This month, team members from Bold Insight will join the global EPIC People community of innovators, researchers, and designers to explore EPIC2025’s conference theme: Intelligences – the multiple, collective, and distributed capabilities of social, technical, business, and environmental systems.

Larry Becker, Director at Bold Insight, and Katie Johnson, Global Head of Research & Consumer Insights at Panasonic Well, will present From chaos to innovation: Understanding products and people in a non-deterministic world, during the Frameworks for responsible AI innovation thematic session. Drawing on insights from collaborative work between Bold Insight and Panasonic Well, they will demonstrate how ethnography and simulations overcome limitations of traditional usability methods when developing products that include LLMs. The case study will detail the rapid path from study design to insight and patent-pending features, with research rigor preserved even as AI systems evolve.

“This partnership let us reimagine how emerging AI products can be studied,” said Becker. “Combining ethnographic methods with product simulations gave us a flexible framework that helps teams move ideas and innovate faster- without sacrificing the much-needed discernment that only humans bring.”

In addition to the presentation, Bold Insight Director Lindsey DeWitt Prat and Anna Metsäranta, Head of Sustainable AI at Solita, will host a salon titled Interactive AI and cultural complexity. The session will invite participants to examine the essential connections between AI and language, considering how discourse and mental models of AI shape our thinking, observations, expectations, and interactions with these systems. DeWitt Pratt was recently welcomed into EPIC leadership, joining the Board of Directors as Secretary. Her long-standing engagement with EPIC includes leading a tutorial on AI research tools, contributing to a virtual session on GenAI and ethnographic research, and presenting her paper on AI in African contexts in collaboration with Google and Mantaray Africa at EPIC2024.

Kirsten Bruckbauer, Partner at Bold Insight, and Jillian Powers, Senior Director of AI Strategy at Slalom will lead Redefining algorithmic intelligence in practice. Presentations in this session will discuss how local knowledge, strategic ambiguity, and ethnographic refusal can be applied to reshape AI and create intelligences that are more responsive to local contexts and needs.

The event takes place September 16–19 in Helsinki, Finland. Visit the event website to learn more.

About EPIC
EPIC is a nonprofit membership organization, global community, and annual conference that supports the professional development, learning, and leadership of people who practice and promote ethnography. 

About Bold Insight
Bold Insight is a UX and human factors research agency based in Chicago and London. We execute projects that span the product development life cycle, conducting user research that informs early product design and global human factors validation. We work with digital, next-generation technology—medical devices, mobile apps, IFUs, and customer journeys. See how we are shaping the future of AI and emerging tech.