March 2026 – Now
🔍 Background – From AI Assistants to AI Workers
As generative AI rapidly evolved, enterprise software entered a new era. Customers were no longer looking for AI that simply answered questions. They wanted AI that could meaningfully participate in work. This presented an exciting opportunity: What if AI could become a trusted teammate rather than just another tool?
However, designing AI workers introduced entirely new challenges. Product teams needed to answer fundamental questions that had few established best practices:
- What work should AI own?
- How should humans and AI collaborate?
- How do we build trust in autonomous systems over time?
To help answer these questions, I led foundational research to connect real customer workflows with the design of next-generation enterprise AI workers for security professionals.
🗻 Process
Working closely with customers, product managers, designers, and engineers, I investigated how enterprise work could evolve when AI became an active participant in complex workflows. Through field research, I translated customer needs into:
- A long-term vision for enterprise AI workers
- Reusable design principles for human-AI collaboration
- Decision frameworks that aligned product, design, and engineering around a shared strategy
My role extended beyond generating research insights. I helped shape the organization’s thinking about the future of AI-powered work.
🔭 Impact and Next Steps
- Product Strategy: Influenced the product vision for next-generation AI workers capable of automating meaningful enterprise work.
- AI Worker Framework: Established reusable principles for autonomy, delegation, trust, and human oversight that continue to guide product decisions.
- Forward Deployed Research & Customer Adoption: Currently partnering with product managers and enterprise customers to support AI worker implementation and adoption, translating real-world deployment insights into continuous product improvements.
- Academic Contribution: Extended the work beyond the organization through a paper accepted to the CSCW 2026 Industry Track, sharing practical lessons on designing trustworthy enterprise AI workers with the broader HCI community.
✍️ Reflections
Designing AI workers isn’t simply about automating more tasks. It’s about redefining how humans and intelligent systems collaborate, make decisions, and build trust together. I believe the most impactful AI products won’t replace human expertise—they’ll amplify it through thoughtful collaboration. This project reinforced my passion for using research not only to improve products, but also to help define entirely new categories of technology.
DAVID LIN 