Designing an AI-First CDP Platform

Ascent360 had a powerful customer data platform, but its interface still asked users to think like the software – navigating menus, stitching together segments, and configuring campaigns by hand. The opportunity was to flip that relationship, put AI at the center and let the platform meet users where they are, in plain language.

The mandate was a ground-up reimagining of the product experience, a cohesive design system, a coherent AI-first strategy, and a new end-to-end flow spanning login, audience building, email, SMS, and campaigns. It meant rethinking not just how the product looked, but how users interact with it.

Instead of adding an AI feature to an existing dashboard, we made conversation the primary way to work. The centerpiece is a guided AI experience, “Create with AI” – that walks users from intent to finished asset across email, SMS, and landing pages, asking the right questions instead of demanding the right clicks.

The Audience Builder turns segmentation into a dialogue: users describe who they want to reach in natural language, and the system translates that into precise, structured audiences, surfacing what’s included, what’s excluded, and why. To power it, I authored the system instructions that shape how the AI reasons about a customer’s data.

Underneath the experience, I rebuilt the front-end on Tailwind and established a unified design system, giving a sprawling product a single, consistent visual language and a component library the team could build on with confidence.