experience transformation, Agentic AI and the future of human plus AI collaboration. His work explores how AI can help organisations scale creativity, improve efficiency, reduce manual effort and move from fragmented workflows to more intelligent, outcome-driven operating models. He previously spoke at UX India on the rise of agentic UX designers, where he explored how human designers and specialised AI agents can work together to accelerate delivery, improve decision-making and create new models of value. His current work builds on that idea by asking a larger leadership question: how should design leaders build the future operating model for human creativity and AI capability?
Workshop details
Designing What Could Go Right: Building the Agentic Design Studio (+)
About this workshop
AI is changing design, but the real question is not what AI can generate. It is what design leaders must choose, shape, govern and protect. This hands-on workshop helps participants design an Agentic Design Studio where human creativity, judgement and AI agents work together responsibly. They will map workflows, define guardrails and create a practical blueprint to take back to their teams.
Workshop key takeaways
- 1. A clear understanding of how AI is shifting design from production work to orchestration, judgement and leadership.
- 2. A practical way to identify where AI agents can support the design lifecycle, including research synthesis, journey mapping, concept generation, design critique, accessibility review, content creation, validation and business case development.
- 3. A human plus AI workflow model that shows what AI can support, what humans must still own and where judgement, context and accountability are required.
- 4. A responsible AI guardrail checklist covering trust, privacy, bias, accessibility, explainability, cultural sensitivity, brand integrity and human accountability.
- 5. An Agentic Design Studio Blueprint that participants can take back to their teams and adapt for their own organisation.
- 6. A first 30 - day experiment plan to help teams move from AI curiosity to responsible AI adoption in a practical, low - risk way.
- 7. A leadership lens for moving beyond “AI for UX tools” towards a future operating model for human creativity and AI capability.