Sasha Merzliakov

Sasha Merzliakov is a digital product and strategy leader based in Australia with 20+ years of experience across AI, product design, and enterprise digital transformation. He is the founder of hcd.ai and winner of the 2023 ACOMM Artificial Intelligence Award with nbn.

About Sasha

I've had the privilege of 20+ years working with some great people building digital products across enterprises, agencies, on contract, and running my own company. I'm a strategic thinker but just as comfortable in the detail. That combination of broad domain experience with the ability to bridge strategy and delivery, has proved invaluable in cutting through noise, ambiguity and inertia to get things done and deliver real value.

A lot of that time has been in large, complex enterprises including Telstra, Westpac, Optus, and nbn. At nbn, I led the development of the nbn Assistant AI chatbot from initial concept in 2017 through to the 2023 ACOMM Artificial Intelligence Award. A key lesson from that initiative wasn't about the technology. It was that AI which understands what people are actually trying to do outperforms AI that's technically impressive, and that Human-Centred Design (HCD) is more important than ever in an AI world.

More recently my focus has shifted to agentic AI systems. Designing, building and running agents and agent teams, like the AI-native operating model at the C-suite level, which is where hcd.ai sits as a practitioner platform rather than a personal blog. Lastly, I'm currently completing an MBA (Technology) at AGSM, UNSW, which is providing me the background, context and frameworks to articulate what years of experience has taught me, and the mindset to broaden my thinking and challenge assumptions.

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

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To get in touch or continue the conversation you can reach me via LinkedIn.

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