About
Rohan Sridhar is Co-founder and Chief Experience Officer (CXO) at Happening Design, an AI-first product transformation company with teams across the New York and Hyderabad. He helps enterprises bridge the gap between AI ambition and real-world adoption by identifying high-impact AI opportunities, designing trusted agentic and copilot experiences, modernizing complex enterprise platforms, building scalable design systems, and accelerating research-to-prototype cycles. Over the past two decades, Rohan has led transformation initiatives across telecom, banking, insurance, government, and enterprise SaaS. Beyond Happening Design, Rohan co-chairs UXINDIA, India's largest design conference, and the UMO Design Foundation, an initiative dedicated to democratizing design education and nurturing the next generation of design leaders. His work continues to focus on helping organizations turn AI roadmaps into products that people trust, adopt, and use at scale.
Talk details
Design Makes the Call
About this talk
Now that we can make anything, what deserves to exist? AI has collapsed the cost of making — a working prototype now costs less than the meeting about it, and teams everywhere are shipping more, faster. But abundance exposes an uncomfortable truth: the bottleneck was never production. It was the unresolved decisions hiding inside it. Making got cheap. Judgment didn't. Drawing on his experience running an AI-native design and technology studio, Rohan opens with a concrete demonstration of what AI-era output really looks like — then shows the part the demo can't automate: the problem worth framing, the standard worth holding, the tradeoff someone has to own. When anyone can make anything, deciding what deserves to exist becomes design's defining responsibility. Attendees leave with a decision audit to run on a live initiative the next morning: find the unresolved choice, name its owner, define the evidence that moves it.
LEAD Commons' Roundtable
About this talk
An exclusive, invite-only roundtable for design leaders to engage in candid conversations on leadership, organizational challenges, emerging trends, and the future of design.