Kristina Glave was inducted into the CX Hall of Fame for grounding the AI conversation at one of Europe’s largest telecoms in the only thing that actually validates it: real users, including the ones the industry chronically forgets.
Glave leads customer insights research inside the design and innovation department of a major European telecom, currently focused on the AI Phone concept that the company unveiled at Mobile World Congress. The product idea is direct. Instead of hiding AI inside individual app features, build a single assistant that generates the interface around what the user is trying to do. The research challenge underneath that idea is the harder part, and it is the part most product organizations skip.
Her position is plainspoken. Not everybody is fascinated by technology. Designers and product managers, by selection bias, are unrepresentative of the population they are designing for. The seventy-year-old planning a trip to the United States is a different user than the engineer building the assistant, and the design fails or succeeds on whether her experience was studied with the same rigor as the engineer’s. Her research has surfaced something the industry under-credits: elder users are far more open to AI than the practice assumes, once the barriers actually come down.
What earned Glave induction is the discipline of letting the user redefine the assumption rather than letting the assumption redefine the user.
Glave’s practice is based in Germany, leading customer insights research inside a major European telecom’s design and innovation organization. Her body of work has shaped product direction by bringing real-user research into AI product design at a stage where most organizations still rely on internal assumptions. The shift her work has helped drive is the practical demonstration that elder users, often dismissed by AI product organizations, are a more open and demanding audience than the practice’s defaults suggest.
Recognition endorsed by The Global CX Alliance.
