There’s always something new to learn in UX. For today’s designers, understanding adaptive user interfaces and Human-AI interaction is no longer optional— it’s essential. In fact, in the most recent ADPList job market report, one specialization saw significant growth: “Conversation Design roles have surged by 8.2%, likely due to advancements in AI and chatbots,” [Source].

If ever there were a time to specialize in conversation design, it’s now. Lucky for you, I have bit of experience in this area and, last year, I delivered my first on-stage talk on Conversation Design for Wearables at the world’s most loved Conversation Design conference, Unparsed [Replay].

Whether you’re a seasoned designer or new to the field, attending these design conferences can help you: a) stay competitive with the latest insights and technologies and b) understand how to design everyday products that integrate AI. These skills will be essential for designers like you to create useful and trustworthy AI products. In this post, I’ll highlight the most notable and worthwhile design conferences in 2025.

Please note all prices (except where indicated) are in USD and reflect the prices available on the date of Jan 7, 2025.

Q1

Pixel Perfect

🔗Conference Page
When: January 24, 2025
Where: In-person at London, UK
Tickets: general £450, last-minute £499
Discount: use MICAELA20 for 20% off!

UX Now

🔗Conference Page
When: February 18–20, 2025
Where: In-person at New Delhi, IN
Tickets: all access ₹8000

Convey UX

🔗Conference Page
When: February 25–27, 2025
Where: In-person at Seattle, WA + Online
Tickets: online $495, general $1,295

Research By The Sea 2025

🔗Conference Page
When: February 27–28, 2025
Where: In-person at Brighton, UK
Tickets: general £345, last chance 395
Discount: use JOINMICHAEL for 20% off!

SXSW

🔗Conference Page
When: March 7–15, 2025
Where: In-person at Austin, TX
Tickets: early bird interactive $1395, interactive $1695

The European Chatbot & Conversational AI Summit

🔗Conference Page
When: March 18–20, 2025
Where: In-person at Edinburgh, SCT + Online
Tickets: early bird £260, general £380

Leading Design New York

🔗Conference Page
When: March 27, 2025
Where: In-person at New York, NY
Tickets: Sold out

Chatbot Summit 2025

🔗Conference Page
When: March 31—April 1, 2025
Where: In-person at Berlin, DE
Tickets: gold early bird €595, gold €695

Q2

prompt:UX

🔗Conference Page
When: April 8–9, 2025
Where: In-person at Berlin, DE
Tickets: standard 450€, w/ workshop 850€

AI User Conference

🔗Conference Page
When: “Designer Day” April 16, 2025
Where: In-person at San Francisco, CA + Online
Tickets: early bird $99, general $349

CHI 2025

🔗Conference Page
When: April 26 — May 1, 2025
Where: In-person at Yokohama, JP + Online
Tickets: N/A, requires registration

IAC25

🔗Conference Page
When: April 29 — May 3, 2025
Where: In-person at Philadelphia, PA
Tickets: early bird $485, general $585

Figma Config

🔗Conference Page
When: May 6–8, 2025
Where: In-person at San Francisco, CA + Online
Tickets: early bird $399, general $799

Upscale Conf 2025

🔗Conference Page
When: May 20–21, 2025
Where: In-person at San Francisco, CA
Tickets: early bird $350, general $650

Designing with AI 2025

🔗Conference Page
When: June 10–11, 2025
Where: Online
Tickets: early bird $695, general $795, last-minute $895

UX London 2025

🔗Conference Page
When: June 10–12, 2025
Where: In-person at London, UK
Tickets: early bird £1,495, general £1,695

Design Matters ‘25

🔗Conference Page
When: June 16–17, 2025
Where: In-person at Copenhagen, DK + Online
Tickets: online 200€, general 805€

SuperAI

🔗Conference Page
When: June 18–19, 2025
Where: In-person at Singapore, SG
Tickets: early bird $399, general $999

Q3

STRAT 2025 (AI + UX Product Design Strategy)

🔗Conference Page
When: September 9–10, 2025
Where: Online
Tickets: $495

Hatch Conference

🔗Conference Page
When: September 10-12, 2025
Where: In-person at Berlin, DE + Online
Tickets: apply for invite

UX Plus

🔗Conference Page
When: September 14, 2025
Where: In-person at Manila, PH
Tickets: early bird ₱3,490, general ₱3,990

The AI Conference

🔗Conference Page
When: September 17–18, 2025
Where: In-person at San Francisco, CA
Tickets: general $1650, last-minute $2600

UX India 2025

🔗Conference Page
When: September 18–20, 2025
Where: In-person at Hyderabad, IN
Tickets: early bird ₹13,998

UX Nordic

🔗Conference Page
When: September 24–25, 2025
Where: In-person at Copenhagen, DK + Online
Tickets: super early bird 280€, general 390€

Q4

vienna uxcon

🔗Conference Page
When: October 6–8
Where: In-person at Vienna, AT
Tickets: early bird (3-day) 850€, general 950€

AIGA Design Conference

🔗Conference Page
When: October 9–11
Where: In-person at Los Angeles, CA
Tickets: N/A but AIGA members get a discount

Beyond Boundaries Festival

🔗Conference Page
When: October 13–15
Where: In-person at Barcelona, ES
Tickets: N/A

TEDAI San Francisco

🔗Conference Page
When: October 21–22
Where: In-person at San Francisco, CA
Tickets: $1,700

Button Conference

🔗Conference Page
When: October 22–24
Where: Online
Tickets: early bird $595, general $695

AI Summit

🔗Conference Page
When: October 23–25
Where: In-person at Atlanta, GA + Online
Tickets: In-person $650, online $450

AGENTIC (Prev. Voice & AI)

🔗Conference Page
When: October 27–94
Where: In-person at Arlington, VA
Tickets: early bird $995, general $1495

Adobe MAX

🔗Conference Page
When: October 28–30
Where: In-person at Los Angeles, CA
Tickets: N/A

DesignUp25

🔗Conference Page
When: Nov 3–5
Where: In-person at Bengaluru, IN
Tickets: ₹22,950

Oops ⚠️ Not open for 2025!

Unparsed Conference (Cancelled for 2025)

🔗Conference Page

Design Thinkers TOR/VAN

🔗Conference Page

2025 List of UX + AI Design Conferences was originally published in AI-UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

AI experience? It’s like saying electricity experience — too vague.

When you say “web experience” or “mobile experience,” you know exactly what you’re talking about.

What if you were to narrow it? “Conversational interfaces”. Hmm, too constrained & missing the bigger play (I may be biased).

So then, what’s next? “Agentive Experience”.

Perfecto. Visionary yet specific. Defining yet space for experiments. It’s also where the tech is heading — towards an active, autonomous user experience.

🤖 In the era of Agentive UX

So I’ve heard all the hype about “agentic experience” — machines doing everything for you, the “next big thing” and all that jazz.

I bought it… until I spent a month with Christopher Noessel’s Designing Agentive Technology (2017). Here’s the real deal on designing AI agents —

Just for some credibility, who’s Christopher Noessel?

• Veteran in UX design & tech
• Design Principal at IBM, focusing on design for AI,
• Speculator, the sci-fi guy, creator of https://scifiinterfaces.com/
• The guy you call when you want to know how machines should interact with humans

Note — I took the relevant key points from the book that changed the way I look at “designing for AI”. There are many more insights and examples in the book that I would highly recommend reading! While I used the book as a learning resource and intended to share my learnings through excerpts, if the author or the publishers have a problem with any of the content of the article, please reach out.

0/ Agentive vs Assistive vs Agentic

“Huh? They’re different?”

Yes, alloweth me enlighten thee.

Agentic = a back stage thing; agents are working on behalf of the primary AI. FYIFLN “ic” is greek, “agent” latin

Agentive = a front stage thing; the agents are working on behalf of the user. FYIFLN “ive” is latin, “agent” latin.

Assistive = helps you do a goal-based task, faster or with more efficiency. eg: spell-check, auto-correct, phone cameras’ point & click without any complex settings.

*FYIFLN = For Your Information From the Language Nerds.

1/ Agents are persistent loops

From designing intuitive controls for the digital land, focused on “getting a task done quickly in that moment” to shifting to having an agent look for things the user didn’t even know specifically existed.

The aim of the agent isn’t to help you find stuff which is already out there, but more about what could be out there in the future.

Your interests find you.

A.k.a lil auto-pilots.

What would an agentive camera look like?

Instead of you taking point & click photos, a small device on your tshirt takes photos every 30 seconds and at the end of the day/month (1) highlights the best ones, (2) clubs them into categories.

“You focused on living your life and having great photos, rather than taking photos”

— Example from the book

Kind of like Google Photos + always on device w/ camera.

Note to self: Think in goals, not tasks.

• Task: Take photos
• Goal: Preserve happy vacation memories for a group of friends.
• Example: Narrative Clip
• Task: Map out the best route from source to destination
• Goal: Reach destination ASAP, based on real-time scenarios.
• Example: Waze

Pssst… jump ahead of the game

Wondering how can I use AI in my product?

Insights from AIverse’s trending AI-UX patterns ebook covers over 50 examples from top companies designing for AI, a breakdown of their user experience, and future-proof trends you don’t want to miss out on it!

It covers examples for multi-modal, agentive & conversational AI-UX.

🎁 Get it now — the Trending AI-UX patterns!

2/ Sense-Think-Do

Humans-Machines follow an input-process-output loop.

Agents follow a sense-think-do loop.

• Sense how? Face recognition, Biometrics, Handwritten recognition, Activity recognition etc.
• Think how? Algorithms to analyse the data and predict.
• Do how? Via screens, message, sound, haptics, robotics, APIs etc.

An important aspect of designing these agents is to understand the user’s goal and preference. What is it that they want to accomplish? One way is to implicitly collect data (social media, private data, observe the user over time). Another way is to explicitly define them as rules.

Rules = Behaviours + Triggers + Exceptions

• Rules: By which agents operate
• Behaviours: Know how an action is performed
• Triggers: Know when it’s time for action
• Exceptions: Know when not to operate

Triggers need not be date/time stamps, they can be based on the temperature, keywords spoken, email received, biometric data, or event the # of cat videos.

Fill the water bowl for my dog (rule/behaviour), when the temperature rises above 20°C (trigger), up to a maximum of two bowls per day (constraints), except when it gives you the sad puppy eyes (exception)

A prime example? Siri Suggestions. It’s from 2020 but on this journey of catching up with everything that’s happened in AI & Design, it perfectly showcases agentive tech.

• If you get a message with your gym location that you’re going to later on in the day
• Your maps with suggest that location up front
• Around the time of your gym session, Siri will suggest that app in your swipe-down-drawer.

How Siri suggestion works — source WWDC’20

Absolutely obsessed. You have to watch behind-the-scenes.

At the end of the day, an average user just wants smart defaults, not the option to customise or set their softwares.

3/ Agency is Proactive Intelligence

Agents are like a great waiter — there when needed, invisible when not. Some areas where agents can fit in to your product-usage-cycle —

• Preparation: Predict actions and prepare themselves [objects] for use. Nest thermostat sets the temperature before you’ve arrived.
• Optimization: Observe all possibilities and pick the right one for the user. Automatically switching between WIFI, cellular data and Bluetooth based on where you are and trying to do.
• Advising: Observe in progress tasks and suggest better or alternate options. Waze suggesting faster routes based on an accident ahead.
• Manipulation: Do on its own when it knows for sure what the user wants. Gmail adding items to your calendar based on an email.
• Inhibition: Understand enough context to know what is welcome and suppress the rest. Your phone/laptop activating DND mode when you’re giving a presentation.
• Finalization: What can agent end or close when it is no longer in use? Spotify stopping playback when your headphones are taken off.

Success metric of an agent?

When the user says, “Oh wow, that’s exactly what I wanted!”

Surprise and delight, every time.

4/ The spectrum of Auto vs Manual.

One of best experience of agentive tech I’ve experienced has been when driving a “smart” car.

Switching on “cruise control” & “lane driving”. Taking a sip of a chilled pina colada as I relax and let myself be driven into the sunset. Okay so maybe the second half is made up, but the first half is *chef’s kiss*. I can leave the agent running and as soon as I want to switch to manual, I can just take control and drive normally.

*smoooottthhh opperaatorrr..* (only F1 fans get it)

That’s what user want.

1. Auto mode — complete trust, “leaving it to the agentt”
2. Can-I-play-with mode — somewhat trust, “would like to play with it while letting the agent do its task”.
3. Manual mode — no trust, “let me handle this part”

In order to switch between each mode, there needs to be mutual observability, predictability and directability.

If an agentive solution is right for our users, and they aren’t asking for it, it’s up to us to introduce the concept and sell them the idea!

Christopher Noessel

References

• Christopher’s agentic vs agentive — Short blog
• Designing Agentive Technology: AI that works for people — Book (I would highly recommend reading the book, it’s a goldmine!)
• Apple’s Design for Intelligence — Video

All of this is based on the Pre-ChatGPT era, before AI could take (1) natural language input, (2) create a plan, and (3) execute & create iterations.

The Post-ChatGPT era is wilder, & agentive UX more powerful! (as evident from WWDC’24 too)

🔥 What’s the latest AI-UX trend I’m seeing?

“lil robo-helpers running in bulk” a.k.a bulk running tasks parallelly

• V7 Go — extract content.
• Elicit — for researchers to extract content.
• Folk — create content for sales.

What do they do? Break down the processes into little tasks and use a familiar + powerful excel like interface, all powered by AI (using natural language to explain the task).

This makes the platform scalable & perform 1000 tasks at a time! Damn.

This was just 1 of the Trending AI-UX Patterns…

*drumroll*

I curated the top patterns from the hottest apps!

Want insights from the AIxDesign world? How should you use AI in your product?

With over 50 examples from top companies designing for AI, a breakdown of their user experience, and future-proof trends you don’t want to miss out on it!

🎁 Get it now — the Trending AI-UX patterns!

Era of Agentive UX, not Agentic was originally published in AI-UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.