Designing for the AI: Everyone will be learning UX in the age of solopreneurs

Interview with Valerie Nillsson for the Anthropology of AI podcast

On August 4, 2025, the Anthropology of AI podcast welcomed Anna Potanina, founder of Call to Action Digital (CDA Digital) and a former mobile UX and conversion specialist at Google, to discuss the intersection of UX, entrepreneurship, and AI.

Host Valerie Nilsson, reconnecting with Anna after their shared days in Google’s Dublin office, framed the conversation around a shared passion: the intersection of UX, entrepreneurship, and the human side of AI. Over nearly an hour, the two explored how Anna’s entrepreneurial journey has evolved, how AI is reshaping product design, and why “making websites and apps a better place for users” has never been more critical. Let’s dig deeper into the insights they shared.

From Google’s playbook to founder freedom

When Anna left Google after almost a decade, she didn’t set out to “be her own boss” in the classic entrepreneurial sense. Instead, she followed her strengths -  world-class UX consulting and design facilitation - and found herself with a steady stream of clients who wanted exactly that.

Running her own consultancy has meant:

• Freedom to work with clients she genuinely wants to help.
• The ability to say no to projects that don’t align with her values.
• The space to evolve CTA Digital from pure consultancy into design execution and AI-focused experimentation.

Her company now reflects her evolution: still rooted in Google-trained user-first thinking, but more agile and exploratory, with room to test ideas like AI-assisted UX audits and even building in-house AI tools.

The core: audits, labs, and sprints

Anna’s current service offering is anchored in three methods:

1. UX audits - Expert evaluations backed by data, Baymard Institute and Nielsen Norman Group research, and decades of UX best practice.
2. User labs - Pre-recorded, facilitated user interviews and usability tests that reveal why users behave the way they do, not just what they do.
3. Design sprints - Five-day workshops to co-create, prototype, and test solutions fast, avoiding the trap of “planning paralysis.”

These approaches aren’t theoretical. They’re hands-on, collaborative, and designed to help teams make better decisions quickly - an essential skill in a product landscape where AI is shortening timelines dramatically.

AI as a UX multiplier and the rise of solopreneurs

The two touched on a sensitive topic, on how AI is transforming the UX landscape, making design and implementation easier and leading to a completely different era of "solopreneurs" than we used to know. Anna sees AI lowering the barrier to creating high-quality products. You no longer need a full design department to bring an idea to life; you need taste, empathy, and clarity of purpose.

As she puts it:

“…we are currently at the beginning of the era of solopreneurs - those people [who] don’t actually have to be real designers, but they will have to have like a basic understanding of what people want, of having good taste, of what is the spirit of the time…”

And thanks to AI’s speed and scalability:

“Everybody will be able to create an app or start a company with AI agents being able to help with absolutely everything. Before, people were scaling through people, and now you can scale with AI.”

Her “Duolingo for design” concept - daily lessons and case studies for non-designers - reflects this shift, giving founders, marketers, and product owners a foundation in what makes products succeed.

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When AI helps, and when it hurts

Not every AI feature is a good AI feature. Anna warns against:

• Implementing AI “for the sake of it.”
• Overly broad chatbots with unclear value.
• Skipping transparency about AI-generated content.

Where AI does shine:

• Generative UI that adapts interfaces in real time based on user context.
• Search enhancement that uses user signals for precision.
• Personalization and assistive summarization that feel useful, not intrusive.

As Anna mentions, at CDA Digital, AI is already integrated into UX audits to speed up research and hypothesis generation, but always with a narrow, problem-focused scope.

Global UX principles in an AI world

Anna’s Google years in emerging markets taught her that cultural nuance is non-negotiable in UX. Color meanings, UI density preferences, payment methods, and even navigation patterns differ widely.

She sees a gap in AI training data, which is overwhelmingly Western-centric, and believes the next frontier will be region-specific LLMs and tools that adapt UI for local markets, from bidirectional Arabic design to Asian high-density layouts.

Advice for the AI-UX frontier

Anna’s guidance to designers, founders, and product leaders is clear:

“…the only thing that people should be doing is actually to get their hands dirty and… learn AI. And it doesn’t matter what level of the organization you are.”

She recommends setting aside dedicated time, even just a few hours a week, to experiment with tools, push your creative limits, and learn how to collaborate with intelligent systems.

Most of all, she advocates for a more grounded AI conversation, one that avoids both overhyped utopian promises and doomsday fears, focusing instead on practical, user-first implementations.

Takeaway:

Anna’s perspective reinforces something we’ve long believed. AI won’t replace the fundamentals of UX, but it will make bad UX decisions faster if we’re not careful. The future belongs to teams (and yes, solopreneurs) who can merge AI-enabled speed with human-centered design discipline.

If you’re ready to explore AI’s role in your product’s user journey, book an AI UX Lab session with us and start building for users, not just algorithms.

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