Six years leading AI design at Zendesk — most recently the team behind Copilot.

On this page

01 · My role at Zendesk 2020 — Present

Over six years, I led three design teams — and grew the people on them.

Zendesk's AI comes in two product lines: autonomous AI Agents that resolve customer issues end-to-end, and Copilot — AI that makes the people running service better at their jobs. I've led the design behind the human half of that bet since before the GenAI wave, reporting to the Senior Director of Design as the sole design leader for Copilot.

• Managed up to 9 direct reports, including two principal designers — a deliberately senior bench for problems that are platform contracts and patterns, not screens.
• Hired and onboarded 10+ designers, and promoted many into senior roles — and one into management, to lead the Knowledge team.
• 2022 — 2024: led two teams across Zendesk AI and Knowledge — the team that laid the foundations of AI configuration at Zendesk: Procedures, topic classifiers, entities. Knowledge sits at the core of multiple AI workflows, and the Procedures the team designed now power Auto Assist. All of it is foundational, and still continuously improved.
• 2024: asked by leadership to lead Copilot — the key AI functionality for Zendesk's biggest user bases, agents and admins.

Design Connect

UXR on-site

CX Trends

Representing Zendesk beyond the product: an intro talk at Design Connect (a series of external events I co-organized), an on-site UXR workshop with customers, and CX Trends with the GTM team.

02 · My impact as of July 2026

My team owns key AI features for two of Zendesk's biggest user bases — across 40k accounts.

Copilot touches agents and admins across 40,000 enterprise & SMB accounts. The design work isn't a supporting act to the revenue story — it is the revenue story: the activation and adoption flows my team designed are what turn a purchase into a habit.

• Design as the growth lever — the PLG flows we designed drove activation rates over 60%, cut conversion time in half, and delivered 3–6× adoption lifts post-upgrade.
• Three capabilities carry Copilot — Auto Assist, suggestions for agents (Zendesk's main user); Intelligent Triage, powering ticket automation; and Admin Copilot, assistance for admins oriented on customer success.

03 · Case study — Admin Copilot GA May 2026

A proactive, conversational assistant that's changing how customers use Zendesk.

Admin Copilot is the first thing a Zendesk user sees when they log in, and it follows them through most of their flows. It's three things at once: conversational assistance, insights into trends, and proactive next-step recommendations. The main page of the Admin Center is now 100% UI designed by the Copilot team.

• A horizontal capability — Admin Copilot touches almost every other Zendesk workspace. Its suggestions can be embedded anywhere, surfacing Procedure recommendations and next steps in context.
• I drove the vision deck and rallied alignment across design and product leadership — outlining the strategic design goals for each area and keeping product and design pointed at one target.
• A lean team working in two directions at once — we shift between the vertical growth of the capability and supporting the teams building horizontally on top of the patterns and flows we created. We set up a structure that lets a lean team do both.

Recommendations

Insights

Conversational UI

Shipping it — and launching a new design language on the way

My team worked on this release since Q4 2025, with the bulk of the design happening in January and February of 2026. After weeks of testing, we GA'd it in May 2026 to strong customer feedback and enthusiasm.

• The first capability built in Flora — Zendesk's new design language. We partnered with the Design Systems team to build Admin Copilot in a new visual style and refresh the Zendesk UI along the way.
• Flora is now official — what started as Admin Copilot's look became Zendesk's official design language. We continue to contribute Flora patterns that other teams build on.

Admin Center

The main page of the Zendesk Admin Center — 100% UI designed by the Copilot team.

Relate 2026

Admin Copilot was unveiled at Relate, Zendesk's annual conference.

We're only just beginning. As a horizontal feature, Admin Copilot keeps expanding to more product surfaces and deepening its impact — while we work on the vision for the future of CX work.

04 · Deep international collaboration a 100-strong design org

A distributed team, and the rituals that keep 40 designers moving fast.

My team works across Denmark, Portugal, Ireland, and Poland, and routinely collaborates with teams in India, Singapore, Australia, Germany, and the United States. Coordinating design at that spread — inside a 100-strong design org — takes an organized approach.

• I designed, implemented, and facilitated rituals for teams of up to 40 designers, and influenced org-wide rituals. Our process has become leaner over time — and those rituals are part of what lets us move fast.
• I maintain relationships at the VP and Director level, plus informal influence networks with teams across the org, to keep the experience at the right level of quality without relying on formal authority.
• I ran tiger teams mixing my designers with others for org-wide goals — product unification and a new design system among them.
• I own strategic capacity allocation — occasionally defending resourcing rationale with design and product leadership, and tapping the broader team for help on strategic projects.

WaysConf

→ link my WaysConf talk on design rituals here

05 · AI tooling practising what we design

The team that designs AI features paves the way for how the org uses AI.

Designing AI made us early adopters of it. We constantly experiment with new ways of using AI in the design process — and Claude Code became a staple tool in ours.

• I modelled AI usage across a broad set of use cases — research analysis, prototyping, presentations, even working in Jira.
• I onboarded many designers into Claude workflows and evangelized the practice across the whole org.

06 · AI & Knowledge foundations Oct 2022 — Aug 2024

Before the GenAI wave, I led the teams that built the groundwork Copilot stands on.

Leadership asked me to take over Zendesk's AI design team in 2022, when "AI" meant classifiers, not conversations. Across two teams — AI and Knowledge — we built the configuration layer every AI workflow now depends on.

• Laid the foundations of AI configuration — Procedures, topic classifiers, and entities: the pieces that make Zendesk's AI configurable and trustworthy, continuously improved ever since.
• Owned Knowledge & retrieval — the content every AI answer is grounded in, sitting at the core of multiple AI workflows. The Procedures concept was born here and became Auto Assist's backbone.
• Shipped Zendesk's first generative AI features (2023) — and invented the UX patterns for uncertainty, citation, and revision that Copilot later scaled.
• Owned the invisible surfaces — intent taxonomies, training-data curation, model-performance dashboards.

07 · The release trail 2022 — 2026 · from public announcements

I've led this work since before the GenAI wave — long enough to watch a few machine-learning predictions grow into a product line worth $100M: