Design Thinking and AI: A New Frontier for Designing Human-Centered AI Solutions

In recent years, design thinking (DT) has become a pervasive innovation approach in the managerial community as a structured way of solving challenging problems through a human-centered perspective. The approach fosters lateral thinking and has a huge impact on the organizational culture and the core elements of the innovation process. At the same time, the number of organizations trying to solve problems through the application of artificial intelligence (AI) is constantly growing, although more than 80% of AI projects never reach deployment due to the wrong strategic approach, poor data quality, or a lack of AI awareness among employees—and those that do remain below profitability expectations. The aim of this paper is therefore to connect the AI and DT communities by proposing a first framework supporting the development of AI solutions in a human-centered way. The contribution of this paper is thus twofold: First, we investigate ways in which design thinking adds real value along the design process of intelligent solutions, thereby enriching the present body of design management literature. Second, we propose a first framework by linking core elements of both worlds to support strategic designers and data engineers in designing such applications. Finally, we propose a research agenda that can serve as a basis for future research directions in order to advance contributions at the intersection of the two fields.