Parth Rathod &
Roland Butler
Principal Product Designer & Managing Director @ Zalando
Presentation - English
Setting up and scaling a design system until you're DZY
Most conversations about AI and UX focus on consumer products, where AI fills a gap in the user's knowledge. But inside organisations, a different challenge is emerging: the users are experts, not just AI users and the tool has to work around their expertise rather than replace it. Designing an expert's tool as if it were built for anyone is a risk that quietly undermines the very people it's meant to help.
Drawing on real work building AI-assisted tooling at Zalando, this session explores what changes when your user already knows more than the machine. You'll leave with:
Why designing AI tools for experts is a fundamentally different problem
How to uncover the hidden layers of an expert's real job
Where AI genuinely fits and where human judgment must stay
Practical patterns for trust, control, and exception design
How this reshapes the designer's role and the organisation For designers, researchers, and design leaders.
About Parth
Parth Rathod is a Principal Product Designer at Zalando, working within the Content Solutions business unit on enterprise and B2B tooling. His team designs the internal platforms that help teams, brands, and partners produce fashion content at scale. His recent work focuses on AI-assisted systems for campaign production and generating product media, where the central challenge is designing for expert operators rather than everyday consumers. He's particularly interested in the intersection of design, AI, and business strategy inside large organisations.
About Roland
Roland is the MD of DeepAR a Zalando Group company specialising in AI and augmented reality fashion content. Previously Roland led product and technology at Zalando Content Solutions building a platform for fashion content that leverages AI across transactional, inspirational and immersive content at massive scale to enhance customer inspiration across Zalando's consumer-facing brands and build an operating system for European commerce.