Human x Intelligent

Send us an email! We talk a lot on this show about what AI can do. This one's about what it can quietly take, if you let it. Ricardo Luiz has spent over twenty years building products at the intersection of psychology, UX and AI, and his warning is simple: the moment you outsource what to think, you've outsourced who you are. AI is good enough and fast enough that most people won't...

Send us an email! You've heard the productivity pitch. AI makes you faster. AI makes you more efficient. AI makes your work better. But what if it's also making you worse at working without it and faster than you think? In this episode of Human × Intelligent, I go deeper into a cluster of research and stories that, taken together, paint a picture we can't afford to ignore. A study f...

Send us an email! Building an AI agent has never been easier. But getting it to production? That's where most projects quietly die. In this episode of Human X Intelligent , host Madalena Costa sits down with Joana Mesquita , Machine Learning Engineer at Swiss Post and former ML practitioner at Adidas and Feedzai, to explore what fundamentally changes when you move from deterministic software...

Send us an email! NotebookLM can do in an afternoon what used to take a research team a week, if you know how to prompt it. In this episode of Human × Intelligent, we walk through a complete 8-step AI-assisted research workflow using a real Spotify UX interview study as our working example. Eight participants, 60-minute sessions and a set of raw transcripts, turned into personas, empathy maps, Job...

Send us an email! AI won’t fix your product. In many cases, it makes things worse. In this conversation, Michelle Brito explains why most companies are getting AI adoption wrong and what they should be doing instead. From her work at Volkswagen Digital Solutions, Michelle shares practical insights on designing AI-powered products that actually deliver value and not confusion. In this episode, you’...

Send us an email! Is your team actually using AI, or are they just playing with it? In this episode of Human X Intelligent , host Madalena Costa sits down with Kaisa Martiskainen, AI Operations lead, to uncover the hidden gap in corporate AI adoption. While usage metrics might be up, true understanding is often lagging. Kaisa explains why providing access to chatbots isn’t the same as building cap...

Send us an email! What does it mean to truly anticipate a user and not just what they'll click next...but what they're trying to become? In Episode 19 of Human × Intelligent, Madalena Costa is joined by Joana Cerejo, design lead, AI product designer and author of the Anticipatory Design Playbook. Together, they explore the real depth of anticipatory design, how behavioral science fits in...

Send us an email! In Part II of this conversation, Madalena Costa and Hugo Froes move from diagnosis to direction, exploring what conscious AI adoption actually looks like inside product teams, why designers may be the most underestimated players in the AI era and whether any organization should even be trying to become AI-first. Hugo Froes is Director of Product Strategy at Nagarro and former Hea...

Send us an email! Is AI fixing your company or just exposing what was already broken? Discover how AI is accelerating organizational dysfunction, reshaping product teams and redefining what it means to build consciously in this conversation with product operations leader Hugo Froes. In this episode of Human x Intelligent, Madalena Costa sits down with Hugo Froes, product operations and transformat...

Send us an email! Cognitive debt is what happens when AI tools do your thinking instead of supporting it and the research is now proving it costs you more than you realise. In this episode of Human × Intelligent, I walk through what the science actually says about AI tools and critical thinking, share a practical framework for structuring your thinking before you open any tool and give you three c...

Send us an email! Is AI redefining UX design or replacing it? In this episode of Human × Intelligent , Madalena Costa sits down with Bruno Figueiredo, founder of UXLx and one of the longest-standing voices in UX in Europe, to explore how artificial intelligence is reshaping the design field. From early web design to today’s AI-powered tools, Bruno brings a long-term perspective on technological sh...

Send us an email! The End of the Chatbox? Designing AI interfaces that act, not just answer In this episode of Human × Intelligent , Madalena Costa explores one of the biggest design shifts happening in AI products right now: the possible end of the chatbox as the default interface for artificial intelligence. Chat interfaces made AI accessible to millions of people. They are familiar, flexible an...

Send us an email! This episode was originally going to be about something else, but a conversation over the weekend reminded me of a workflow I use quite often when developing and designing applications. So instead, I decided to share one Human × Intelligent workflow I keep coming back to: Figma → Claude → Figma Rather than treating AI as a chatbot outside the workflow, this setup connects Claude...

Send us an email! ' Most AI pilots don’t fail in the demo. They fail inside the workflow.' In this episode of Human × Intelligent , Madalena Costa speaks with Krystel Leal , a fractional AI deployment lead working at the intersection of enterprise AI implementation, customer success and real-world AI adoption . Krystel shares a simple signal that reveals when teams are moving too fast wi...

Send us an email! In this episode, I’m joined by Krasi Bozhinkova to explore AI cosplay, the shift from AI as a tool to AI as a performed intelligence, where emotion, presence and perceived personhood become more persuasive than proof itself. This conversation goes beyond capability. We talk about: - The moment AI moved from a tool to performing intelligence - Why humans respond to emotional UX as...

Send us an email! Episode 11 (season finale) - The agentic leader: How organizational design changes when your team is a mix of humans and agents AI is no longer just transforming products. It’s transforming organizations, leadership and professional identity . In the Season 1 finale of Human × Intelligent , Madalena introduces the concept of the agentic leader, a new model of leadership for a wor...

Send us an email! As AI-powered products become more autonomous, intelligence is no longer the hard part. Trust is. In this episode of Human × Intelligent , Madalena explores the verifiability gap, the invisible space between: 1. what AI systems do 2. what users understand 3. what product teams can actually observe and validate. You’ll learn: Why trust breaks before AI systems fail The 3 control l...

Send us an email! AI systems no longer just respond. They plan, decide and act and often without asking. In this episode of Human × Intelligent , we explore a critical question for the age of agentic AI: How do humans stay in control once systems can act on our behalf? The answer isn’t more prompts, smarter models or bigger Dashboards. It’s the interface of intent, the layer that makes autonomy un...

Send us an email! Autonomy scales intelligence. But without coordination, it creates conflict. In this episode of Human × Intelligent , we explore the shift from single-model AI to multi-agent systems and why intelligence at scale starts to behave less like software and more like an organization. We break down what happens when multiple autonomous agents work together, where things go wrong and ho...

Send us an email! Autonomy is no longer optional in intelligent systems. But without clear boundaries, it quickly turns from helpful to harmful. In this episode of Human × Intelligent , we explore what autonomy means in product design, why it’s often misunderstood and how to design systems that act with purpose rather than unpredictability. You’ll learn: Why autonomy is not freedom, but structured...

Send us an email! Products are changing.  They no longer just react to user input or display information. They initiate actions. They make decisions. They influence behaviour. In this episode of Human × Intelligent , we explore the age of agency, a shift where intelligent systems move from passive tools to active collaborators. We break down what agency really means, why it changes the human–techn...

Send us an email! Every product communicates something before a user ever takes an action. Some products feel clear the moment you open them. Others feel confused, even when the design looks polished and 'correct'. The difference isn’t aesthetics. It’s attention. In this episode of Human x Intelligent , we explore attention not as a productivity skill or psychological trait, but as the u...

Send us an email! Part 2 of Episode 4 moves from theory to application.  If Part 1 explained drift, Part 2 explains how to prevent it. In this episode: > the five principles of system alignment > how to stabilise incentives to avoid unintended behaviour > how to design reversible autonomy > how to keep feedback loops coherent across teams and models > how to align human attention, p...

Send us an email! AI does not fail because it is powerful. It fails because it becomes powerful in the wrong direction. In this episode we break down one of the most misunderstood concepts in AI and product building, alignment, the gap between what we intend intelligent systems to do and what they actually optimize for. The real world is full of examples. A lawyer using AI fabricated cases in cour...

Send us an email! In episode 1 we explored why clarity is the real measurement of intelligence. In episode 2 we learned that intelligence does not evolve in straight lines, it evolves in loops. But loops do not start on their own. Something has to tell the system what to look at first, and that something is attention. In this episode we explore the architecture of attention and how it shapes learn...