About hcd.ai

hcd.ai is a practitioner platform covering human-centred AI strategy, product design, and enterprise transformation. It's written by Sasha Merzliakov, a digital product leader with 20+ years building digital products, and aimed at anyone who's looking for strategic thinking alongside practitioner-level execution, not just news and summaries.

Why hcd.ai?

When OpenAI released ChatGPT in November 2022, it opened the flood gates to a new technological era, much like Apple's iPhone did in 2007 (Newman, 2022). But the comparison only goes so far. Whilst the iPhone put the internet in our pockets, ChatGPT opened the doors to the democratisation of technology and creation itself.

NVIDIA is now using AI to design the very chips that run AI (Harris and Raskin, 2023). Think of the evolutionary flywheel this creates and what speed it's evolving. Gawdat (2023) calls this the double-exponential, the rate at which technology is now improving technology. Models are also being used to train on output from other models, with Shumailov et al. (2023) raising performance questions around degradation. We're iterating on systems we don't fully understand yet.

Since hcd.ai was launched in 2023, that trajectory is harder to ignore. Agentic AI systems work autonomously. Companies running AI-native workflows. Many organisations are still warming up at the starting line, but for those whose journey has started, the distance between the two groups is a real competitive advantage, and growing fast.

In this technology driven environment, human dimensions don't become less important. They become a key defensible advantage that compounds rather than commoditises. Experience. Judgement. The ability to design systems that serve people rather than just process them.

hcd.ai works at that intersection. It covers strategy, design, and AI from the perspective of experimentation and practice, not just research and analysis. The content here comes from doing the work, not just studying it.

What you'll find here

Five sections. AI Leadership covers strategy, risk, and what AI at the C-suite level demands from the people running organisations. The hands-on work lives in AI in Practice, tools and workflows from real deployments. Agentic AI is for anyone building autonomous systems, orchestration patterns and the tradeoffs that determine whether an agent is useful or just expensive. Product Strategy looks at how AI reshapes platform economics and business models. And Resources curates the playbooks and frameworks worth knowing from the companies building at the frontier.

Please note that all views expressed on hcd.ai are my own and do not represent those of my employer.