How AI Is Changing Discovery: Different Questions, Later Decisions, Better Forecasts
Overview
The value of discovery is narrowing the gap between an idea and a plan a team can commit to. But a room full of people with limited time, budget, and patience can only take in so much context and weigh so many options. The quality of the decisions is limited by what that room can address. Whatever the room can’t address becomes an assumption, and those assumptions are what put a plan at risk.
AI is changing the way we approach discovery. With the same time, money, and people, we can bring more context and keep options open longer. Each session begins with what we already know, structured so the group can react, making it easier to see how decisions play out downstream and where uncertainty lies. We’ll explore how AI-assisted discovery is helping us make faster, more confident decisions with fewer resources.
In This Session
This talk covers how AI is changing the way we run discovery, how that improves the results, and the tactics we use to get past the old constraints. We’ll also talk about why the results depend on a well-structured discovery process more than the AI tooling, and how discovery now feeds agentic development.
Everything we share comes from recent client work.
If you define products and outcomes, or plan and coordinate the work of building them, you’ll walk out with tactics you can use on your next project.
What You’ll Take Away
- How AI brings far more context into the room when decisions get made
- The tactics SEP uses to get past the old constraints of discovery
- How AI surfaces complexity and uncertainty early, leading to a more informed plan
- How AI-assisted discovery produces outputs coding agents can build from, carrying designs through specs and plans to working code
Who Should Come
- Product and technology leaders deciding what to build next
- Teams planning a new product, a major feature, or a modernization effort
- Anyone who sponsors or runs discovery work and wants better inputs to the decision
Meet Our Speakers
Your speakers bring years of experience building complex products and shaping product strategy for clients.
Chris Shinkle
Director of Innovation
Chris leads innovation at SEP with a practical, experience-driven approach shaped by decades of building complex products across regulated and high-stakes industries. As an early champion of Agile, Lean, and Kanban at SEP, he helps teams navigate complexity and deliver software that holds up in production.
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Andy Chen
Senior Product Strategist
Andy is a Senior Product Strategist. Since joining SEP in 2020, he has brought invaluable expertise to client projects across multiple industries, including Consumer IoT, Renewable Energy and Pharmaceutical. Andy's recent work utilizes frameworks for clarifying objectives, evaluating tradeoffs, and managing risk.
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Bejoy Thomas
Senior Interaction Designer
Bejoy Thomas is a Senior Interaction Designer at SEP, working on rapid discovery for a client's innovation pipeline accelerator. He has designed software for more than a decade and has worked with AI since 2019, including helping shape its adoption in enterprise systems at Rocket Companies. Day to day, he uses it to prototype features quickly, so teams have something real to react to, and to gather the information they need to decide and act.
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Check-in Begins
Doors open for registration check-in, light refreshments, and networking.
SEPTalks Event
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Event Location
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