/AI output: is a sea of same good enough?

Everyone has access to the same AI now, so what is left to compete on? UX researcher Colleen Pellissier joins James Carman to make an uncomfortable case: AI-assisted work keeps landing on the safe, average answer, and the harder, more human work of staying curious is exactly what earns a customer's trust. Along the way they get into the layoff wave reshaping tech, why human-centered research keeps getting cut, and what it means to bet on yourself when the old career path stops holding.

At a glance

Key takeaways

• AI hits the themes but stops short of curiosity. Colleen finds AI-generated research insights accurate and usable, yet marked by a "flatness" she compares to the uncanny valley. It does not take the work to the next layer of wondering, which is often where the real insight lives.
• Treat AI as a springboard, not the solve. It is genuinely useful for tasks like transcripts and summaries, but the human parts, following an unplanned thread mid-interview and building enough trust for someone to share candidly, are not things she believes AI can do.
• The industry is rushing from curiosity to certainty. She describes the current moment as a "liminal space" and argues that discomfort pushes people to posture as if AI is already understood, when more curiosity would serve everyone better.
• Fear is driving the layoff wave, and fear erodes empathy. When companies feel uncertain they constrict and get smaller, and she senses "less dedication to the employee these days."
• User research has a real ROI problem, partly of its own making. The craft of wondering is hard to price, and she argues researchers must collaborate earlier with product and build the business case for their work instead of treating it as a nice-to-have.
• Grief can be a door to transformation. Rather than let three layoffs deplete her, she reframed the loss as an opening and chose to bet on herself.
• Fractional work needs an honest reckoning. Health insurance, 401k, and other essentials are bound to full-time employment, and moving toward fractional models means being honest about who can actually afford to.
• The best version of AI gives time back to craft. Her hope is that AI takes on the work people do not want to do, freeing them for art, connection, and the human experience.

Host and guest

Frequently asked questions

What does a UX researcher actually do?

Colleen describes it as supporting a team's business, product, and design decisions by using the right research methodology for the moment to inform the next best decision. The researcher does not hand over the answer; they gather the right information so the team can move forward with confidence and iterate from there.

Is AI useful for user research?

Yes, and she says "ship it." AI handles tasks like transcripts and summaries and reliably surfaces themes across interviews. What it misses is the more complex curiosity beneath those themes, and the human trust required to get candid answers from an interviewee in the first place.

Why are so many UX research and tech roles being cut?

She ties the layoffs to economic uncertainty and fear. When companies feel uncertain, they constrict, and she senses less loyalty to employees than before. She also notes that research is sometimes wrongly treated as something a product manager or designer can simply absorb.

Why go independent instead of taking another full-time job?

After three layoffs in three years, each with strong reviews, she decided to bet on herself. She wants more control over where her time goes and finds independence more honest than interviewing for roles she doubts will last. She is building a UX research and business-strategy consultancy for teams not yet ready to hire a full-time researcher.

What does she believe AI cannot replace?

The human connection at the center of good research: creating enough trust for people to share honestly, and the curiosity to follow unexpected threads in real time, things she does in roughly eight of every ten interviews by setting her prepared questions aside.

Read the conversation

From public radio to user research

James Carman: Welcome to the Forward Slash Podcast, where we lean into the future of IT by inviting fellow thought leaders, innovators, and problem solvers to slash through its complexity. I'm your host, James Carman. Today we're talking to Colleen Pellissier. Before Colleen ever ran a usability study, she spent seven years making radio. Her stories aired on NPR, she produced for Chicago Public Radio, and she was executive producer of the Good News Podcast for Cards Against Humanity. Then she moved into user experience research, and for the last eight years she's done that work at companies like Groupon, Shoprunner, and The Mom Project. She's also been laid off three times in the last three years, each time with strong reviews and the same "this isn't about your performance" conversation. So this time she's working for herself. Colleen, welcome to the show.

Colleen Pellissier: Hi, it's nice to be here. Thanks for having me.

Colleen Pellissier: My professional track is a bit non-traditional, but to me it makes a lot of sense. I worked in public radio as a journalist and producer for several years, and that is where I learned podcasting. That kind of work is about deep listening, asking really good questions, and then telling great stories. So it was a really convenient training ground for my UX research work. When I moved into becoming a UX researcher, it didn't feel like some big pivot. If anything, tech was refreshing, because at the time it was about making mistakes and trying new things, and I was coming from public radio, where you cannot make a mistake because you're live on the air. My skills as a reporter and producer made me an excellent user researcher. It lets me listen, ask good questions, be strategic, and then tell a great story.

Three layoffs in three years

James Carman: You mentioned it in your bio, the layoffs, three in three years with strong reviews. There are a lot of layoffs going on. What's driving all of this?

Colleen Pellissier: I don't have the answers. For the first two I was at a mid-size company as the sole UX researcher, so maybe that one can be explained by funding. Then I went into a much larger corporation outside of tech, in building materials, thinking it would be a safer spot. I was there maybe a month and a half before a round of layoffs, and then another wave at the beginning of October caught me too. I think they're all directly and indirectly tied to the economy. Something that worries me: user research is such a valuable part of the product process. Great teams know this. But some folks think it can just be absorbed into the PM's role or design's role. The work a UX researcher does is very close to a craft, and I wouldn't expect myself to be a great designer, because that's not the craft I practice.

James Carman: I don't know that I've ever heard anyone articulate that before, the idea of being able to distance yourself. It's not your baby, not in the sense that it is for the people around you.

Colleen Pellissier: When I get on LinkedIn, it's a lot of posts about being recently laid off. Businesses are feeling really uncertain, maybe because of the economy, maybe because of the advancement of certain technologies. When people feel uncertain, there's a restriction that happens; it feels more comfortable to get smaller than to expand. I also wonder if there's been a shift in the morality of companies. We live in a capitalistic society and business is supposed to make money, but I think there might be less dedication to the employee these days.

Fear, scarcity, and the lag before the aha moment

James Carman: Do you think AI could be pushing us to the other side of the spectrum, where companies don't feel they have to be nice to attract or keep talent?

Colleen Pellissier: I think it's sneakier than that. There's a real fear companies are experiencing around AI. Everyone's trying to come up with a plan, the governance, how we're going to use it, but at the end of the day folks are pretty uncertain about its impact, not only on the business but on their own place in the world, and I'm talking about people in leadership. When we're afraid, we tend to be less empathetic, because we get into a survival mode. I don't think people wake up trying to make things horrible for everyone, but there's a pressure people are reacting to.

James Carman: I did a keynote a while back about AI's impact on the economy and general-purpose technologies. There can be quite a lag. I think we're at the point where we're applying AI and everyone's posting very authoritative-sounding blog posts, and we're going to look back on this in a decade and realize we had no idea. The example I used was the factory. When the electric motor came in, they just replaced the big steam engine with one motor and kept all the belts. Thirty years went by before they realized they could put a motor on every machine. I think we're going to stumble on that kind of realization with AI.

Colleen Pellissier: You might call it a liminal space. It's the space in between something ending and whatever is new, and we haven't walked into the new yet. One way we behave when we're uncomfortable is we get authoritative; we want to know the answers, because that helps us feel safe. With AI growing and changing the field as much as it is, I wonder if we're moving too quickly from curiosity to believing we have the answers. I would like to see a little more curiosity about the use of AI, rather than settling on what it does and does not do, because I really don't know yet.

Grief, craft, and the value of research

James Carman: You've talked about a kind of grief moving through the tech community, especially in human-centered design and research. What's driving that?

Colleen Pellissier: When these jobs disappear, it's a real hit to how people identify. A lot of people in human-centered design found a place where they could have a professional job with business impact that also took care and concern for humans into account. That felt like important work. As business and products have evolved, there's less value put on human-centered work, which I don't agree with. People think business decisions can be made without that informed lens. So there's grief: you got into a profession, you were told a story about what it meant, and that's becoming less of a focus. But in loss there's an opportunity toward transformation. You get laid off a third time, and you can be angry and let it deplete you, or you can ask what this might agitate that would be interesting and new. The grief is really just a door to get you to some other side that's new and important.

James Carman: Do you feel the field hasn't done a good job showing the return on investment?

Colleen Pellissier: Part of it falls on the user research community. I don't know that we've done a good enough job tracking and proving business value. It was easy for people to treat it as a nice-to-have. It is possible to track the ROI, but it takes legwork, and you have to collaborate early with your product manager and a business analyst. The work is also a craft; there's value in wondering and in open questions, and those are hard to put a dollar amount on, because what's valued is a number on a spreadsheet going up and to the right. But I can't think of a product that was born from one business idea alone and became a complete success without that human collaboration. We just have to do a better job being business-focused in how we deliver insights.

Betting on herself

James Carman: There's some newness going on. You're starting your own thing. What's the next chapter?

Colleen Pellissier: These companies keep having layoffs, and I've gotten to the point where I'm not interested in that game any longer. It takes a lot of emotional and mental load to convince a company to hire you full time, and then they lay off a large group that includes you. It makes more sense to bet on myself. I've decided to start a UX research and business-strategy consultancy, connecting with people doing interesting work who care about their users. I can bring research to teams that aren't ready to hire a full researcher. Research is moving more toward business strategy, so really what I'm doing is informing the strategy of the product to make it successful.

Colleen Pellissier: It feels more honest. If I pushed myself into interviewing for full-time roles again, I don't think I'd be showing up as my most honest self, because part of me would think it's crazy to pretend the role is going to last. As a user researcher, I'm not afraid to try something, because things that don't work out aren't failures, they're learning experiences.

Ship It or Skip It

James Carman: AI in the research work itself, using AI, do you like that idea?

Colleen Pellissier: Ship it. It's not realistic to argue AI isn't beneficial, especially for tasks that need to get done. When I started in public radio I typed transcripts by hand. Having transcripts and summaries done by AI is so important. But when I work with insights from AI tools, it's interesting. They're not bad insights, and they're not wrong, but there's a certain flatness to them. It's almost an uncanny-valley feeling: the insight is correct and usable, but AI doesn't take it to the next layer of wondering or curiosity that you need to really move forward. AI is a great springboard, but I don't see it being the solve. And I hope we get to a place where AI does the stuff we don't want to do, so we have time to be committed to craft, to art, and to the human experience.

James Carman: Wouldn't it be ironic if this technological advancement brought about an artistic renaissance? If it gets rid of the mechanical things, that leaves time for the more beautiful things.

Colleen Pellissier: The models seem built to pick the center line, the most average thing. AI finds the themes. In user research we're looking for themes across interviews, and it does hit them, which is great. But it doesn't get to a more complex curiosity about what's happening. When I do qualitative interviews, eight times out of ten I don't follow my prepared questions, because the experience is so human that I follow the threads the interviewee gives me and discover things in real time I couldn't have planned for. Part of my job is creating a connection so they trust me enough to share. I have to create a container with another person so they'll give me the juicy information about what I'm curious about. I don't know if an AI could do that.

James Carman: A PM doing research, ship it or skip it?

Colleen Pellissier: Ship it. A PM with the muscle of research is helpful, and a PM who cares about research is probably empathetic to the user and wants to solve the right problems. The worst thing that can happen to a PM is solving the wrong problems. When a PM does their own research, they stay close to users, and when they work with a researcher it doesn't feel so jarring when new information comes in.

James Carman: The fractional research lead, bringing one in instead of a full-time hire. That's basically your thesis.

Colleen Pellissier: Ship it, but let's get honest about what we're doing. In this country a lot of major things are tied to full-time employment: health insurance, 401k, these structures. If we're moving away from full-time employment being the thing that holds those, let's be honest about the implications for people. I'm a single woman with a daughter, and I have to be conscientious about what I'm giving up to go this direction. There's privilege in being able to, and there are talented people who could do fractional work but don't have access because they need the logistics a full-time role brings.

James Carman: This one hits home. My brother-in-law, an economist, asks why we get health insurance through our employer but not car insurance. Somebody long ago decided to bind those together, and it's an innovation killer.

Colleen Pellissier: It took me actively shifting my mindset to realize I could source health insurance on my own. It was a blocker I didn't even know I had. It is expensive, and it isn't ideal, but it isn't impossible.

Lightning round

James Carman: Favorite childhood television program?

Colleen Pellissier: Who's the Boss. Tony Danza reminded me of my dad, and I love my dad.

James Carman: Neck pillow on a plane?

Colleen Pellissier: No. I scrunch up my hoodie. I travel a lot, and I just end up contorted and disheveled. But I have a strict rule: no shorts to the airport. Flights get chilly, and you can leave Florida in shorts and land in Chicago where the weather's much worse. I don't want to be the person who didn't plan ahead.

James Carman: Candy corn?

Colleen Pellissier: My secret is I love the candy pumpkins, because there's more candy to be had. But if you're going to eat candy corn, just eat the candy corn; don't try to dress it up with peanuts.

James Carman: Air horn in your ear every day, or run four miles every day?

Colleen Pellissier: Run four miles. The air horn would wreck my nervous system. At least with running I'm getting some health benefits.

The lightning round continued with Colleen's takes on thermostats, spiders, cranberries, and socks with sandals, and a few more getting-to-know-you questions. We've kept the highlights here.

Ship It or Skip It

Where to find Colleen

Colleen writes about the kinds of research she does, the problems she likes to solve, and how she uses AI at colleenresearch.netlify.app, and she's on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/colleenpellissier.

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