The Dialogue Architects

As AI-powered search and answer engines continue to change how people discover information, what happens to the websites and content management systems that power the internet?

In this episode of The Dialogue Architects, Lauren Goerz is joined by Brian Alvey, CTO of WordPress VIP at Automattic, for a conversation about the future of enterprise content, conversational AI, and digital experiences.

Brian explains why websites remain the system of record for organizations—even as AI assistants increasingly become the front door for customers. Together they explore how enterprises should think about AI answer engines, chatbot governance, security, evaluation frameworks, and the guardrails needed to keep AI reliable at scale.

They also discuss why content management systems aren't disappearing, how "Jobs to Be Done" can help teams build better AI experiences, the challenges of agent-to-agent communication, and why accessibility and voice interfaces should be foundational—not afterthoughts.

Whether you're building AI-powered customer experiences, managing enterprise content, or designing conversational systems, this episode offers practical insights into preparing your organization for what's next.

(00:00) Welcome to The Dialogue Architects

(00:44) Brian Alvey's Journey to WordPress VIP

(02:08) What Makes WordPress VIP Different?

(03:07) Why Content Management Systems Still Matter

(06:29) How AI Answer Engines Are Changing Search

(10:13) Chatbots, Voice, and Conversational Interfaces

(14:36) AI Agents and Vendor Lock-In

(17:22) Applying Jobs to Be Done to AI

(21:14) Breaking Work into AI-Friendly Processes

(22:55) A Simple Chatbot Success Story

(24:22) Policies Become AI Behavior

(25:18) Governance and Enterprise Guardrails

(25:42) Jailbreaks, Prompt Injection, and Security

(28:28) Scaling AI Security Testing

(30:24) Evaluating Models and Cross-Checking Results

(32:00) When AI Agents Talk to Each Other

(33:42) Balancing Creativity and Automation

(37:11) The Reality of Voice Interfaces

(39:06) Accessibility and Designing for Everyone

(43:20) Will AI Change Brand Loyalty?

(44:41) Closing Thoughts

Brian Alvey is the Chief Technology Officer of WordPress VIP at Automattic, where he leads technology strategy for one of the world's largest enterprise content platforms. WordPress VIP powers digital experiences for leading organizations including News Corp, Salesforce, NASA, the White House, major financial institutions, and global healthcare companies. With decades of experience building publishing platforms, enterprise software, and internet infrastructure, Brian focuses on helping organizations modernize content operations while preparing for the next generation of AI-powered digital experiences.

🌐 Learn more about WordPress VIP: https://wpvip.com

🌐 Learn more about Automattic: https://automattic.com

🌐 Learn more about WordPress: https://wordpress.org

🎙️ Follow The Dialogue Architects

💬 Connect with Lauren Goerz

🔗 Connect with Brian Alvey on LinkedIn

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In this episode of The Dialogue Architects, host Lauren Goerz sits down with Aleks Bass, Chief Product & Technology Officer at Typeform, to explore why customer research is becoming even more important in the age of AI.

With a background in social psychology and market research, Aleks has built her product philosophy around a simple belief: great products come from deeply understanding people—not just shipping features faster. As Typeform evolves from a design-led forms platform into an AI-first customer intelligence platform, that philosophy has become even more important.

Aleks shares the principles that guide how her teams build products, including the importance of creating shared language across organizations, recognizing how seemingly small interaction details shape customer experiences, and continuously "closing the loop" with customers throughout product development.

The conversation also explores Typeform's AI-powered evolution, including intelligent data enrichment that helps businesses ask fewer questions while collecting richer insights, and Research Flow, a new AI-powered research platform that combines qualitative interviews with quantitative analysis to help organizations better understand their customers.

Lauren and Aleks discuss why structured product development becomes more—not less—important when building with AI, how organizations can scale customer research without sacrificing quality, and why no simulation can replace real conversations with users.

Whether you're a product manager, UX researcher, AI builder, conversation designer, or technology leader, this episode offers practical lessons for building products that customers trust because they were built with customers—not just for them.

(00:00) Meet Aleks Bass

(00:44) From Psychology to Product Leadership

(01:22) Three Principles for Building Better Products

(04:53) Typeform's Evolution Beyond Forms

(07:10) What It Means to Be AI-First

(08:29) AI-Powered Data Enrichment

(11:18) Designing Better Customer Conversations

(14:25) Inside Research Flow

(17:42) Why Product Fundamentals Still Matter

(20:02) Scaling Customer Research with AI

(26:08) Managing AI Product Teams

(30:24) Why Process Is Your AI Superpower

(36:24) Customer Conversations vs AI Simulation

(38:49) Closing Thoughts

Aleks Bass is the Chief Product & Technology Officer at Typeform, where she leads product strategy, engineering, and AI innovation. Drawing on her background in social psychology and market research, Aleks champions a research-first approach to product development that prioritizes understanding customer behavior before building solutions. Today, she is leading Typeform's transformation into an AI-first customer intelligence platform, helping organizations collect richer insights, automate research, and make better product decisions through a combination of human-centered design and artificial intelligence.

Lauren Goerz on LinkedIn

Aleks Bass on LinkedIn

Learn more about Typeform

Learn more about Rasa

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In this episode of The Dialogue Architects, host Lauren Goerz sits down with Dino Letic, Product Manager at JetBrains, to explore what it takes to build conversational AI for developers.

Unlike most customer support audiences, developers arrive with detailed logs, highly technical questions, and unique environments that make support particularly challenging. Dino shares how his background in support engineering shaped his approach to building JetBrains' unified support bot—an AI-powered experience designed to simplify customer interactions across a growing portfolio of products.

The conversation explores the challenges of fragmented support systems, the importance of creating a single point of entry for users, and how the bot identifies intent, asks follow-up questions, summarizes issues, and escalates conversations when needed. Dino explains how JetBrains balances automation with human expertise, why knowledge management is critical to AI success, and how the team handles the ongoing challenge of outdated documentation and rapidly evolving products.

Lauren and Dino also discuss measuring success, team ownership models, deployment considerations, and why JetBrains chose an on-premises AI approach. The episode concludes with a thoughtful discussion about the opportunities—and risks—of agentic AI in customer support and product decision-making.

Whether you're building AI assistants, managing support operations, or designing enterprise conversational experiences, this episode offers practical lessons from one of the most technically demanding support environments in software.

(00:00) Show Introduction

(01:00) Dino Letic's Journey to Product Management

(02:59) Why Developers Are Difficult Support Customers

(05:37) Unifying Support Through a Single AI Bot

(09:30) Product Priorities and Roadmap Strategy

(10:55) Team Structure and Ownership

(12:57) Escalation Paths and Unified Experiences

(14:24) Measuring Real Business Value

(16:20) Data Sources and Knowledge Management

(20:05) Mining Insights from Customer Conversations

(23:27) Automatically Updating Knowledge Bases

(24:33) Handling Outdated Information

(26:06) Team Rituals, OKRs, and Continuous Improvement

(29:09) Balancing Ambition with Practicality

(31:19) Why JetBrains Chose Rasa On-Prem

(33:06) The Product Manager Mindset Shift

(34:53) Analytics, Accountability, and Ownership

(37:28) The Risks of Agentic AI

(40:51) Closing Thoughts

Dino Letic is a Product Manager at JetBrains, where he leads initiatives focused on conversational AI and customer support automation. Beginning his career in support engineering, Dino developed firsthand experience helping developers navigate complex technical issues before transitioning into product management.

Today, he leads JetBrains' support bot strategy, working to unify customer experiences across products while balancing automation, human expertise, and operational efficiency. His work sits at the intersection of AI, support operations, product management, and developer experience.

Lauren Goerz on LinkedIn

Dino Letic on LinkedIn

Learn more about JetBrains

Learn more about Rasa

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In this episode of The Dialogue Architects, host Lauren Goerz sits down with Rebecca Evanhoe, Product Manager at Slang AI, to explore what it takes to build enterprise voice AI that works in the real world.

As organizations race to adopt generative AI, many are questioning whether traditional conversation design practices still matter. Rebecca argues the opposite. While new terms like prompt engineering and context engineering have emerged, the core principles of conversation design remain essential: understanding user goals, mapping conversation pathways, designing effective question flows, and building systems that reliably help people accomplish tasks.

Rebecca shares how Slang AI approaches voice automation for restaurants, handling millions of customer interactions each month. She explains why the company combines deterministic systems with carefully selected language models, using a hybrid architecture that balances reliability, speed, cost, and user experience. The discussion explores how teams can determine when generative AI is appropriate, when traditional workflows are still the better choice, and how rigorous evaluation helps prevent hallucinations and maintain trust.

Lauren and Rebecca also dive into modern AI evaluation strategies, including transcript reviews, funnel analysis, automated labeling, human scoring, and experimentation frameworks that help teams understand what users are actually experiencing. They discuss the unique challenges of voice AI, including speech recognition errors, latency, multilingual experiences, and the future of fully generative speech-to-speech interactions.

Whether you're a conversation designer, product manager, AI engineer, or enterprise leader, this episode offers practical lessons for building conversational AI systems that users can trust—and businesses can confidently deploy at scale.

(00:00) Introduction to The Dialogue Architects

(00:39) Meet Rebecca Evanhoe of Slang AI

(01:30) A Day in Product Management & Voice AI

(02:25) Why Conversation Design Still Matters

(03:29) Why LLM Evaluation Is Critical

(05:38) Is Conversation Design Dead?

(06:19) Prompt Engineering vs Conversation Design

(07:07) What Conversation Designers Actually Do

(10:01) User Advocacy, Research & Design Workshops

(12:22) Hybrid AI vs Fully Generative Systems

(16:31) When Deterministic Systems Beat LLMs

(19:31) AI Costs, Latency & Model Selection

(21:07) How Slang AI Evaluates LLM Performance

(25:41) Transcript Reviews That Improve AI

(26:34) Finding Root Causes Through Metrics

(27:54) CSAT vs Sentiment: What Matters More?

(31:07) Choosing the Right North Star Metrics

(31:59) The Biggest Challenges in Voice AI Design

(36:23) Multilingual AI & The Future Product Roadmap

(40:31) Turning Customer Calls Into Business Insights

(43:12) How AI Is Changing Human Communication

(46:46) Rebecca Evanhoe's Advice for Conversation Designers

(47:51) Closing Thoughts & Where to Connect

Rebecca Evanhoe is a Product Manager at Slang AI and a longtime conversation design practitioner. After building her career designing conversational experiences, she transitioned into product management to help scale AI-powered voice systems for enterprise customers. At Slang AI, Rebecca helps shape the strategy behind voice assistants that handle millions of restaurant calls every month, combining conversation design expertise with rigorous evaluation methodologies to build reliable, trustworthy AI experiences.

Lauren Goerz on LinkedIn

Rebecca Evanhoe on LinkedIn

Learn more about Slang AI

Learn more about Rasa

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In this episode of The Dialogue Architects, host Lauren Goerz sits down with Eugenia Zeibig, Strategy & Innovation Lead — Marketing AI & Commercial Analytics at Pfizer, to explore how AI is reshaping decision-making in pharma marketing.

The conversation focuses on what it takes to bring AI into the daily workflow of pharma marketers — combining visual insights with natural-language dialogue to move from weeks of stitched-together analysis to faster, more informed strategic decisions.

Lauren and Eugenia discuss the challenge of designing AI systems that marketers can actually trust, why quality matters more than quantity when delivering recommendations, and how AI behavior needs to adapt across different therapeutic categories in pharma.

The episode also explores:

A practical conversation for enterprise AI leaders, marketers, product teams, and conversational AI practitioners interested in how natural language interfaces are reshaping data analysis and strategic decision-making in regulated industries.

Views shared by Eugenia Zeibig are her own and do not reflect Pfizer corporate guidance.

Guest Bio

Eugenia Zeibig is the Strategy & Innovation Lead — Marketing AI & Commercial Analytics at Pfizer. With nearly two decades of experience connecting analytics to commercial outcomes across healthcare and retail, Eugenia leads initiatives focused on building AI-forward, data-driven solutions that empower enterprise marketing teams with conversational AI, strategic insights, and faster decision-making workflows.

Key Topics Discussed

Episode Timestamps

(00:00) Welcome and guest introduction 

Links & Resources

About The Dialogue Architects

The Dialogue Architects is a podcast from Rasa, hosted by Lauren Goerz, exploring the craft and strategy behind designing conversational AI in the enterprise. Each episode brings together technologists, designers, and product leaders to unpack how dialogue is built, scaled, and governed in real-world systems.

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On this episode of The Dialogue Architects, host Lauren Goerz speaks with Sapana Patel, Chief Information Officer at Spirit Airlines, about designing, scaling, and governing human‑machine conversations with strong data foundations.

Patel shares how her approach to technology leadership is driven by curiosity, creativity, and team reliability, likening technologists to artists shaping experiences through thoughtful design. She breaks down Spirit’s four AI layers—from enabling developers with Copilot and embedding AI helpers, to building in‑house conversational agents and predictive analytics—all with human verification at the core.

The conversation also explores how Spirit serves anonymous airline customers while keeping experiences secure, how metrics like solution ratio, revenue impact, uptime, stability, and security define success, and how her team uses an event‑driven services platform to deliver consistent data across customer touchpoints.

Patel closes with leadership insights on how to balance innovation with operational excellence, build trust across technical and business teams, and lead people through change in a fast‑evolving AI landscape.

00:00  Welcome and Guest Intro

Sapana Patel has served as Vice President and Chief Information Officer at Spirit Airlines since January 2026. She previously held the role of Senior Vice President, Solutions Architecture, where she led technology teams in close partnership with the business to transform Spirit’s technology stack.

Since joining Spirit in 2012, Patel has held several transformational leadership roles, including Senior Director of Solutions Delivery. Prior to Spirit, she held technology leadership positions at the University of Miami, Interval International, and Cargill, spanning more than 20 years. Patel began her aviation career with Northwest Airlines and holds a Bachelor’s degree in Aerospace Engineering and a Master’s degree in Aviation from Embry‑Riddle Aeronautical University.

About The Dialogue Architects

The Dialogue Architects is a podcast from Rasa, hosted by Lauren Goerz, exploring the craft and strategy behind designing conversational AI in the enterprise. Each episode brings together product leaders, designers, and engineers to unpack how dialogue is built, scaled, and governed in real‑world systems.

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Customer conversations hold an enormous amount of signal—but most enterprises aren’t measuring that signal with the depth or nuance it deserves.

In this episode of The Dialogue Architects, Lauren Goerz sits down with Etie Hertz, GM of Conversation Intelligence at ContentSquare, to explore how the acquisition of Loris is bringing together digital experience analytics and next‑generation conversational intelligence to transform customer support, retention, and lifetime value (LTV).

Etie shares how Loris evolved from a real‑time agent assist tool into a full conversational quality and insights platform used by both CX leaders and AI teams. He explains why traditional CSAT is insufficient—low-response, biased, and missing data—and how more sophisticated scoring systems can capture the full emotional arc of a conversation.

Lauren and Etie dive into Loris’s granular sentiment scale (-2 to +2) and their Conversational Quality (CQ) metric, which evaluates tone, empathy, friction, contact drivers, escalation patterns, and even churn prediction. They discuss what makes conversations work—mirroring tone, acknowledging emotion, reducing repetition—and where they fail.

The conversation also explores:

A practical, insightful episode for anyone building or governing conversational systems in CX, operations, or AI.

Etie Hertz is the GM of Conversation Intelligence at ContentSquare, where he leads the integration of Loris’s conversational insights platform with ContentSquare’s global digital experience analytics. With a background spanning product strategy, AI‑driven optimization, and enterprise CX, Etie focuses on extracting actionable signal from conversations—helping organizations understand sentiment, reduce friction, and directly impact customer lifetime value (LTV). His work sits at the intersection of behavioral analytics, conversational design, and responsible AI.

(00:00) Meet Etie Hertz

The Dialogue Architects is a podcast from Rasa, hosted by Lauren Goerz, exploring the craft and strategy behind designing conversational AI in the enterprise. Each episode brings together product leaders, designers, and engineers to unpack how dialogue is built, scaled, and governed in real‑world systems.

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In this episode of The Dialogue Architects, Lauren Goerz sits down with Nick Thomson, General Manager at Got Bot in Cape Town, to unpack the realities of building and scaling high‑volume bots for commerce, support, and automation—especially in markets where WhatsApp is the primary customer channel.

Nick shares his journey from account management into NLP, APIs, JavaScript, and ultimately Python/Rasa, where hands‑on experimentation taught him how dialogue systems actually behave in production. Today, he leads teams that must balance generative‑AI client expectations with the real engineering work: reliable integrations, multi‑step workflows, rigid flows, regex‑based routing, fraud checks, and failover plans when client APIs or websites buckle under load.

Lauren and Nick dive into the architecture tradeoffs behind enterprise automation—fast vs. cheap vs. complex—how to design workflows that survive message‑volume spikes, and why diagramming in tools like Excalidraw or Miro remains the only reliable single source of truth across internal and client teams.

They also explore multi‑bot orchestration, agent‑to‑agent handoffs, the challenges of WhatsApp/Meta governance and bans, and Nick’s prediction that by 2026, companies will lose patience with autonomous agent failures and demand measurable ROI, stronger security, and far more system discipline.

A grounded, practical episode for anyone designing or governing real‑world conversational systems at scale.

Nick Thomson is the General Manager of Got Bot, a leading conversational AI and messaging automation company in Cape Town. With a background spanning account management, NLP, API integrations, and hands‑on Rasa development, Nick specializes in designing and scaling enterprise WhatsApp bots in one of the world’s highest‑volume messaging markets. At Got Bot, he oversees teams responsible for automation in retail, logistics, and commerce, balancing GenAI innovation with reliable workflow‑driven design. He is known for his practical approach to architecture, diagram‑driven collaboration, and governing multi‑bot ecosystems across brands and departments.

Episode Timestamps

(00:00) Welcome and guest intro

Links & Resources

• Nick Thomson – LinkedIn

The Dialogue Architects is a podcast from Rasa, hosted by Lauren Goerz, exploring the craft and strategy behind designing conversational AI in the enterprise. Each episode brings together technologists, designers, and product leaders to unpack how dialogue is built, scaled, and governed in real‑world systems.

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What can a playwright teach us about designing generative AI? In this episode of The Dialogue Architects, host Lauren Goerz welcomes conversation designer and playwright Soo‑Jin Lee for an in‑depth look at the creative and technical practices that shape AI behavior.

Soo‑Jin traces her journey from public‑school teaching and playwriting to building conversational search experiences powered by language models. She explains how modern conversation design goes far beyond scripting dialogue—instead involving system‑prompt design, content guardrails, metadata strategy, and rigorous human evaluation to ensure responses are accurate, safe, and aligned with brand values.

Using “smart search” as a real product example, Soo‑Jin breaks down how metadata underpins natural‑language queries and how short generated confirmation blurbs help users validate intent. She also demystifies the world of human raters, sharing what it takes to calibrate feedback, avoid bias, and make ethical decisions around inappropriate or sensitive content.

The conversation highlights the importance of collaboration between designers and engineers, and why hybrid creative‑technical thinkers are becoming essential in the GenAI era. Soo‑Jin closes by exploring the challenge of teaching AI humor—and her interest in designing bots that bring wholesome joy to user interactions.

This episode offers actionable insights for designers, engineers, and product leaders building trustworthy, user‑aligned generative AI systems.

(00:00) Welcome and guest introduction

Soo‑Jin Lee is a New York–based playwright and conversation designer whose work blends creative storytelling with practical AI design. Before entering the world of conversational AI, she spent years as a public‑school teacher and playwright—experiences that sharpened her understanding of dialogue, audience intention, and the nuances of human communication. Today, Soo‑Jin works across generative search and language‑model‑driven experiences, where she develops system prompts, designs content guardrails, and leads human‑evaluation workflows to ensure accuracy, safety, and clarity. Her multidisciplinary background allows her to approach AI design with both imagination and rigor, making her a distinctive voice in the evolution of generative AI and conversational UX.

The Dialogue Architects

 is a podcast from Rasa, hosted by Lauren Goerz, exploring the craft and strategy behind designing conversational AI in the enterprise. Each episode brings together technologists, designers, and product leaders to unpack how dialogue is built, scaled, and governed in real‑world systems.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.