Convoclub goes IRL

Wednesday 17 June 2026

Programme

Here's the shape of the day. A few talks are still TBA.

1. 09:30–10:00

   Reception & coffee

2. 10:00–10:15

   Welcome

   Maaike Groenewege & Doris Dippold

3. 10:15–10:30

   Welcome from the Surrey Institute for People-Centred AI (PAI)

4. 10:30–11:00

   The realities of enterprise RAG

   Oluwabusayo Omolabi

   What it takes to ship RAG that behaves itself inside a regulated bank.

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   About the session

   This session will explore the realities of building Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems in enterprise environments, with a focus on behavioural guardrails, tone of voice adherence, and response reliability.

   Busayo will discuss how teams define acceptable AI behaviour, manage retrieval quality, and design systems that remain trustworthy, compliant, and aligned with business expectations, drawing on practical challenges, approaches, and lessons learned from real-world conversational AI implementations.

   About Oluwabusayo

   Oluwabusayo Omolabi is an AI Conversation Designer at Lloyds Banking Group, where she architects large-scale, generative AI-powered conversational systems within one of the UK's most regulated industries. With over five years of experience in conversational AI, she specialises in designing intelligent, human-centred systems powered by LLMs, machine learning, and data-driven insight.

   Beyond her corporate career, Busayo is a tech entrepreneur and ecosystem builder. A member of G100 mission million for Robotics, Automation and STEM and is the Co-founder and Director of iT8 Academy Ltd, a UK-registered tech academy, where she has trained and mentored aspiring professionals to successfully transition into technology careers.

5. 11:00–12:15

   Linguist for a day

   Doris Dippold & Adam Brandt

   Group A: applying rapport theory to user research and conversation design (Doris Dippold) Session detailsHide details

   About the session

   What does it take to build conversational products that are empathetic to users' needs? In this interactive workshop, Doris Dippold will introduce her recently published taxonomy of human-machine rapport, benefiting conversation designers and their teams in user research, message design and user-led evaluation. Through hands-on exercises, you will learn to apply this taxonomy to interviews and survey responses of chatbot users and consider how you will apply the insights gained to prompt and fine-tune your system for rapport driven, empathetic responses. The workshop will end by discussing the opportunities and challenges of implementing rapport considerations in the conversation design workflow.

   About Doris

   Doris is an applied linguist passionate about the power of language and culture to shape how we think, speak, write and communicate with machines and one another. Her work spans research, teaching, and consultancy at the intersection of human AI interaction and intercultural communication. As part of her applied research, she works with public and private sector partners to bring insights from sociolinguistics and pragmatics insights into conversational AI. Doris is a Principal Fellow of the Surrey Institute for People Centred AI and a co-chair of the BAAL HUMALA Special Interest Group.

   Group B: third position in conversation analysis and prompt design (Adam Brandt) Session detailsHide details

   About the session

   In this interactive workshop, Adam Brandt will introduce the conversation analytic concept of 'third position': the turn in which an agent responds to a user's answer, and show how Conversation Analysis research on this can inform prompt design for chatbots and voice agents.

   Through hands-on exercises, we will apply these insights to evaluate and improve agent responses, with a focus on making interactions more naturalistic and reducing unnecessary verbosity. We will end by discussing how third position thinking can be embedded practically in conversation design workflows.

6. 12:15–13:00

   Lunch

7. 13:00–13:30

   Selecting and fitting a voice that truly represents your brand

   Anna Greilich

   Brand-aligned voice design, and the EU AI Act disclosure question for human-sounding bots.

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   About the session

   The plan for the session is to discuss how teams can ensure a newly adopted voice aligns seamlessly with existing conversational flows and brand identity, covering the technical and strategic considerations that determine whether a voice bot feels like a natural extension of a brand. The session will also address a critical transparency challenge introduced by the EU AI Act: as synthetic voices grow increasingly human-like, how should dialogue openings be designed to meet disclosure requirements without undermining the user experience?

   About Anna

   Anna Greilich is a PhD candidate at the Graduate School of Empirical and Applied Linguistics at the University of Münster, Germany, where her research focuses on multi-turn, voice-based human-machine interaction from the perspective of information structure. Since 2022, she has also worked as a Conversational AI Experience Designer at Ideabay.ai, where she applies her user-oriented design and research expertise to real-world conversational AI implementations.

8. 13:30–14:30

   Who gets to dream the machine?

   Marly Pierre-Louis

   A flash book club.

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   About the session

   We design from assumption. What a 'natural' voice sounds like, what makes a chatbot feel helpful, whose language gets to be the default: these aren't neutral choices. They reflect who builds the systems and whose world gets treated as normative.

   Speculative fiction writers have been sitting with hard questions about language, power, and non-human intelligence for decades. What can they teach us? And what might we design differently if we let their questions in?

   About Marly

   Marly Pierre-Louis is a UX Consultant based in Amsterdam. With 10+ years across e-commerce, fintech, and fem tech, her work spans experimentation, content operations, and LLM training. She helps teams practice good governance, judgment, craft, and care as AI reshapes how products are built. Alongside her consulting work, she is a speculative writer and community cultivator whose creative practice explores inner worlds, survival strategies, and spaces of possibility.

9. 14:30–14:45

   Coffee break

10. 14:45–15:15

    AI in design systems: progress, pitfalls, and where Tesco is

    Nikoletta Ventoura

    A look at the messy frontier of AI design standards. Come ready to discuss.

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    About the session

    Companies are starting to formalise how AI fits into their design systems. But it's early, messy, and full of unanswered questions. In this talk, we'll explore the landscape of AI design standards emerging across the industry, look at both the progress and the pitfalls, and share where Tesco is in the process. Come ready to discuss.

    About Nikoletta

    Nikoletta Ventoura is an award-winning Conversation Designer, named one of the Top 10 Conversational AI practitioners in the UK this year. With a background in Computational Linguistics, she's been designing, developing and evaluating AI agents for the past 6 years. Now she's working as a Senior Conversation Designer at Tesco.

11. 15:15–16:15

    Convoclub IRL session: UX design in times of GenAI (walk & talk)

    How do you design for your users if half of the time you have no idea what your agentic platform is up to?

    Maaike Groenewege & Romina Pankoke

12. 16:15–16:30

    Wrap-up & close

    Maaike Groenewege & Doris Dippold