Paul Svoboda is Director & Head of UX Strategy & Design at EMD Digital, an affiliate of Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany, where he leads multidisciplinary teams of designers, researchers, and software developers building AI-native products for regulated scientific environments. His current work spans Liquid Images — an AI image generator deployed across Merck — and the next generation of agentic systems that accelerate scientific workflows and drive meaningful business value.
Before joining EMD Digital, Paul shaped connected-vehicle experiences at Razorfish and helped build COBI, the smart-bike startup acquired by Bosch. This mix of entrepreneurial speed and design-driven rigor shapes his approach to product development today. At Merck, he established the Liquid Design ecosystem and introduced new ways of working that help teams move faster, collaborate more effectively, and stay anchored in real user needs.
He focuses on the intersection of UX, AI, and regulated science — a space where speed, rigor, and trust all have to hold at once.
Past Talks
12 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