Leading AI Adoption

Diana Jeong Ro (EDI '20) is leveraging AI to help a diverse range of BCG X clients solve complex questions about how users engage with their products and services.

What makes someone loyal to a fast food restaurant? Which tools would best help a clinician make a high-pressure but efficient decision to help a patient? What new design would help unsnarl a regularly congested roadway? 

Understanding how and when to use AI to answer these questions is at the heart of the work Diana Jeong Ro (EDI '20) does as a senior experience designer at BCG X, the technology and design unit within Boston Consulting Group.  

She joined the company shortly after graduating from Northwestern's Master of Science in Engineering Design Innovation (EDI) program.  

“My role is hard to pin down in a single sentence, and that’s what I love about it,” Diana said. “Every project and team finds its own creative rhythm, and I get to help shape that from concept to delivery.”  

It’s a role she felt prepared for thanks to the EDI program.  

Diana was an undergraduate at Northwestern when she first learned about EDI. She earned dual bachelor's degrees in applied mathematics and manufacturing and design engineering; as part of that journey, she connected with several EDI alumni. 

“I found myself inspired by the paths they were carving out,” she said. “Each person I met didn’t fit into one neat box. They were designers who could think like engineers, strategists who could build things with whatever they had on hand, and communicators who could build the right story in any format. It felt exactly like where I wanted to be.”  

Drawn by the program’s emphasis on multidisciplinary thinking and with her background in math and engineering, she dove into an experience that deepened her design practice. 

One of the most important lessons she learned was the value of communication.  

“It’s all about the power of storytelling,” she said. “Design decisions don’t speak for themselves. You have to be able to communicate not just what you decided but why, and do it in a way that connects to business goals and user needs simultaneously.” 

The EDI program's presentation-heavy environment helped Diana build those skills. The program's midterms and finals are often presentations, and in-class critiques help students distill weeks of work into short, snappy conversations. 

Mastering those skills helps Diana today. Her work sits at the intersection of strategy, design, and engineering, focusing on building new ventures, digital products, and large-scale transformations for clients across industries.  

The diversity of clients and rapidly changing technological landscape underscores the need for her to be adaptable.  

“Things change, scope shifts, clients pivot, feedback challenges your assumptions,” she said. “You’ll thrive if you stay curious and flexible rather than defensive.”  

Her recent work leans heavily into AI, both as a tool for her work and as a component woven into the workstreams she designs for her clients.  

Recently, she has been using it to design interfaces for data-rich, technically complex environments for companies that deal in industrial goods and logistics, where design has to do much of the heavy lifting to make intelligence legible and actionable. 

Depending on the project, Diana might be leading product definition and user experience for a new platform, building out a design system, facilitating workshops with client teams, designing a venture pitch deck, or shaping visual storytelling for an early-stage business build.   

The role is essentially built for an EDI graduate to thrive, she said.  

"EDI taught me that the core of a human interaction doesn't change, even as the technical landscape does," she said. "To me that's what empathy looks like in practice, building confidence with ambiguity by having a thoughtful, intentional process and trusting it through."