Jess Holbrook

The researcher who wrote the rules for human-centered AI at Google, Meta and Microsoft.

Designer-researcher-translator. Calm, principled, pattern-rich, masses of insight on product futures.

Jess Holbrook is Head of UX Research for Microsoft AI and one of the original AI user researchers. He co-founded Google's PAIR initiative, co-wrote the 2017 essay Human-Centered Machine Learning that named the discipline, and helped produce the People + AI Guidebook that thousands of teams still work from. Across Google, Meta and Microsoft he has watched the same pattern repeat: AI products fail on mental models, trust and error handling far more often than on accuracy.

He also writes about how research teams themselves are changing as AI enters the practice — what a frontier UX research team looks like now, and how the job is being rebuilt around tools that are useful and unreliable at once.

He'll be one of the more practical voices across the weekend, in several settings. If you build things, he is the person whose answers you can use directly.

You'll take away: concrete design patterns for uncertainty. How to set expectations before a system disappoints someone, how to fail in a way that keeps trust, and how to help users build a mental model accurate enough to rely on and skeptical enough to catch errors.

ONE READ — "Human-Centered Machine Learning" (2017), still the foundational piece (co-authored with Josh Lovejoy); his newer writing on AI-era research teams is at General Purpose.