UXDX San Francisco is scheduled for Nov. 5-6, 2026, bringing product, research, design and engineering leaders together around a business question that extends beyond faster production: who decides what an AI-enabled product should do? The published program makes customer control and cross-functional decision-making prominent themes.
This Preview examines questions raised by the confirmed agenda. It does not report conclusions from sessions that have not happened or imply that any listed speaker has endorsed the interpretation below.
Customer control is on the program
The Nov. 5 agenda includes a panel on who controls the customer journey in agentic AI, moderated by Optimal CEO Alex Burke. Listed participants include design and product leaders from Expedia Group, Target and Chase. The organizer says the discussion will address approval boundaries, transparency and intervention when systems act for users.
For executives, the practical question is where convenience ends and a consequential commitment begins. A product that recommends an option and one that completes a purchase create different decisions for the person using it. The conference offers a place to examine that distinction, not proof that participating companies have solved it.
A useful account of any example would identify the action, the person authorized to approve it and the way an error can be corrected. General statements about trust become more informative when those details are explicit.
Advertising brings a second kind of user
Snap’s Shobha Diwakar is scheduled to discuss building advertising platforms for human marketers and AI agents. The session description includes campaign creation, budget decisions and the boundaries between automation and human judgment.
That framing creates a design problem beyond the appearance of a screen. If software can operate a platform, the team needs to specify what it may change and how a human can understand what happened. An interface that is easy to navigate is not necessarily a complete account of decision authority.
The questions to bring back are concrete: what is visible before an action, what is recorded afterward and who can stop the process? Those are this preview’s suggested evaluation criteria, not promised conference outcomes.
Turn examples into operating questions
The organizer describes UXDX as a cross-functional event rather than a design-only gathering. That matters because approval rules, technical execution and customer communication cannot be evaluated entirely in isolation.
Teams reviewing the sessions can distinguish a speaker’s reported experience from a generalizable method. The important follow-up is which constraints made an approach work, what failed and what would need to change in another organization.
The business value will depend on the specificity of the evidence presented. Attendance and an ambitious agenda do not establish better products; clearly described decisions could give leaders a more useful starting point for their own review.