There is a difference between using AI and thinking with AI.
Most researchers have not stopped to consider which one they are actually doing.
Leo Hoar, PhD has. And what he has found is not reassuring.
Every research decision you make sits on top of a layer of smaller decisions you are barely aware of. Which questions to ask. Which signals deserve your attention. Which gaps are worth chasing and which ones you can afford to leave alone. These micro-decisions shape everything that comes after them. And right now, a lot of researchers are quietly outsourcing them to AI without realising it.
That is not a workflow problem. That is a thinking problem.
And he’s unpacking all of it at UXCON26.
Bad research does not fail loudly. It drifts. By the time the insight lands wrong, or the product ships something that should never have made it through, the error is already weeks behind you. The moment it could have been caught has passed.
Leo has worked at this intersection for a long time. From Samsung to founding UXR Institute, because he looked at where the industry was headed and decided the education it needed did not yet exist. He is not theorising about this. He has watched it happen to experienced teams, senior researchers, people who should have known to slow down and did not.
At UXCON26, he is running a full workshop on exactly this. Not a talk. Not a panel. A proper working session where you will examine how AI is reshaping the research process, where the real risks live, and what rigorous practice actually looks like when AI is in the room.
October 8th. Silver Spring Civic Center, Maryland.
One day. Real work. The kind of questions this industry needs to sit with.
