4 Essential UX Research and Design Skills for 2026 with Author Greg Nudelman
85% of AI projects fail. McKinsey, BCG, and Gartner all agree on the cause: the Four Horsemen of the AI Apocalypse — Wrong Use Case, Wrong Data, Wrong ROI/Risk, and Wrong Process.
UX professionals who defeat the Four Horsemen are the ones companies are scrambling to hire in 2026. The rest are watching their insights get ignored, and their roles quietly absorbed.
This session shows you how to blend traditional UX research skills with the new disciplines required to lead AI projects to success — turning research from an upstream input into the engine that drives AI products to ship.
You'll leave with 4 concrete skills:
Agentic use case research & design — human-in-the-loop and agentic storyboarding that pinpoints the right problem before a line of code is written. This is pure UXR, elevated: the research discipline that prevents the wrong-use-case trap that kills most AI projects.
Understanding data + RAG — output formats, XML, and the RAG Registry that turn data chaos into reliable AI behavior, so your research insights actually survive contact with the model.
Value Matrix analysis — the risk and ROI framework that lets you quantify the cost and benefit of every outcome, so your findings get shipped instead of shelved.
The Snowball Sprint process — the end-to-end method that replaces the ineffective "three-in-a-box" handoff between research, design, and product with an iterative, integrated, cross-functional development process.
This presentation is an extension and practical application of the content in UX for AI by Greg Nudelman — the #1 New Release on Amazon. Real examples from 34 shipped AI products. Live Q&A.