Preview
The Service Design Global Conference has scheduled its main program for Oct. 29 and 30 in Wiesbaden, Germany, putting executive influence, service performance and AI-enabled systems on the agenda for design leaders. Oct. 28 is reserved for workshops and the Service Design Network’s opening event.
The RheinMain CongressCenter independently lists the conference for Oct. 28–30, with in-person and online participation. This preview concerns the published agenda, not reports from sessions that have already taken place or conclusions the speakers have reached.
From the design team to the boardroom
The organizer’s Thursday program lists a keynote by Monica Dalla Riva on bringing service design into the boardroom. It also schedules sessions on journey management and service design’s role in business-to-business market entry.
Those subjects create a practical agenda for executives: how a design team connects customer-facing problems to decisions about ownership, resources and operating priorities. A journey map can document an experience without establishing who has the authority to change the underlying process.
The useful question for attendees is therefore not simply whether an organization produces design artifacts. It is whether those artifacts lead to a decision, an accountable owner and a way to observe what happens after implementation. That is an evaluation framework for the program, not a promised conference outcome.
AI appears alongside service fundamentals
Friday’s published agenda includes Lou Downe on fixing services that do not work, a session on service design for agentic AI in critical systems, and a closing keynote by Sarah Gibbons about shared understanding across people and agents.
The business connection is the relationship between automation and the service surrounding it. An automated step can appear successful in isolation while a customer still encounters a broken handoff elsewhere. Teams evaluating examples should ask where the service starts and ends, which exceptions require people and how responsibility moves between systems.
These are questions to bring to the discussions. The agenda alone does not establish that a particular method improves customer satisfaction, reduces cost or makes an AI system reliable.
Plan for the right format
The organizer distinguishes main-conference access from the Oct. 28 workshops, which are not included in the standard conference ticket. Its FAQ says talks will be streamed for the online audience, while workshops are in person and will not be streamed.
For distributed teams, that difference affects how learning can be shared. A useful follow-up is to select one service problem before watching, record the evidence relevant to it and agree on a small test afterward. Attendance and implementation are separate activities; any operational benefit still needs to be demonstrated within the organization.