Across corporate boardrooms, including those at kyu, artificial intelligence has shifted from future possibility to present imperative, from technology challenge to business opportunity.
IDEO has channeled this moment of corporate AI concern into real revenue: a third of incoming briefs involve AI. Its experiences reveal not just how companies are spending on AI, but how IDEO is helping clients invest in human-centered solutions.
Client names have been blinded where engagements are still ongoing.
Work That Works
IDEO’s AI work runs the gamut, including research, designing, futuring, and training. Product build engagements can last six months or longer, not because the AI is complex, but because designing and building leading-edge products requires sustained client collaboration.
“These are typically longer engagements,” says Jenna Fizel, co-managing director of its Emerging Tech Lab. “Many times it’s follow-on work where we already have established credibility with our clients.” An ideal project goes from start to finish: identifying the problem, understanding the solution, then actually building it.
A different urgency drives companies already deep in digital transformation. These clients arrive with a specific question, namely: How do you weave AI capabilities into products that millions (and in some cases, billions) of people already use without breaking what works? These integration challenges require different expertise — less blue-sky visioning, more careful threading of new capabilities through established behaviors.
“We’re seen as innovative and we can get them to a good result quickly and efficiently,” Fizel says.
Selling Tomorrow’s Possibilities
IDEO has always helped companies imagine what’s possible, and these days that includes “tangible ways of feeling the future.” In one instance, a global electronics manufacturer needed to “continuously earn relevance with diverse consumers” while navigating rapid technological change. The solution wasn’t a technology roadmap, says Fizel, but a “future-facing vision” to ease the client out of a shorter-term mindset. Showing how AI was used in IDEO’s design process helped win the brief in that it established “trust and belief.”
Better Organizations, Not Just Better Tools
The most sustainable AI spending focuses on capability-building rather than quick fixes. A trio of big brands has already signed on to address the human side of technological change, creating innovation practices and governance structures that outlast single AI initiatives.
These “Future Ways of Working” engagements acknowledge that organizational change moves more slowly than technological possibility. Here, says Fizel, companies look for guidance “navigating stakeholder configurations and bridging understanding across silos,” as there will always be human challenges in any AI-driven transformation.
IDEO’s expertise has helped it build out offerings around advisory or training engagements. Companies looking to upskill have tapped it for workshops and training that run the gamut from low-cost relationship-building sessions to larger strategic intensives, offering a low-risk exploration of what can be high-stakes decisions.
Bespoke but Achievable
A less glamorous but equally valuable application of AI is to speed up work. Earlier this year, healthcare leader Sanofi approached IDEO to support the process of soliciting and evaluating medical device design ideas from around the world. The client insisted they could administer this through web forms, but after diving into the challenge, it was clear this wouldn’t cut it. IDEO needed to produce a bespoke collaboration platform.
Sanofi was looking to unlock long-term value in medical device innovation through the distributed expertise of post-secondary students and recent graduates. This request would have been impossible with its resources and timeline, even just a few months before.
The result? The Device Innovation Challenge platform, which came together in just seven workdays. Fizel describes it as work that “bridges otherwise unbridgeable gaps with new tools and technologies.”
The Infrastructure Investment
Less visible but equally valuable, clients are paying for the technical infrastructure that makes AI integration possible. Design systems work addresses the nuts and bolts of intelligent features, creating frameworks that support the rich user experiences required to engage deeply and productively with AI functionality.
These projects typically emerge from larger relationships where companies have realized their existing infrastructure “is not fit for purpose” for AI-enhanced products. The investment here reflects a deeper understanding that successful AI implementation requires foundational work, and not just algorithms.
IDEO is treating AI as a strategic discipline requiring new frameworks for client engagement, pricing, and delivery. For the iconic agency, the real opportunity isn’t in the technology itself but in the expertise required to thoughtfully deploy it.