Jod Kaftan

Jod Kaftan — Digital Experience Design Senior Director at NTT DATA. Talks and sessions delivered at UXDX.

Jod Kaftan

Digital Experience Design Senior Director

Jod Kaftan is Digital Experience Design Senior Director at Launch by NTT DATA. He has more than 20 years of end-to-end experience across enterprise organizations, agencies and startups, driving cross-channel experiences for organizations including Sony, Microsoft, Riot Games, Google and Wells Fargo. Jod has long advocated for human-centered businesses and solutions designed for resilience and enduring value. Before joining NTT DATA, Jod led design teams at Oracle and Accenture Song and worked as an experience designer and strategist at Razorfish and Possible. Jod has an MFA from Naropa University and a BFA from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts.

Past talks

3 talks · 3 events

2026

UXDX San FranciscoNov 2026

Talk

The Next Interface Is the Organization

AI isn’t just changing what teams build. It’s redesigning work itself. As roles and workflows shift, product, design and engineering leaders must move beyond products and services to shape how the organization works. Even the strongest AI vision will fail if the organization cannot absorb it. This session explores how to design organizations that are ready to turn AI’s potential into real change: - How do we redesign jobs and workflows around AI? - What can design bring to organizational transformation? - Why do traditional change programs fail to change how work actually happens? - How can employees help shape the AI-driven organization they’ll work within?

Jod Kaftan

2024

UXDX EMEAOct 2024

Design for Tomorrow vs. Design for Today

Should UX designers prioritise designing solutions for the ever-changing future (Design for Tomorrow) or focus on delivering practical solutions with immediate benefits (Design for Today)? Practicality vs. Investment: Do the costs of deep futurism outweigh the potential benefits? Agility vs. Vision: Can a long-term vision hinder an organization's ability to adapt to change?

Jod Kaftan

Alex Burke

UXDX USAMay 2024

Strategic AI Integration in Engineering Teams: Lessons from Google's Applied ML Approach

Most organizations struggle today with the pace of change, especially as it applies to the tension between capturing near-term revenue and long-term market viability. While there are popular frameworks, such as the 3 Horizon framework that inform planning, few organizations apply futurist principles and methodologies to the 3rd horizon, missing an opportunity to apply evidence-based imagination on the futures that we want to author now. Jod will share insights on how futurism practices can be integrated into the product design sphere to create a visionary blueprint for innovation. He will illustrate how a commitment to experimentation and adopting a long-term thinking mindset can lead to groundbreaking products and services that resonate with generations to come. Learn about the methods and mindsets that empower designers to transcend traditional boundaries and engage with the future as an active element of their design process. From embracing 10-year time horizons and longer, such expansive thinking contributes to the creation of products and services that not only fit into a long-term vision but also catalyze the very future they envision. Prepare to be inspired by a future-forward approach that fuses the essence of futurism with practical design strategies to drive progress and pave the way for a new world of innovation, today.

Jod Kaftan