Insight Out 2025—how AI is reshaping customer understanding and the way product teams work

Insight Out 2025 did more than celebrate the power of customer intelligence. It gathered global leaders at the intersection of product, design, research, and customer experience, inviting them to share real lessons for making sense of our AI-driven age and laying down a roadmap for the future. Hosted at San Francisco’s iconic Fort Mason, Dovetail’s flagship conference for designers, researchers, and CX professionals, navigated uncertainty around the future of our industries and buzzed with anticipation about the fast-changing role of AI in product and team landscapes. We were proud to showcase our latest Dovetail product innovations, including contextual chat, a host of new Channels integrations, magic insights, and more. Check out our 2025 Spring Launch blog post to learn more. We were also thrilled to host some of our industry’s brightest minds through a variety of talks, panels, and intimate fireside chats, making it a truly unforgettable experience.

Why did we put it on? The goal was simple but ambitious—to create a space for honest discussions about what deep customer understanding will mean as technological innovation accelerates. The result was a practical, hopeful roadmap for leaders on the front lines of modernizing teams, building trust, and putting customer intelligence at the center of every decision.

Here are five key takeaways that shaped the conversation at Insight Out 2025.

The biggest differentiator for companies today is customer understanding

The landscape of product development is changing at high speed. With AI drastically accelerating iteration cycles and driving down development costs, businesses can now get products to market faster than ever. Yet, in this environment, speed alone is no longer enough. Teams must adapt by shifting their focus from just rapid delivery to building a deep, sustained understanding of their customers.

Jonathan Widawski, founder and CEO of Maze, captured the essence of this in the panel From pixels to profit: The next era of UX tools:

“Companies have been shaped to be time-to-market machines—output machines for the past 20 years. The goal was ‘how can we push stuff faster to market’. All of a sudden all of those things become irrelevant. It commoditized the capacity for people to build stuff. And so in that world, insights become the only remaining differentiator—how deeply and how continuously do you understand your users—become the only thing that matters.”

Watch the full session: From pixels to profit: The next era of UX tools

This shift challenges leaders to re-center their teams on listening and learning, not just shipping. With AI commoditizing core capabilities, customer understanding is fast becoming the edge that separates market leaders from followers. The message from Insight Out 2025 was clear: Double down on truly knowing your customers, because it’s the most enduring source of competitive advantage you have.

The structure of teams is changing

AI is not just changing what organizations build—it’s transforming how teams work together. Traditional, hierarchical structures are giving way to smaller, more autonomous teams. These multidisciplinary squads will move with agility, experiment boldly, and own their decisions end-to-end. It’s a dramatic pivot from rigid optimization to open exploration.

Jess Holbrook from Microsoft AI offered keen insight on this shift:

“I think that we’ll see the normal kind of size of what we count as a team shrink… I think that there’s going to be more of these smaller, more multidisciplinary teams that are operating a lot more autonomously and have a lot more authority in decision making.”

Watch the full session: Ignore all previous instructions: Where is UX Research headed now that AI is everywhere?

Why does this matter? Smaller teams foster accountability, speed, and a willingness to test new ideas. They break through bottlenecks, silos, and handoffs, unlocking fresh approaches to customer problems. For large enterprise companies, this means rethinking how you set up your teams for success in the future, empower teams with both autonomy and clarity, and encourage cross-functional collaboration.

Design is starting to look a little different

The design landscape is undergoing a transformation with the rise of AI. As AI takes over routine, low-level tasks, human effort will shift toward higher-level responsibilities, like orchestrating, managing, and deciding what needs to be done.

Usability pioneer Jakob Nielsen shared his thoughts on this paradigm shift, saying, “The human role will be to orchestrate or synchronize all of these different things that are done by AI. We’re going to uplift the human contribution to be more like a manager of the AI, rather than the one doing the handcrafted design.”

Watch the full session: The past, present, and future of design and usability with Jakob Nielsen

Nielsen raised a thought-provoking question: AI has revolutionized other fields by analyzing vast datasets, uncovering insights at scale. As he put it, “If you spend more gold, AI gets smart and bold.” But can AI achieve the same level of advancement for usability insights? Could it one day "understand" what makes a design effective by analyzing millions of testing sessions and design examples?

One thing remains certain: the human role in design is shifting. Designers will provide agency, deciding what should be done, and judgment, evaluating the quality of AI-generated solutions. As the collaboration between humans and AI deepens, it promises to redefine the field of design and the way we create in the future.

To retain customer trust, security & compliance need to form the foundation of AI capabilities

AI supercharges access to customer intelligence, but it also raises new risks. Leaders are navigating a tricky balance between enabling widespread use of AI-powered tools and maintaining strict data privacy, reliability, and transparency standards. Without strong foundations in security and compliance, organizations risk eroding the very customer trust they hope to earn.

Dovetail’s Head of Security and Compliance, Nathan Miller, and AI engineer Peter Wooden, spoke at Insight Out 2025 about early missteps and ongoing improvements at Dovetail as well as the pillars behind Dovetail’s AI approach:

Discover how we at Dovetail approach AI integration. Watch the Spark talk

AI is a partner, not a threat

As research expert Sam Ladner said during the panel Mediated Meaning—AI’s Role in the Research Craft: 

When it comes to research, AI holds the potential to drive remarkable efficiency gains. However, there’s a lingering concern about losing the deep understanding and empathy that come from direct customer interactions. To stay ahead, people who do research must evolve from hands-on operators to strategic leaders, guiding AI tools to produce accurate and ethical results while preserving the quality of participant experiences. This shift offers an exciting opportunity to rethink our approach—not just in research, but in design, customer experience, and beyond.

Through all the changes AI introduces, one truth remains: connecting with and understanding customers is irreplaceable. 

Jared Forney, Research Operations Principal at Okta, captured this sentiment perfectly: 

"For all the great analysis summarization tools, all the AI-generated insights, including the innovations showcased in this morning’s keynote, none of it exists without the interview, without the researcher, without the participant. Without that, it all exists in a vacuum." 

To hear more, watch the full session: Mediated meaning: AI’s role in the research craft

Moving forward with customers at the forefront

The energy at Insight Out 2025 was both practical and optimistic. Yes, AI brings rapid changes, new uncertainties, and the need to rewire how teams and organizations operate. But the opportunities are just as significant. The companies that will win the next decade will be those that listen deeply, iterate bravely, and build trust at every layer, from their internal teams to their external customers.

For leaders, the time is right to lean into customer understanding. Change is here, and so are the practical tools and mindsets to thrive. The insights from Insight Out 2025 offer a clear north star.

Want to catch up on all of the Insight Out 2025 action? Watch the keynote, or subscribe to our YouTube channel for more talks and sessions.