About
Anya Gerasimchuk is design and product leader with deep experience across product management, UX and digital innovation in highly complex, regulated industries. As Senior Director of Product Design and UI/UX Engineering at Ontada, McKesson's oncology technology division, she shapes product vision through customer insight, evidence-based user research, and an empathetic understanding of clinical workflows. Her work focuses on elevating product quality in mission-critical healthcare environments while maturing design practices across the organisation.Across McKesson, GE Digital, EY, and GE Aviation, Anya has built and scaled UX organisations, driven cross-functional collaboration and delivered digital solutions for domains ranging from oncology to aviation, energy and industrial systems. She has led teams through strategy formation, design execution and delivery of human-centred experiences that support safety, operational efficiency and measurable business outcomes.
Workshop details
Human-Centered AI: Accelerating Design Thinking Without Losing Empathy
About this workshop
This workshop explores how AI can accelerate traditional human-centered design methods without replacing the core principles that make them effective: empathy, problem framing, collaboration, and continuous learning. In many organizations, teams move slowly because research synthesis, workflow mapping, concept generation, and prototype creation take significant time. AI can help compress those cycles by summarizing research, identifying patterns, generating early design directions, drafting user flows, creating testable prototypes, and surfacing assumptions that need validation.But the workshop is not about using AI to skip discovery or remove human judgment. Instead, it focuses on how AI can strengthen Design Thinking when used intentionally. Participants will learn how to move faster from ambiguity to clarity while still grounding decisions in real user needs, business outcomes, and technical feasibility.A key focus will be empathy-building across trio-teams: Product, Design, and Engineering
Workshop key takeaways
- AI can accelerate Design Thinking, but should not replace it. Teams can use AI to synthesize research, generate ideas, map workflows, and create prototypes faster - but user empathy, problem framing, and human judgment still guide the work.
- Rapid prototyping becomes a shared learning tool for trio-teams.Product, Design, and Engineering can use AI-assisted prototypes to align earlier, test assumptions faster, and move from abstract discussion to concrete evidence.
- The goal is faster learning, not faster guessing. AI helps teams move from Plan → Build → Validate toward Build → Learn → Harden, but teams still need to validate with users, expose risks, and avoid polished outputs that create false confidence.