Theo Paraskevopoulos
Founder and CEO @ Growcreate | Advocate of human-centric AI
Köln, Germany
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Theo works at the intersection of strategy, design and technology. He helps businesses and startups understand and adopt AI to empower their teams and improve their customer experience.
Theo contributes to the global AI conversation as author of Humans After All, a weekly newsletter, and co-host of Beside Ourselves, a podcast.
A Greek-British national, he lives in Cologne with his family and an expanding record collection.
Area of Expertise
Topics
Beyond dashboards: AI as the new UX of data
Why do we expect customers to think like amateur data analysts? As an experience, a dashboard can feel more like homework than customer service. This session argues that dashboards will soon be replaced by AI agents that act as "Data-to-Language" converters, improving trust and loyalty.
The aim is to provide the audience with a clear path to empower their service teams and delight their customers. To illustrate, I will demonstrate a vanilla financial app that gradually transitions from a data-delivery UI to a conversational UI. We will explore how “anticipatory” agents can help relationship managers address exceptions and provide proactive customer support.
Learning aids and outcomes:
- Good design is invisible: why the best interface for customers is as minimalist as possible, and how to replace clutter with conversation.
- Data-to-Language conversion: a demo showing how to use AI to translate complex data into insights, actions and story lines
- Loyalty requires proactive action: use "anticipatory" agents to spot irregularities, explain them and recommend changes
- Safety first: defining "hard ”and "soft" guardrails to ensure accuracy, reliability and keeping relationship managers in the loop.
So AI writes the code. What do I do?
AI is rapidly automating many aspects of the software development process. For many developers, this sparks an identity crisis: if AI writes the code, what is my role? In this talk, I argue that the risk lies not in the technology itself but in clinging to an outdated job description.
The talk will introduce the concept of Job Crafting, a framework for proactively redesigning your role by revising the duties traditionally assigned by a manager. Conversely, managers and leaders should encourage their teams to align their strengths and interests with what creates value for the company.
Better together: How Partnerships drive Tech
Gates and Allen, TCP and IP, Design and Code, Content and Commerce - the history of tech is a story of successful partnerships. An open-source ecosystem itself is a network of partnerships between teams that make the software, those that extend it and those who implement it. Drawing from my own experience fostering a collaborative culture at GrowCreate, I will discuss the components of successful partnerships and invite you to consider why we work better when we work together.
Mission-critical, or critical of the mission?
Every leader plans to use AI to accelerate "mission-critical" operations. But by deploying AI solely for efficiency, leaders risk creating a culture that rewards speed over creativity and is incapable of being "critical of the mission". To generate value from AI, leaders must help their employees be more effective and, therefore, essential.
The talk argues that leaders cannot save their way to a competitive advantage: they must continuously invest in building capabilities and upgrading the employee experience. More than anything else we can control, workflow design underpins culture. And culture, as Peter Drucker said, eats strategy for breakfast.
Learning aids and outcomes:
- Find job-preserving efficiencies by infusing workflows with AI to make your team more effective, rather than obsolete.
- Rethink incentives and shift from crude efficiency metrics to reward creativity, originality, and problem-solving.
- Mind the traps of AI sycophancy that stifles debate and diversity, and the AI Mediocrity that disincentivises excellence.
- Bring customers closer by encouraging “Job Crafting” to redirect time saved from automating routine tasks into deeper relationships.
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