Before AI Can Help, UX Leaders Must Solve Operational Tech Debt | #87
The rise of AI is exposing massive operational tech debt in companies. Here’s why and how UX and design leaders must pivot toward workflow optimisation and employee experience.
I answered a question recently about UX, design and the future of UX leadership roles, and I felt it deserved its own post here.
"How do we lead with vision and empathy in a rapidly changing design landscape, ensuring progress doesn’t come at the cost of sustainability and inclusivity?"
Before the leadership bit - I’d still argue that UX is more important than ever - but now it's just changing in how we define it.
Correct, UX for interfaces isn’t the behemoth it used to be, but in my opinion it's actually just shifting away from interfaces and towards operational UX instead - the experience of internal users navigating complex, broken workflows inside companies.
AI is exposing something about a practice that is widespread across most companies: the massive operational tech debt they’ve ignored for years.
Teams are still handling an incredible amount of manual work that was never properly systematised, especially in companies that scaled quickly.
The old solution was to just throw more headcount at the problem.
This doesn’t work anymore.
The tech debt is becoming too unwieldy, making it hard for big companies to scale quickly and change their features on demand - just like all these new AI companies are doing.
I do think we’re a bit away yet from AI automating all these workflows however, unless they’re first brought into the company’s core systems in a structured way.
So that brings me to your question - what should UX and design leaders focus on?
Well, in my eyes, they should be identifying all the manual processes within a company in order to understand which are the most painful, have the highest friction, and cause the most frustration.
They should also aim to determine which of these processes are easiest to transform into automated flows or be removed entirely. Much of this tech debt is completely redundant and can be eliminated fairly painlessly, considering the amount of grief it causes.
Researching where manual work is driving employee churn is important too, because it’s often these tasks that create the most stress and risk when errors happen.
The challenge is that these inefficiencies aren’t new.
Operational teams have been flagging them for years. It's just that people didn’t listen, or they did, but they didn’t have the capacity to fix them.
That’s where leadership and empathy needs to come in.
UX leaders will have to approach these conversations with stakeholders using empathy, trust-building, and a lot of strategic thinking. In many cases, the work they’re trying to automate could threaten someone’s entire job.
But there’s a better way to do it.
Instead of just removing the highest-risk tasks for the company, you need to focus on the bottom of the barrel.
Start by reducing the most repetitive, low-value work first - this way, you don’t destabilise the ops teams, and you free them up to help you with the discovery on higher-impact, higher-value tasks.
They are the best people to help you design new flows, and the best people to help maintain them.
This is how you need to frame what you are doing: building relationships, doing deep customer discovery and removing the worst pain points for your customers.
True UX.
