AI Adoption in 2026: What Worked, What Didn't (Design Studio POV

​20 years of a design studio's work sat in three disconnected places: a web archive for the earliest years, email from 2008, Slack from 2014.

​Over the past six months we rebuilt Motka, a product design studio running since 2005, around LLMs. Not a pilot on the side: the studio's knowledge now lives in a curated wiki of roughly 140 pages that an agent reads before it writes a proposal, a case study or a post, and the whole team works from it.

​This talk is the honest ledger.

​What you'll leave with

• ​The order the steps have to happen in, and the one most people skip and then stall on

• ​Practical context strategies: how to collect it, how to QA it, how to retrieve it

• ​Three layers of company data: input, facts, calculated

• ​How to organize and maintain an internal wiki, and where to start one

• ​Automated bans, clarifications and edits that keep a self-written knowledge base from drifting

• ​The main chokepoints and the ways around them

• ​What clients paid for, and what broke along the way

​Who it's for

​Founders and operators of small service and creative companies: agencies, studios, consultancies, small product teams. People with an archive nobody can use and no AI department coming to help.

​Speaker

​Phil Smirnov, founder of Motka design studio (Ljubljana). 300 projects since 2005, data-heavy B2B products: trading platforms, media and analytics systems, EdTech. Half of the studio's current work is designing AI products.

​Format

​A 45-minute talk in English plus questions, with one short screen demo.

​Where

​PTW Palace, Room 1 (ground floor), Rua Gomes Freire 98, Lisbon. Part of Portugal Tech Week.

​By attending you agree to the PTW Palace Terms & Conditions for Visitors: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1vhbEInr-BLSxD6pDTAp7p1p0GlA6NeQB/view?usp=drive_link