Open Doors

Kick-Off

Learn about what to expect of the day.

Welcome

Opening of the George UX Conf, Maurizio Poletto, Chief Platform Officer at Erste Group, welcomes all UX enthusiasts and creative minds with his opening talk.

TBA

Finding Meaning and Utility in AI

Join Morten on a practical philosophical exploration of AI as assistive intelligence, and how this subtle semantic pivot can provoke a radical rethink of what user experience is and can be. As the landscape of AI shifts on a near daily basis and Morten is teetering on its bleeding edge, listing the exact contents of his talk would require a functioning time machine. That said, topics sure to be touched on include:
- Assistive technology
- Agentic tension
- Moral imperatives
- Throwaway interfaces
- Mission-critical Just-In-Time Heuristics
- How to stop worrying and learn to use AI to empower humanity

Manufacturing Serendipity: Designing Delight at Scale with a Little Help from AI

Mick explores how AI fuels creative cross-pollination. In this talk, she shares how experimenting with AI in his illustration practice—generating wild concepts, pushing styles, and playing with storytelling—sparks unexpected ideas that flow back into her UX work. Discover how an illustrator’s mindset, amplified by AI, can reimagine UX challenges, visualize whimsical interactions, and infuse products with more human-centric delight. Key Takeaways:
- Strategies for letting personal creativity (like illustration) inform professional work
- Using AI as a sandbox for visual exploration and UX innovation
- How visual thinking and storytelling enhance design
- AI as a bridge between disciplines, not just a tool for efficiency

Designing Dynamic Customer Experiences Powered by Generative AI – Learnings from Zalando Assistant

Jarno will uncover pragmatic learnings on how to combine product design, generative AI and business in designing and developing scalable conversational customer experiences. The talk will cover:
- How to design and scale AI-powered customer experience from zero to all Zalando markets covering 21 languages and 50 million customers
- How to pragmatically drive customer-centric innovation in a fast-moving space requiring cross-functional collaboration, focus and speed
- How to combine product design (UI, UX) and generative AI in creation on dynamic discovery experiences

Panel Discussion

Design Patterns For AI Interfaces in 2026

In this session, we’ll explore new effective design patterns for better AI experiences, with quiet AI, daemons, style lenses, structured presets and templates, temperature knobs, collaborative AI systems and users interacting with AI products much faster, more precisely and with less frustration along the way. You’ll leave the session with the toolbox of practical techniques to apply to design better AI experiences in your product. You’ll learn:
- State of AI in 2025: how people use AI interfaces, challenges, slowdowns and blockers
- How to help users articulate their intent faster and more precisely
- How to design for agentic UX, and how to support people in complex flows and tasks
- How to design better input UX, output UX and refinement journeys
- How to help users develop trust and confidence for AI interfaces

From Novelty to Necessity: Building AI for Real Human Needs

Valerie will share an approach to designing AI experiences that goes beyond the hype, grounding in real human needs and seamlessly integrating into the ways people actually work. You’ll hear practical, down-to-earth learnings from our lived experience of launching an AI-powered product in an ambiguous problem space, including:
- The importance of anchoring in real user workflows
- How to build for emerging mental models and shifting expectations
- Frameworks for aligning user trust, feasibility, and business goals

Scaling a Virtual Assistant That Customers Love

Lloyds Banking Group will share the design journey they’ve been on as they grew their virtual assistant from an overlooked channel to one that now handles half of all digital customer contact. They’ll share how they approached building design maturity in their team, which was critical to ensuring an experience-led approach as the channel scaled. They’ll then zoom in on a case study that brings this experience-led approach to life: using the virtual assistant to introduce in-depth human support at key moments.

TBA

From Zero to Stocks

How do you turn an idea into a product that makes life easy? In this keynote, Tom shares how his team brought bunq Stocks to life in just 6 weeks. From first sketches to last-minute pivots, you’ll get a look inside the fast, focused process that led to a simple, safe, and user-first investing experience. No fluff, just real talk on building what users actually want.

TBA

Conversational Interactions in Banking: Fad or Future?

Here at George we love the power of good design: it can help our users understand what it is important, empower them to make good financial decisions, and bring clarity to complex processes in banking. We use it every day to simplify and bring moments of delight to our users. But there is a paradigm shift happening: with the rise of conversational interfaces, we have to ask ourselves, which interactions are best handled as conversations, and where it is better to keep relying on long-stablished visual UIs? How do we strike a balance between the two worlds? Packed with real life examples, and insights from user research, Stefan’s talk explores how conversational AI interfaces shape the future of banking and of George. What can you expect to take away from Stefan’s talk?
- Get to know “Hey George” – the new conversational way to interact with your financial companion George
- Get real life insights and learnings from user research all around AI chat interfaces and the future of banking
- Learn about the design challenges, which new AI technologies bring and how to deeply integrate them into the online banking application

Closing Ceremony