Human & Experience Design Lead, EMEA Workforce AI Transformation

Ankura is a team of excellence founded on innovation and growth.

Role Purpose

The Human & Experience Design Lead is a pivotal role within Ankura’s new Workforce AI Transformation practice in EMEA. This position exists at the intersection of human behaviour, organisational change, and AI - ensuring that as clients redesign work, roles, and operating models, people remain firmly at the centre of the story. You will bring rigorous human-centred research, experience design thinking, and deep empathy for how individuals and organisations experience technological change. You will help clients understand not just what AI can do, but what it means for the people living and working within it. Building trust, adoption, and lasting behavioural change.

Key Responsibilities

• Experience Design & Human-Centred Research

• Lead qualitative and mixed-method research programmes to understand how employees, teams, and leaders experience AI-enabled transformation - capturing signals of trust, resistance, adoption, and readiness.
• Design and facilitate immersive research, ethnographic studies, co-design workshops, and human-centred discovery phases across client engagements.
• Translate complex human insight into accessible, actionable design principles that shape workforce strategies, role redesign, and change programmes.
• Develop frameworks for understanding ‘Empathy Demand’ and emotional responses to AI at scale - ensuring organisations deploy AI with responsibility and human sensitivity.
• Shape and contribute to Ankura’s proprietary "Execution Certainty™" framework methodology - building repeatable research and insight products.

• Work alongside transformation leads to embed experience design throughout large-scale workforce AI programmes - from diagnosis through to adoption and embedding.
• Advise HR, change, and communications leaders on how to design employee journeys through AI transition, reskilling, and new ways of working.
• Design learning and adoption experiences that bring people on the AI transformation journey, reducing anxiety and building capability with confidence.
• Explore and prototype agentic AI experiences in high-stakes, high-emotion workforce moments - testing acceptability, trust, and design standards with rigour.

• Build Ankura’s human experience design toolkit for workforce transformation - including diagnostic tools, employee persona frameworks, journey maps, and co-design playbooks.
• Create packaged research and design offerings that can be deployed across sectors, particularly in regulated industries where trust, vulnerability, and human complexity are high.
• Partner with the Responsible AI Lead and AI Strategy Lead to ensure human insight informs governance and strategic choices.

• Lead the design and delivery of client workshops, insight presentations, and experience design sprints at senior stakeholder level.
• Present and publish research findings that position Ankura at the frontier of human-centred AI transformation - through events, roundtables, reports, and media.
• Build trusted relationships with CHROs, People Directors, Change Leaders, and Heads of Design within client organisations.
• Contribute to business development by shaping proposals, articulating the value of the human design lens, and identifying adjacent opportunities.

Candidate Profile

• Experience & Expertise

• 20+ years of experience in human-centred research, experience design, or related disciplines, with a strong track record in applying these to organisational or technology transformation contexts.
• Deep expertise in qualitative and mixed-method research - ethnography, depth interviews, diary studies, contextual inquiry, and behavioural analysis at scale.
• Proven ability to translate human insight into experience design that shapes strategy, operating model change, and adoption programmes.
• Significant exposure to AI, Gen AI, or emerging technology contexts - with a sophisticated and evidence-based perspective on how people engage with, trust, and adopt AI.
• Experience working in or with regulated industries (financial services, healthcare, public sector) where human complexity and vulnerability are central concerns.

• Exceptional communication and storytelling ability - able to make complex human insight accessible and compelling to executive audiences.
• Energising, bridge-building leadership style that builds human understanding between organisations and the people they serve.
• Intellectually curious and genuinely people-focused - able to hold complexity, ambiguity, and nuance while remaining clear and decisive.
• Comfortable operating in a build environment: entrepreneurial, self-starting, and able to create structure where none exists.
• Strong presence in the design, research, and transformation community - including speaking, publishing, and external thought leadership.
• Commercial awareness: able to shape research and design as sellable, scalable propositions, not just delivery capability.

Success Measures

• Quality and impact of human-centred insight embedded into client transformation programmes.
• Development and adoption of Ankura’s Human Experience Design methodology and IP toolkit.
• Revenue contribution through design-led engagements and proposition development.
• Client satisfaction and relationship depth with HR, People, and Change leaders.
• External profile: publications, keynotes, roundtables, and media presence.
• Cross-practice collaboration with Responsible AI, AI Strategy, and Digital practices.

Why This Role

This is a rare opportunity for a human-centred researcher and experience designer to step into a senior consulting role at the moment it matters most. AI is reshaping work at pace - but organisations are struggling to bring their people with them. The gap between what AI can do and what humans are ready to embrace is one of the defining challenges of this decade.

Ankura is building a practice that takes this challenge seriously. This role sits at its heart: with the freedom to shape how the firm thinks about the human experience of AI transformation, the platform to publish and speak at the highest levels, and the opportunity to build something genuinely new.