When consumers have countless options, what makes them stick with one product or brand over another? More often than not, it comes down to customer experience.
Research shows that 42% of buyers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience. At the same time, overall customer satisfaction in the US has been trending downward. It’s clear that experience isn’t just a “nice-to-have”; it’s a revenue imperative that demands executive attention.
Yet many enterprises continue to underinvest in Experience Design (XD) strategy and user experience design services, which often leads to missed opportunities and customer journeys that fall short. By bringing AI into the strategy phase, businesses can speed up research, uncover actionable insights, and shift from guesswork to data-driven decisions.
The result is a better experience for customers—and significant ROI for your business.
Why Many Products Miss the Mark
The disconnect between customer experience and business outcomes often comes from how enterprises approach product design. The typical product design lifecycle follows a linear path: budget allocation, roadmap creation, priority setting, design, and development. Here’s where it breaks down:
Strategy, including research, is happening too late.
This approach often fails to capture customer insights early on, leading to misaligned features and suboptimal outcomes. Organizations that invest in building human-centered thinking early through programs like ExperienceInnovation Aware are better positioned to close this gap before it becomes a costly mistake.
Product Initiatives Should Be Built on Data, Not Assumptions
When product initiatives are defined before conducting XD strategy and research, the proposal is inherently flawed. Without input from real users, use cases can’t be validated or quantified, and ROI remains a guessing game.
This guesswork makes it difficult for product teams to get executive buy-in and secure budget. Product owners will struggle to create compelling proposals that demonstrate a clear return on investment for technology initiatives. Even worse, teams may move forward with a product and miss the mark, which can lead to millions in lost revenue.
To secure funding and build a great experience, teams must showcase a clear vision and decisive outcomes at the proposal stage. This requires a well-defined XD strategy right from the start.
Building Your XD Strategy with AI
Incorporating strategy and research early in the product design lifecycle is key to unlocking sustainable growth and maximizing your competitive edge. The earlier these are conducted, the better the outcomes and the lower the overall cost.
In our work with clients, we’ve seen that AI makes XD strategy and research even more powerful—and more accessible to lean teams under pressure to deliver.
What XD Strategy Enables
- Validate real needs: Ensure you’re building solutions for real problems, not perceived ones, to prevent costly product failures.
- Mitigate risk: Identify and resolve pain points before they impact your bottom line and tarnish your brand.
- Uncover opportunities: Discover untapped markets and avenues for innovation that drive exponential growth.
What AI Adds to XD Strategy
- Rapid insights: AI tools allow you to quickly analyze large datasets to identify key customer insights, allowing teams to make informed decisions faster than ever before.
- Smarter insights: AI tools can spot patterns and connections in data that would be invisible to the human eye, revealing hidden opportunities and potential pitfalls.
- Accelerated ideation: By leveraging AI, teams can rapidly ideate pain points, opportunities, and solutions, streamlining the creative process.
- Efficient research synthesis: AI tools excel at visualizing and presenting research findings, dramatically reducing the time and energy investment required for data analysis.
- Personalized experiences: AI helps craft customer journeys that resonate deeply with users, improving customer adoption, engagement, satisfaction, and retention.
An AI Ecosystem for XD Strategy: Tool Recommendations
At Orion, we view AI as an ecosystem that empowers strategists and researchers to achieve unprecedented levels of insight and impact.
Below are three AI-powered tools that have significantly enhanced our research process, enabling rapid synthesis of customer feedback, market trends, and internal discussions, and providing a solid foundation for strategic decision-making.
| Tool | Function | Benefit |
| Microsoft Teams | Every meeting and interview is transcribed in Teams so we can query against our entire collected knowledge with AI. | Ensures no insight is lost, allows for efficient knowledge management, facilitates easy information retrieval, supports compliance by maintaining a searchable archive of discussions. |
| Perplexity | Perplexity allows us to interact with our research and search engines to reference web material to get insights from our research rapidly. | Accelerates research by quickly synthesizing information from diverse sources, provides a comprehensive view of the topic, helps identify emerging trends, reduces time spent on manual literature reviews. |
| Napkin.ai | Napkin.ai can produce infographics and visualizations of the topics in our research, enabling us to present our findings quickly. | Enhances communication by creating compelling visuals, simplifies complex data for easier understanding, accelerates report creation, enables data-driven storytelling, ensures insights are accessible to a wider audience. |
Now we can put it all together. Here’s how these tools work in harmony:
- Capture: Microsoft Teams captures every nuance of your meetings and interviews.
- Synthesize: Perplexity distills insights from your collected knowledge and external sources.
- Visualize: Napkin.ai transforms your findings into compelling visuals.
Embrace the Future of Enterprise CX
With AI as your research partner, you can unlock new levels of creativity, efficiency, and impact. Don’t let doubt hold you back. Instead, embrace the future of XD research with confidence, knowing that you have the tools and knowledge to create exceptional customer experiences.
Take the Next Step
- Experiment: Consider an important user journey in your enterprise where you know value can be unlocked.
- Collaborate: Partner with the XD research experts at Orion to understand those user journeys and identify opportunities that will drive real value in your organization.
- Innovate: With clear and valuable initiatives—backed by empirical data and projected ROI—create a roadmap and start innovation.
For decades, Orion Innovation has been helping businesses find new ways to solve critical business challenges, provide user experience design services, and drive AI-driven innovation. Explore our Experience Design Strategy offerings.
As a frequent speaker on product design and strategy, XD Director Matt Pendleton shares insights on scaling startups, fostering a culture of innovation, and leveraging design to achieve strategic goals.
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