Two years ago, Josh Clark and Veronika Kindred previewed a book about a coming era of sentient digital experiences on this show. That book, Sentient Design, is out now — and the future it predicted arrived faster than most companies' data, governance, or restraint could keep up with.
We talk with them about why most "agentic" features are still just a chat sidebar bolted onto an old product, what a gym-booking AI agent's very bad week reveals about designing for agents instead of people, and why Google running the biggest sentient design experiment alive — its own AI Overviews — is already rewriting how businesses get found.
In this episode we cover:
➜ Don't wait for perfect data — legacy data, not ambition, is blocking three live Fortune 50 sentient design projects.
➜ Personalization is quietly becoming individualization — reading the moment, not building a permanent profile.
➜ Defensive design: teaching AI systems humility and users healthy skepticism, so neither is taken at face value.
➜ Agents need their own front door — if you don't design one, somebody finds the back door instead.
➜ AI is a reckoning, not a feature: the real opportunity is removing interface entirely, not adding more of it.
➜ Google's AI Overviews are the biggest live sentient design experiment, and businesses never agreed to it.
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"Putting a chat sidebar on an existing thing, it's like bolting a spoiler onto a crummy Honda." — Josh Clark
"With LLMs, it's a really siloing technology." — Veronika Kindred
"We're not gonna have a single interface that swallows them all — although clearly OpenAI would like to see that happen." — Josh Clark
About Josh Clark & Veronika Kindred:
Josh Clark is principal of Big Medium, a design studio working with organizations on next-generation interfaces, and coined the term "Sentient Design" in 2024. Veronika Kindred is a designer and researcher at Big Medium who leads Sentient Design workshops for startups and Fortune 100 companies. Together they're the co-authors of Sentient Design: Crafting Intelligent Interfaces with AI (Rosenfeld Media, 2026) — and returning guests, having first previewed the book on this show in October 2024.
Find Josh on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshclark/
Find Veronika on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vkind/
Get the book: https://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/sentient-design/
Josh & Veronika set up a coupon code for Product Impact listeners: 20% off Sentient Design at Rosenfeld Media.
➜ Use coupon code: SENTIENT-PI at https://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/sentient-design/
➜ Expires September 12
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➜ Arpy Dragffy Guerrero — https://www.linkedin.com/in/adragffy/
➜ Brittany Hobbs — https://www.linkedin.com/in/brittanyhobbs/
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