About Jean-Jacques Sliepen
Jean-Jacques is the founder of Optmzr, where he helps organizations close the gap between AI ambition and actual adoption. With 15+ years building companies in tech, marketing, and sales, he brings a practitioner’s view to the AI revolution — not theory, but what actually works when humans and AI collaborate.
Through Optmzr Academy, he helps professionals develop practical AI skills while keeping their human edge. His philosophy: human-centered AI doesn’t replace expertise — it amplifies it. But only if you know when to trust it and when to override it.
A Rotterdam native, he balances his professional life with being a father to three, and still figuring out which parts of his own process deserve to die.
What is your vision on the creative industry? Are there any innovations or developments that you find exciting?
The design process is dead. Not dying — dead.
For years, we’ve preached a rigid sequence: research → persona → journey map → problem statement → wireframes → test → ship. We built MBAs around it. But here’s what I’m seeing: a PM can now get to a working prototype faster than a designer can write the perfect problem statement. They skip the research, skip the personas — and sometimes it just works.
This isn’t a threat. It’s a liberation.
The most exciting shift isn’t AI that designs — it’s the collapse of artificial role boundaries. The strict separation between researcher, designer, and product manager is dissolving. We’re moving from T-shaped to X-shaped professionals: multiple deep skills, with AI filling the gaps. You’re no longer your job title. You’re your combination of gifts.
What excites me most: intuition is being rehabilitated. For too long, it was a dirty word — “not user-centric enough,” “not data-driven enough.” But intuition isn’t guessing. It’s the ability to make reasoned judgments quickly because you know the subject deeply. In a world where AI can generate anything, your ability to know when something is truly good — that’s irreplaceable.
The designers who thrive won’t be process-followers. They’ll be the ones who trust themselves — their taste, their judgment, their dangerous ideas.
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Keynote
Jean-Jacques Sliepen
Start from Zero: Trust Yourself, Not the Process
I’ll challenge UX professionals to abandon their sacred cows — the design process we’ve been preaching for a decade — and embrace a more uncomfortable truth: in the AI era, your value isn’t in following steps. It’s in knowing when something is worth building.
Expect a reality check on how tools have changed the game, why the double-diamond never really produced great work, and what separates designers who thrive from those who get left behind. I’ll share frameworks for 10x thinking instead of 10% optimization, and make a case for why intuition — that dirty word — might be your most valuable skill.
This talk isn’t just for senior designers — it’s for anyone who’s felt the ground shifting beneath their role and wants to know where to stand next. You won’t get a new process to follow. You’ll get permission to trust yourself.
“Don’t trust the process. Trust yourself.”
