Designing the future: A conversation with Jod Kaftan

This week on Catalyst, Tammy is joined by Jod Kaftan, Head of Product Design and Research at Oracle. Jod is a visionary design leader with twenty years of experience across financial services, healthcare, ecommerce and media. Together, Tammy and Jod  explore the practice of foresight and how humans can design a positive future where our values prevail.

Highlights from the episode include:

• The future can be designed. Jod speaks passionately about futures thinking and its value to organizations. Instead of predicting and reacting, organizations can adopt longer timescales and identify signals - specific examples of the future manifesting in the present. This mindset can help them stay ahead of disruption and create a preferred future.
• Moving from command-based to intent-based interactions. Tammy and Jod discuss the interesting way that natural language processing models are changing user interfaces. The locus of control is shifting more to the system, with the user doing less of the work while achieving more.
• AI can help restore human interaction and emotional intelligence. The conversation ends, appropriately, with a shared positive vision for the future: a world where technology recedes into the background, and we go back to being human beings.

Check out the full episode to learn more about reimagining the moat as a metaphor and Jod's philosophy that everything can be designed.

Please note that the views expressed in this episode may not necessarily be those of NTT DATA.‍

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