Name: From Everyday AI to Global Impact
Uploaded: 2025-12-02
Duration: 16 min 41 s
Description: From the tangible tools we interact with daily to inter-species design thinking and global conservation efforts, a design leader at one of the world’s largest tech companies explains how investing in education, partnering with organizations that advance society, and expanding our imagination beyond human-centered design creates the foundation for prototyping our collective future.

From the tangible tools we interact with daily to inter-species design thinking and global conservation efforts, a design leader at one of the world’s largest tech companies explains how investing in education, partnering with organizations that advance society, and expanding our imagination beyond human-centered design creates the foundation for prototyping our collective future.

From Everyday AI to Global Impact

Conferences

You too, well you 3. It's gonna be a tough act to follow. Next, let's see how AI has become increasingly embodied into our daily lives. I'll be chatting with the VP of design at Microsoft AI, Liz Dancio. Liz has built a remarkable career spanning design, education, media, and technology at Microsoft AI. She works on the works on the first consumer AI product that became co-pilot, specializing in AI and search. She oversees the content design team for. Of consumer facing products and behind the scenes model fine tuning and evaluation and so much more. She'll guide us on Microsoft's journey from developing the AI that we use every day to its transformative potential for society. Please join me in welcoming Liz Danzigo. Come sit, come join. You really have had such an unusual career. We're going to talk about nonlinearity later today, but you really do embody it, um, spanning design and journalism and media where my heart lives, um, education. And I like to think of you as a person that has a heart for social impact but a brain for strategic design thinking with real business impacts. And as a result, I think you have an unusual role at Microsoft which we're going to dig into today. um, but I do want to flag for the purposes of this conversation, in addition to the things that you do all day, we're going to also be turning our way, our attention away from the chat and the interfaces and the search and all the tools that we use and debate and work. about and wonder about. I'm on to AI and you have a beautiful phrase for this a global material for possibility and the work that you're doing and you've done to prepare students and your Microsoft colleagues, clients, partners and friends to imagine that better world. But to understand the context, let's start with your role at Microsoft. You have a very, very big job, and I struggle to sometimes wrap my mind around what it is you actually do all day for the last 3 years. Yes, so well thank you, thank you so much for the introduction and for um for being here, um, with, uh, with all of us and I am, I struggle to think about what my, my role is. Microsoft is a very large place uh I I work in an. Or within Microsoft called Microsoft AI, which is between 8 and 9000 people and uh believe it or not, it feels like a very small community in the way that we support each other and show up for one another. Um, my role is to lead the design team and the content design team and the content design team is a group of writers of kind of UX writers and also writers that fine tune and evaluate the model, uh, directly as well. Most of our work is either with generative search, um, new forms of search, looking at search across Microsoft platforms and services, but also looking at how copilot shows up directly to the consumer. And so it's in contrast to how co-pilot might show up in one's work on the enterprise side we're going sort of directly to the consumer in their everyday life, um, on the streets, etc. So, um, every time we use these tools, it's your, it's you and your team work that we're seeing. I'm, I'm really behind at all. That's true. No, no, it really, the, the search search really does, however, search and co-pilot together, which is a topic of great interest, uh. Internally, uh, work together and really are in many different places, so the team is quite spectacular. I want to dig into your history a little bit because you came to Microsoft, as our friend Liam Neeson would say, with a very specific set of skills. Um, and you were, which I think is relevant as we'll we'll continue our conversation, specifically in education. Can you talk to us about what you were doing right before you got to Microsoft AI, right? So about almost 20 years ago I had the opportunity to found a new kind of graduate program which became something called the MFA and Interaction Design program at the School of Visual Arts in New York. City and I led that program uh for that time looking at how to keep students who are graduating from this 2 year program what we called about 3 to 5 years ahead of the industry by the time they graduated so many of the faculty, if not 100% of the faculty at the time were what we call adjunct, so not full time there, but also. Within the profession, bringing the skills of the profession into academia, bringing the the sort of learnings and new ways of thinking from academia out to the profession, and then creating a curriculum that would keep people ahead by the time they graduated, take take some foresight and experimentation, failures and lots of learning that I do think that I've brought back into the work of Microsoft alongside of that I. Was the vice president of design and then SVP of digital at NPR leading their product team so thinking about how media and designing with and alongside the public uh made sense in terms of the the longitudinal value of like journalism and the integrity of how journalism shows up to people in their homes and their businesses and their cars. in their podcasts, so that was also something that I was doing right before Microsoft. So taking those two sort of media and journalism, designing for the public, not designing for the public, designing with and alongside the public and and education, long career and sort of education and thinking about that and bringing them together really serves us well in an organization as large as Microsoft working. Um, with Microsoft AI in a space that is new every single day, that's my that that would lead me to my next question in a space that's moving that quickly, would it take us behind the scenes on how you stay prepared? Yeah, well, uh, showing up at places like this, learning about what's happening from multiple perspectives, and then thinking about how you bring those multiple perspectives back into the studio. Uh, so creating the conditions for the team to have success that includes um. Understanding what the goal is for our studio. So this year, even though our name is Microsoft AI, that doesn't mean despite the conversation earlier about naming things and sort of alongside of that doesn't mean that everyone is AI native. So we created a goal for our organization that every person in the studio will become AI Native by the end of the fiscal year. And so, as you all know, you can't just say something to make it true. You have to put in place conditions for that to be successful. So my colleague and I, Jess Holbrook started something that we're calling the Royal Academy of AI. Um, and that it's a pretty good name. That place is uh the name is a bit tongue in cheek, uh, but it's supposed to have a serious impact on the way that people are able to approach AI and AI tooling, AI and processes and the workflow. It has goals of staying curious. Commitment to craft and continuous learning and it does it by time boxing the way that we think about it week to week. So we created an overall curriculum. We brought in professors who are peers of the colleagues that we have so that they. The accessibility of the knowledge felt achievable for people and then we allowed people to only work in that space that we allotted so we gave people permission to be messy and to experiment and to do all that but then we said there's no assignments, there's no homework, there's no responsibility for them to think about it outside of those conditions and the response to it has been. Just tremendously positive and we're in the 4th month now, so it's relatively new. You are the first among the first to hear about it outside the walls of Microsoft AI, um, but the ways that's showing up in people's work. The product itself on their teams, the way that it's showing up in terms of communications and also just in terms of people feeling more satisfied and energized about the possibilities with AI has been tremendous anxious too, exactly lowers the bar of anxiety and maybe fear by allowing people to experiment with multiple tools. When we were prepping, you described a moment that would probably be familiar to many here where your new CEO of Microsoft AI, Mustafa Suleiman, um, joined and found a. A set of products that weren't working as they should and a team that they probably felt, I don't want to put any words in your mouth but just still forming, right? A star still evolving um what, what, what was wrong and what was the fix? Yeah, in March 2024, so just the beginning of last year, Mustafa Soleiman came over to Microsoft, and he had a mandate in mind. So one, we were uniting under a single brand called Microsoft AI. So again, this naming just keeps coming up, doesn't it? It seems to be a thing creating this. Place culture, a way that we can talk about ourselves together and creating this idea that we are all focused on a Microsoft AI, so we're all focused on this idea of creating AI for humans but for the broader impact of society of the world, and he laid down three commitments for us trust, simplicity, and quality. And the way that he did that was by talking about it from the stage when we had town halls talking about it in his weekly emails every time you're in a small meeting with him reinforcing those commitments that we had, and they became ways that we could talk about our work and our processes and the what the goals that we had um individually across the products within Microsoft AI because we're multiple products under one umbrella. And so it became this incredibly kind of amazing uniting force that convened us and allowed us and empowered us to to sort of work together. It's not perfect um we're still we're still evolving, but what it's allowed us to do is work in a similar way, shared language, shared processes, um, and now we're all working on the same cycles we all have the same beginning. Of our process sort of end of the process cycle, so we're sort of in the same time zone, you know, in the same kind of work time zone, if you will, and it's just really transformed the way that we communicate with each other and the impact that we have in the market. Speaking of impact, let's talk about the social impact part of your life, which isn't part of your day job. You had some really interesting case studies, and these are things that people might not think that Microsoft would naturally have an affinity for, right? Yeah, so Microsoft is a large place, as I mentioned, as you all know, and throughout Microsoft there are many, many different teams and pockets that are working on social impact projects, some of which I've had the opportunity to work on in my time there so far. So one recent and yes, people don't often think about social impacts when they think about Microsoft, but what unites us all is our commitment to the. User whether the users, you know, at their, their, their office at their desk or working somewhere out in the wild um but that commit that commitment brings us together so Microsoft understands that the worker or the user has the information that we need to kind of conduct our business and likewise we have information that would empower workers and so about 2 years ago, the end of. 2023, so December 2023, Microsoft forged a partnership, the first of its kind with the AFL-CIO, which is the largest federation of labor unions in the United States, and what that meant was a commitment to three things. One, Microsoft would commit to being part of the ongoing education of workers for the labor unions to Microsoft. would agree to pitch and shape policy on behalf of the labor unions with their input, and 3, Microsoft would host and convene summits in situations where labor union workers and their representatives could inform the way that AI technology is rolling out. So this exchange of ideas is not unlike the work that we do at Microsoft AI where we're centering the human, we're centering the. Context in which that human is and then thinking about how to kind of create a two way kind of street so there's communication going both ways. What's incredibly pointing about this for me is that when you think about who's in labor unions, these are the people who touch the nuts and bolts of the companies where they work and investing in them, them with design thinking seems like a brilliant way to to to to influence the people who actually make things happen. Yeah, the idea of the worker voice being represented in the product, but also, as you're saying, making sure that they're empowered to have that to have that information, the ideas about what's happening and unfurling in the market is so. Important so that when they go back to the bargaining table, their everyday jobs, um, that the ways that they touch our everyday lives, they're gonna be informed worker center design, we are, we are, we just have about a minute left and that if there's so much more that you're doing. I, I was wondering, um, we've talked so much about this conference about the urgent need to prepare people to be fully human, to lead, navigate difference. Um, just as a sort of a parting thought, what have you learned about creating a fully, a truly effective team? Truly effective teams are like new communities that are forming right? They're they're little neighborhoods, uh, cities, you know, within their within their own right, and we talked a lot about architecture and urban planning, uh, here as well. So if you think about the intentional way you might go about forming a community, um, there's been a few things and there are many things. It's different with every community and every neighborhood, so you have to know the constituents. Um, but one, sort of clarity of purpose, making sure that that vision or the clarity of purpose within the team is clear to everyone and finding ways that are interesting and fun and meaningful and accessible to everyone to to kind of share those two, psychological safety, uh, for diverse ideas to make it out, people have to feel safe to voice them so making. So that that that psychological safety is there doing training, being approachable, creating safe space and 3 ambiguity, sort of leaning into the ambiguity and I think that's contingent upon having the culture to do it, but making sure that people feel empowered to kind of go into the ambiguity with uh with creativity to kind of bring bring uh. You know, clarity there. So I think those have been the 3. That's perfect. I'm so glad you're here. Be sure to ask her about Project Sparrow when you see her later and also with the elections but not politics. Liz, thank you so very much for being here. Congratulations on your great success. Thank you so much.