Growing a Conversation Design Practice

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In this episode of Unprompted, Hans van Dam speaks with Grace Hughes of Accenture Song about growing a conversation design practice in the enterprise. They explore evolving roles, building CoEs, maintaining quality at scale, and designing trustworthy conversational AI systems.

In this episode of Unprompted, Hans van Dam, CEO of the Conversation Design Institute, sits down with Grace Hughes, Conversation Design Director at Accenture Song, to explore what it really takes to grow, scale, and sustain a conversation design practice inside complex organizations.

Together, they trace Grace’s journey into conversation design and reflect on how the role has evolved from scripting flows to shaping product behaviour in AI-driven systems. The conversation highlights how large language models have shifted the focus of the work, from controlling dialogue to designing principles, guardrails, and trust across unpredictable, non-deterministic interactions.

The episode also covers:

▪️ How the conversation designer role has changed in the age of LLMs

▪️ Building and operating a Conversation Design Center of Excellence

▪️ Maintaining quality and consistency at scale

▪️ Designing for trust, transparency, and user confidence

▪️ The realities of shipping conversational AI in enterprise environments

Drawing on Grace’s experience working across multidisciplinary teams, including product, engineering, research, and model design, the discussion surfaces the often invisible work behind successful conversational products. They unpack why conversation design today is as much about systems thinking, collaboration, and governance as it is about language.

The episode emphasizes that growing a strong conversation design practice requires clarity of purpose, shared principles, and continuous learning. As conversational AI becomes more embedded in products and organizations, Grace and Hans stress the importance of moving beyond hype to build practices that are resilient, human-centered, and grounded in real-world constraints.

Tune in to hear how conversation design is maturing as a discipline and what it takes to build a practice that can scale without losing its soul.

Grace Hughes is the Conversation Design Director at Accenture Song, where she leads strategy and execution on large-scale conversation and content design initiatives. With a background in content design and content strategy, Grace has worked on everything from digital identity frameworks to multimodal AI assistants. She is a frequent speaker and educator in the field, a contributor to Accenture’s flagship reports on conversational AI and value networks, and a trusted voice on how to scale meaningful, human-centered design across complex enterprise environments. Grace also teaches at TU Dublin and IADT, mentoring the next generation of content and conversation designers.