Shelley Evenson
Shelley Evenson is a designer who thrives on change, technology, and the positive impact it can have in people’s lives. Shelley focuses on driving innovation by design—helping companies reinvent the way they work, share ideas, think about the future, and take advantage of recent advancements in GenAI and agentic systems.
Shelley’s made her mark at Accenture, Fjord, Facebook, Microsoft, and even inspired a generation of designers as an Associate Professor at Carnegie Mellon’s School of Design. She also co-founded the Service Design Network with Birgit Mager. Shelley was recently nominated as a Jacobs Design Fellow at the Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation at UC Berkeley. She has lectured at several academic institutions and contributed to various books and articles, covering topics from integrating human systems for the National Academy of Sciences to service and interaction design methods and practice.
Shelley's Featured Talks
Stop playing, start building: The Roadmap to an Agentic Organization
Most companies are stuck in “Pilot Purgatory”—endless experiments that never become real workflows. This talk reveals the “Laboratory” methodology we use to move organizations from tentative dabbling to becoming a fully fluent agentic organization.
From this session, attendees will gain:
- The “Laboratory” Framework: Why standard training fails and why you need a structured, immersion program to see real ROI and change.
- Escaping the inertia: How to move your team from basic prompting to augmenting themselves and engineering workflows where AI collaborates to do the work.
- The playbook: A look at the tangible assets—how we’ve transformed our work and how you can too.
Shelley will unpack:
- The “Virtual C-Suite”: building shared expert agents (Strategy, Data, Creative) that can accelerate decision making across your org.
- The “I Liked, I Learned, I Longed For” Loop: How to capture the right data to prove the program is working for the bottom-line and for your people.
- That designing workflows is hard: Flow engineering is critical skill for teams to learn how to create “just right” human | AI balance
- The “Transformation Gap”: Why the cultural rollout is where the money is made or lost.
Designing Trust in the Age of Autonomous Agents
We are moving from a world where we click buttons to a world where we assign goals. But if your team doesn’t trust the agent, they won’t use it. This talk explores the invisible architecture required to build “Agentic Systems” that users actually adopt, focusing on the delicate balance of autonomy and control.
From this session, attendees will gain:
- The Trust Architecture: Why most AI rollouts fail due to failures in adoption and how to design experiences that solve it.
- The “Loop” Strategy: A framework for deciding when a human needs to be in the loop (approving) vs. on the loop(monitoring).
- Friction as a Feature: Why making AI too seamless can actually be dangerous, and where you need to intentionally design friction back in
Shelley will unpack:
- Goal and outcome-based design: Moving beyond “prompt engineering” to designing systems that anticipate and meet user needs.
- The “Co-editing” paradigm: Why the future isn’t a chat box, but a shared canvas where humans and agents work together.
- Managing failure: Operational strategies for when the Agents get it wrong (because they will), and how to recover without losing user trust.
- The adoption cliff: Why great tech fails with bad experience, and how we co-design the “workflows” with skeptical and enthusiastic employees.
The Human Algorithm: Why culture is your biggest Agentic bottleneck
You can buy the compute, but you can’t buy the curiosity. The biggest barrier to AI adoption isn’t technical—it’s psychological. This keynote dives into “Radical Augmentation,” a human-first approach to AI that amplifies your people rather than automating them away, ensuring your transformation sticks.
From this session, attendees will gain:
- Solving the fear factor: Practical strategies to turn employee anxiety (“Will I be replaced?”) into agency (“I have a superpower”).
- The “uneven edge”: How to identify the specific tasks where your humans are untouchable, and how to build workflows that protect those skills.
- Preventing “skill atrophy”: How to ensure your team stays sharp and critical, even as AI takes over some of the lifting
Shelley will unpack:
- Radical augmentation: A framework for designing jobs where AI handles the drudgery so humans can handle the strategy.
- The “thought partner” model: Skilling your team to use AI as a coworker, devil’s advocate and critic, raising the bar for their thinking.
- Psychological safety: Why safe environments result in faster AI adoption rates.
- The leadership mandate: How executives must model “imperfect exploration” and continuous experimentation to give their teams permission to innovate
