Paul Svoboda is Director and Head of User Experience Strategy and Design at EMD Digital, an affiliate of Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany, where he leads UX strategy, product direction, and design execution across a global science and technology portfolio. Based in Boston, he drives the integration of user centred design into complex digital products and platforms, shaping experiences that support research, healthcare and enterprise innovation.
Paul has spent more than eight years at EDM Digital in senior UX leadership roles, building the organisation’s design capability and embedding UX strategy into product and business planning. Previously, he led digital product design for COBI, worked as an art director at SapientRazorfish, and began his career in digital design at Neue Digitale.
Upcoming Talks
13 May 2026
Most enterprise transformations stall in meetings. At EMD Digital, change is shipped as software. Workflow platforms and creative automation make better practices the default, so teams adopt new ways of working through use. With AI, these tools become adaptive systems that guide, learn, and scale faster than top-down plans. In this session, Paul Svoboda shows how a product-first, AI-accelerated approach makes transformation tangible, repeatable, and self-sustaining.
Key learnings:
- Lead transformation through products, not presentations
- Use AI to amplify adoption and learning
- Build tools that make change self-reinforcing
- Replace alignment meetings with systems that do the teaching