Ryann Foelker

Turn AI into help people can feel, reducing customer and agent burden while building trust, equity, and adoption at scale.

Friction isn’t a one-time annoyance. It’s a recurring tax: cognitive load, time loss, stress, and extra labor people pay every time they interact with your business. And it’s not an accident. It’s a design choice — often the side effect of cost-first automation, disconnected systems, and metrics that reward internal efficiency over real-world outcomes. When customers and agents feel taxed by your processes, they push back: they avoid digital channels, flood call centers, churn, complain, and lose trust. But when you remove the burden, something powerful happens: adoption becomes easier, service improves, and your brand earns credibility because the help is real. In this executive-level keynote, futurist and design expert Ryann Foelker breaks down the hidden costs and power dynamics behind “self-service” and automation — and why burden-shifting creates downstream risk (inequity, reputational damage, and operational drag). Attendees leave with a practical reinvention sequence: turn human needs into AI-enabled products and services that create durable value, earn trust and adoption, and build operations and metrics that actually support the future.