Note: This blog covers the conversation with Sridhar Ramanna - Associate Director of Design at GeekyAnts, which reveals his insights shared as an AI thoughtmaker on how the interplay between AI, human creativity, and collaboration will shape the future of digital customer experiences.
Customers approach a digital product with an expectation of what it should deliver. From the customer’s perspective, the technology behind the product, including the frontend, backend, or AI, is not the primary concern. The expectation is a product that provides a good customer experience.
This idea shaped a discussion between Prem Prakash Goswami and Sridhar Ramanna, Associate Director of Design at GeekyAnts, on the AI Thoughtmakers podcast. Their conversation covered digital customer experience, AI in design, cross-functional collaboration, mobile experiences, research, and the skills designers need as AI enters their workflows.
Watch the full conversation on YouTube →
Customer Experience Extends Beyond the Design Team
Customer experience cannot sit within one function. Sridhar describes it as a collaboration across research, design, development, marketing, maintenance, and other functions involved in the product.
Strong design paired with poor development can affect the product. The same problem can occur when design and development work as intended but the product does not meet user expectations. Each function has a role in shaping the experience.
Teams also need to understand the target user and consider feedback from people who use the product. Sridhar discusses customer satisfaction, customer feedback, and willingness to recommend a product as inputs that matter alongside revenue.
For him, CX depends on contributions from different departments rather than decisions made by one team.
Mobile Has a Growing Role in the Customer Journey
Sridhar sees mobile as a priority for the future of CX. He points to portability and interactions through taps and swipes as reasons for its role in digital experiences.
His view does not remove the need for web, tablet, or other interfaces. These channels will continue to support mobile, while mobile takes priority in the product experience.
AI Can Enhance Design Without Replacing Human Creativity
As AI enters UX workflows, one question continues to surface: will AI replace designers?
Sridhar’s answer is no. His view centers on the difference between enhancement and creativity. AI can support a process and produce variations, but creativity comes from the person using the tool.
He illustrates this through the example of a coffee mug. An UI/UX designer can look at the product and use creativity to visualize it. AI can support changes and variations in elements such as color or form.
For Sridhar, this principle applies beyond design. AI can enhance processes across customer experience, development, marketing, and other functions, but it does not replace human thinking and creativity.
Design Is Moving From Individual Screens to Systems
Sridhar describes a change in how designers approach digital products. In the past, designers focused on designing individual screens. The focus has shifted toward system-based design.
This requires designers to consider inputs from development, pre-sales, marketing, and other functions involved in the product. Customer experience comes from the interaction between these departments rather than design decisions made by one function.
AI Literacy Is Becoming Part of the Designer’s Skill Set
AI tools form part of this change. Sridhar discusses Figma Make and Claude in the context of design and development collaboration. He also refers to ChatGPT for communication and Gemini for graphical interfaces. The tool depends on what the designer wants to achieve.
Sridhar connects AI literacy with prompt writing. Designers need to understand what the end user wants and what the product needs before asking an AI tool to produce an output. Without that understanding, repeated prompts may not produce the intended result.
AI can support brainstorming as well. When teams need design variations, these tools can generate options without requiring designers to create each version from scratch. Sridhar describes this use as support for variation rather than creativity.
CX Problems Need Research Before Solutions
One principle appears across Sridhar’s discussion of customer experience: teams should understand the pain point before moving to a solution.
He shares an example involving an e-commerce platform where user traffic dropped during the checkout journey. When the team examined the experience, it found repeated fields and a checkout process that users found complicated.
The team reframed the checkout experience around usability. Sridhar states that traffic progressing through this part of the journey increased from around 30 percent to between 60 and 70 percent after the changes.
The example reinforces his recommendation to research the pain point instead of jumping into solution mode. Backend teams can provide traffic data, while other functions can contribute their inputs to the customer experience.
Large Organizations Face a Cross-Functional CX Challenge
Sridhar connects CX challenges in large organizations with their size, processes, and complexity.
As organizations grow, the number of departments increases, which can make collaboration between functions a challenge. Sridhar identifies this collaboration as an important part of creating a better customer experience.
His recommendation is to focus on what the end user needs, research the pain point, and avoid moving into solution mode before understanding the problem. He also points to the need for a roadmap that brings cross-functional departments into the process.
Core Design Skills Remain Important in an AI-Assisted Workflow
Sridhar places creativity at the center of a designer’s role. Technology can enhance the designer’s capabilities, but the designer needs to know what the user wants and what the product should deliver.
He identifies storytelling, creativity, patience, observation, and practice as skills designers should develop. He also encourages designers to build literacy in AI tools that can support their work.
For designers entering the field, his advice is to develop creativity through observation and practice while building skills with the technologies that can enhance their work. He also advises designers to limit dependency on tools as they develop their careers.
The Future of CX Will Focus on Personalization and Prediction
When asked to describe the future of CX, Sridhar points to personalization and prediction.
He expects future experiences to use available data to anticipate what a user may want before the user makes a request. He illustrates this through a meal selection example, where a system could present a list of menu options before the user decides what to have for lunch.
For Sridhar, personalization and prediction represent key directions for digital customer experience over the next five years.
Building Digital Customer Experiences Around User Needs
The discussion with Sridhar presents digital customer experience as a combination of research, design, development, technology, and collaboration around the end user. AI can support design variations, personalization, prediction, and product processes, while creativity and an understanding of the user remain part of the human role. This perspective connects with GeekyAnts’ Digital Customer Experience services, which bring design, technology, and product thinking together to shape digital customer journeys.
