The Rise of Creative Intelligence in the Age of AI — Just as the dawn of the internet birthed the interaction and UX/UI designers, the era of AI is forging a new kind of visionary. Join C.J. Yeh and Christie Shin as they discuss how creatives can move past the fear of automation to embrace Creative Intelligence: the ultimate superpower for the modern design hero.

In this keynote, they will provide a comprehensive overview of the current AI landscape and its rapid adaptation across the industry. Moving beyond theory, they will share practical workflows for integrating AI into the design process, showcased through real-world AI-assisted design examples. Finally, they will present case studies from FIT's AI-Assisted Design program and courses, demonstrating how the next generation of "Creative Heroes" is already redefining the boundaries of the discipline.

Three NYC designers — at IBM, Duolingo, and Abike Studio — operating at three different scales, with three different relationships to AI. We ask each one: where does your craft survive the next five years, and where does it get rewritten? Each panelist brings one hot take. Audience pushes back in the back half.

Gazi works as a software engineer at Google. She also has 1.5M followers — almost none of whom found her through her engineering. The closing keynote is about how that happened, what it taught her about taste and specificity, and why every designer's portfolio is starting to look the same. Stay for the last fifteen minutes. This is where the day lands.