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Organized around channels, not customers
Experience initiatives named after channels, AI initiatives after vendors. Nobody can name the customer moment that gets better if the work succeeds.
Experience
& Innovation
& Innovation
Driven by AI
Solutions overview
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The situation
Why experience programs stall — and why AI programs stall the same way
Enterprises are not short on customer activity. They are short on agreement about the experience they intend to deliver. When the experience is the offering, shipping it unmanaged is a pricing decision nobody made. AI programs fail the same way. Four patterns show up almost every time.
From prototype to an experience customers feel — and the four places it breaks
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Prototypes and pilots have no path to production
Tested concepts never get an owner, a budget line, or an operating model. The demo lands; what customers would live with never gets designed.
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Experience ownership arrives last — and so does governance
Journey ownership surfaces after commitments are made, and so do the data and risk questions. Both stop the work at its most expensive moment.
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There is no shared executive vocabulary
The board hears capability, operators hear disruption, finance hears cost. The customer gets described five ways in one meeting.
The leadership imperative isn’t to start with technology. It’s to start with the experience you intend to deliver and the decisions that get you there — then let AI do the research, the synthesis, and the prototyping at a speed that changes what is worth attempting.Skip Vanderburg
Decisions named
A short list of customer moments and business decisions, each with a named owner.
Roadmap sequenced
Work is ordered by value, feasibility, and risk — with an investment narrative attached.
Governance in place
Journey ownership plus data and risk guardrails, designed in rather than retrofitted at review.
Where I add value
Six offerings across three pillars
Customer experience strategy, design, and solution innovation — executed with AI and measured in return on experience. Grounded in building and designing the thing, not just recommending it.
Pillar one — AI-Driven Customer Experience Strategy
Deciding the experience the business intends to deliver — and proving it pays
For leadership teams whose experience is whatever each channel happened to build. The constraint is intent, ownership, and evidence — not effort.
Customer Experience Strategy & Operating Model
Set the experience the business intends to deliver, specific enough to design against and to say no with. Then the ownership, measures, and rhythms that make delivering it somebody’s job. AI reads the full voice-of-customer corpus, not a sample.
Experience Intelligence & Portfolio Decisions
Agentic decision intelligence pointed at the experience portfolio: which moments carry revenue and trust, what to fund, what to stop, what each trade-off costs. Scored as return on experience rather than advocacy, so the roadmap survives the board.
Pillar two — AI-Driven Customer Experience Design
Designing the journeys and services customers actually move through
The craft half: research, blueprints, and the designed detail of what a customer receives. AI compresses synthesis, variants, and testing, so more of the engagement goes into judgment.
Customer Journey Reinvention
Research the journey customers really take, name the breakpoints that cost revenue and trust, redesign the service end to end. AI where it improves the moment, absent where a human is the point.
Service Design & Experience Orchestration
Service blueprints, journey orchestration, and the detail behind each moment — frontstage, backstage, and the lines between them. The blueprint arrives tested rather than assumed.
Pillar three — AI-Driven Solution Innovation
Turning ideas into solutions customers have actually used
Innovation stops being a workshop the moment a prototype exists. Generative AI collapsed concept-to-artifact from quarters to weeks, which changes what is worth attempting.
Innovation, Prototyping & Concept Testing
Concepts framed, prototyped, and put in front of real customers before anything is funded at scale. The ideas that do not survive cost weeks instead of quarters.
Agentic Solution & Product Design
Designing the agentic experience: what the system decides, what the person decides, where the handoffs break. Human-in-the-loop by design, not by exception.
Running through all three
The AI capability underneath — not a separate program
None of this is sold as an AI project. Roadmapping sequences the work, decision intelligence ranks it, generative AI does the synthesis and prototyping, governance keeps it defensible. I built an enterprise AI company around those capabilities; here they are the engine, not the product.
How the work is prioritized
Opportunities ranked against customer evidence rather than internal conviction, then scored with established frameworks — RICE, MoSCoW, Eisenhower, scenario planning, risk assessment. Agentic analysis scores at portfolio scale, which is what makes the roadmap defensible.
How we work together
Three ways to engage
Scoped to the problem in front of you — from a single executive session to ongoing advisory. Every format runs the same way: customer evidence first, AI doing the heavy lifting, a decision your team can defend.
Starting point
Executive Briefing
A working session with your leadership team: an honest read on the experience customers get today, where it breaks, and where the real constraint sits.
- The journey as customers actually experience it, breakpoints named
- Where experience ownership falls between the seams
- What AI genuinely changes here — and what it does not
- Current-state read on the design and AI work already underway
- A ranked shortlist of experience and innovation opportunities
- Written summary the team can circulate internally
Investment$ fixed fee
Focused engagement
Experience Strategy & Design Sprint
A defined engagement producing the intended experience, the redesigned journey that delivers it, and a prototype customers have actually used — prioritized with frameworks, sequenced against the capacity you really have.
- Current-state journey research, synthesized across every source you have
- The experience the business intends to deliver, written to design against
- Redesigned service blueprint across the channels that carry it
- A working prototype customers have actually used
- Sequenced roadmap with investment narrative, guardrails, and success measures
- Board-ready readout and executive summary
Investment$ project fee
Ongoing
Executive Advisor
Retained advisory alongside your executive team on customer experience strategy, design, and solution innovation — the senior perspective in the room, without a full-time role or a consulting bench.
- Standing counsel to the CEO, CX leader, CMO, CPO, or CIO
- Experience and design review before the build is committed
- Innovation portfolio decisions — what to prototype, what to stop
- Agency, platform, and vendor decision support ahead of commitments
- Board-ready communication and investment narrative
Investment$ / month
Engagements are sized after a short scoping conversation. The briefing is usually the fastest way to establish where the real problem sits — strategy, design, or innovation. Travel and expenses billed at cost.
Focus sectors
Where this work lands hardest
The approach is industry-agnostic, but six sectors carry the combination of experience stakes, decision complexity, regulatory weight, and data fragmentation where getting this right matters most.
Insurance
Carriers & brokers
Underwriting, claims, and distribution each run their own experiments. The portfolio view is missing, and the policyholder feels every seam between them at exactly the wrong moment.
Opening move · One prioritized roadmap across underwriting, claims, and service, with governance above it — and the claim journey redesigned end to end, where trust is won or lost.
Healthcare
Providers & payers
Clinical and administrative AI advance on separate tracks, and governance questions arrive after the pilot has been promised. Meanwhile the patient navigates access, scheduling, and billing as three unrelated companies.
Opening move · Separate the decisions that carry clinical risk from those that do not — and treat access-to-outcome as one designed journey, not three handoffs.
Financial Services
Banking & capital markets
Model risk management sets the pace, and ambitious AI programs stall waiting for a defensible control story. On the front end, onboarding and servicing are still assembled from products rather than designed around customers.
Opening move · Build the governance and evidence trail into the roadmap instead of bolting it on at review — and redesign onboarding around the customer’s goal, not the catalog.
High Tech
Software & platforms
No shortage of capability — the constraint is prioritization. Too many credible AI bets, too little agreement on which earn engineering capacity, and a product that has accumulated more surface than intent.
Opening move · Rank the portfolio with explicit frameworks so trade-offs are arguable — then prototype the two or three changes that would move adoption before writing the rest of the plan.
Professional Services
Consulting & systems integration
Capacity is the budget. Pursuits, engagements, staffing moves, and practice investments all draw on the same scarce senior people — each decided in a different meeting by whoever advocates hardest. The client’s experience then varies partner by partner rather than by design.
Opening move · Score every competing commitment on one basis, sequenced against the senior capacity that actually exists — and make the client experience a standard the firm delivers, not a function of who staffed the account.
Manufacturing & Industrial
Operations & supply chain
Operational data is abundant and fragmented; AI initiatives cluster at the plant level and rarely aggregate into an enterprise capability. Dealer, distributor, and end-customer experience is somebody’s side responsibility.
Opening move · Identify the recurring enterprise decisions the plant data should feed and build toward those — then give the aftermarket and service experience an owner and a design.
Sector framing is a starting point, not a template. Every engagement begins with your operating context, the experience customers get today, and the decisions your leadership team is trying to get right.
Background
Built across the operator, consultant, and founder seats
Thirty-five years translating emerging technology and human-centered design into enterprise strategy, products, and customer experiences — at Fortune 500 companies, global consultancies, enterprise software firms, and as founder of a digital experience agency and an enterprise AI company. Two decades of it leading CX design and innovation.
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Years across customer experience design, innovation, and enterprise technology
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Beta customers validating agentic decision intelligence at Prioriti AI
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Published books on generative AI, decision intelligence, and prioritization
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Years leading customer experience design, innovation, and service reinvention
Selected experience
- Prioriti AI — Founder & CEO; agentic decision intelligence and generative prioritization
- Brillio Design Studio — Head of Design; built the Silicon Valley experience-design practice
- Tata Consultancy Services — Partner; Chief Innovation Officer, DESS; CX innovation, design & emerging technology
- The Social Café — Founder & Chief Experience Officer; digital experience and innovation agency
- Siebel Systems & Mercury — Executive technology and innovation roles
- The Coca-Cola Company — Engineering and development leadership
Writing & thought leadership
- Illuminating Pathways — decision intelligence and generative AI for enterprise prioritization (2024)
- The Future of Generative AI: Creating Tomorrow
- The Rise of Decision Intelligence
- Executive speaker, Practical Journey to AI; featured expert, The Catalyst by Softchoice
- Creator and host, Illuminating Pathways podcast
Contact
What experience are you trying to get right?
An experience that no longer holds up. A decision about what to reinvent first. An innovation program stuck at the workshop stage. Bring the specific one, and we will work it in a single session.
