Designing For Value In An AI-Driven World

We’re starting a new podcast focused on how AI is changing solution design — and what that means for value acceleration inside the enterprise. ‍

When Pega first introduced Blueprint, I’ll be honest: I was skeptical.
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At the time, I assumed it was primarily a sales enablement tool—useful, sure, but largely designed to help Pega's sales teams frame new client use cases and move faster through early license conversations. Interesting, but not something I saw as fundamentally changing how solutions get designed or how value gets realized. So I stayed mostly on the sidelines.
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What changed my perspective wasn’t a product update or a pitch. It was spending real time working hands-on with other large language models—outside of Blueprint—and seeing how quickly they could accelerate early-stage thinking. Not just documentation or requirements capture, but the design work itself: shaping intent, exploring options, pressure-testing assumptions, and making tradeoffs visible much earlier in the process.
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That experience reframed how I viewed Blueprint. Through a different lens, it became clear that the real opportunity wasn’t about design automation or speed for its own sake—it was about fundamentally changing how solution design happens, and who participates meaningfully in driving that process.
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A Single White Paper Started a Bigger Conversation

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That shift led to a joint white paper we published with Pega, where we explored what we called AI-Driven Design and outlined the implications for solution design, value realization, and the evolving role of Solution Designers. The response confirmed we were addressing real challenges teams were experiencing — and surfaced the need to go deeper.

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What became clear was that this wasn’t a one-time idea to be captured in a document. It was the beginning of a longer conversation that needed a different format. That’s what led us to start a podcast.
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Each episode, I’ll be joined by my co-host, Steph Louis, who leads Pega’s Community and Developer Engagement. Like me, Steph has spent decades in the trenches of solution design—working with teams as they wrestle with complexity, tradeoffs, and the gap between intent and execution. Today, she’s at the center of how Pega is helping practitioners navigate the shift toward AI-Driven Design, making her a natural partner for these conversations.

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The Crucial Conversations We Tackle in Season 1

In the first episode, we go behind the scenes on how Pega is thinking about AI-Driven Design—what’s actually changing in practice, where early bets are paying off, and where there’s still real work to be done. We talk candidly about how AI is moving upstream into the design process, how that shift changes roles and decision-making, and what leaders need to pay attention to if they want AI investments to translate into real outcomes.
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You can listen to the first episode here:
‍Spotify → https://open.spotify.com/show/086HKiStVl0hanZB2gEab7
YouTube → https://youtu.be/UGCwD7N1Zio

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Over this first season, we center the podcast around critical AI-Driven Design conversations that tend to get deferred, softened, or avoided entirely:

• Why AI makes traditional solution design obsolete—and what replaces it
• The uncomfortable truth about keeping design downstream
• Why “Business Architect” is no longer the right role for what’s coming
• When Blueprint helps—and when it masks deeper design problems
• How automation quietly amplifies bad decisions
• Why most AI investments stall at the moment of handoff
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These aren’t hypothetical debates — they’re tensions we’re already seeing in client programs, across teams, and real delivery challenges.
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Who this Podcast is For

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The goal of the podcast isn’t to speculate about the future or promote the latest Pega product capabilities. It’s to create space for honest, uncomfortable, practitioner-level conversations—inside Pega and beyond—about what’s working, what’s not, and what needs to change as AI becomes embedded earlier and earlier in the design process.
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This podcast is for solution designers, architects, and enterprise leaders who are trying to bridge the gap between powerful platforms and real outcomes—and who are willing to question some long-held assumptions along the way.
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We’re just getting started.
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But this feels like exactly the right conversation to be having now.

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