How to build agentic AI your customers will actually trust
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Welcome back to Insights Unlocked. In this episode, we sit down with Chase Keaton, senior research manager at Walmart, to talk about the two competing mindsets shaping how teams use AI today, why the builder model might be missing something crucial, and why trust, not usability, could be the real metric for agentic AI. Chase brings sharp, practical thinking to a conversation every researcher and designer needs to hear. Enjoy the show.
Welcome to Insights Unlocked, an original podcast from User Testing, where we bring you candid conversations and stories with the thinkers, doers and builders behind some of the most successful digital products and experiences in the world, from concept to execution.
Welcome to the Insights Unlocked podcast. I'm Nathan Isaacs, Principal Content Marketing Manager here at UserTesting. And our host today is Mike Mace, a Director of Solution Marketing at UserTesting. He's also a longtime tech veteran, and one of the areas he works on is helping companies build effective AI products. Welcome back to the show, Mike.
Thanks very much. It's great to be here.
And our guest today is Chase Keaton, Senior Research Manager at Walmart, where he helps teams make smarter, customer-centered decisions through research. A passionate advocate for human insight, Chase has built his career turning complex customer behaviors into clear, actionable strategies that drive better products and experiences. And as a quick disclaimer, while Chase works at Walmart, he is not speaking for Walmart, and he won't touch on any confidential information.
Who is Chase Keaten and what perspective does he bring to AI and UX research?
Okay, now welcome to the show, Chase.
Thanks for having me. I appreciate you.
Hey, Chase, it's great to talk with you again. So folks know the background. Chase and I have talked a few times and I found him to be a really fun guy to talk with about AI things. He's got really interesting, innovative thoughts about what it's doing and also what we can do about it. So today we're not going to be just talking about how you should use AI in your work. I will touch on that some, but this is also what AI is doing to user experience. and the opportunities and challenges it's creating for us. And, you know, we've talked about this stuff before one-on-one, and I wanted to share it on Insights Unlocked. So, hey, Chase, it's great to talk with you again.
Yeah, I appreciate the opportunity. Thanks for having me, Mike.
So I think to start us off, it'd be great if you could share a bit on your background, because you've done a diverse set of things over time that kind of add up to where you are today. Talk to us about the journey you've been on.
Sure, so a lot of people end up in the UX space through either like an academic lens or kind of like a more of a homegrown natural progression. I have fallen to the latter category. I've been in UX as some form or function for the past 13, 14 years, and a lot of that is focused on AI related things for the past five or six years. So, um, it puts me in a unique position to have a really long UX story career across different B2B, B2C channels, um, different companies, a large diversity there. And then also just the ability to kind of talk a little bit about how AI intersects with research, intersects with users, intersects with business and, um, And that's been a lot of my focus for the past five, six years.
So I'm happy to share what I've learned. I doubt any of it is going to be world-breaking, but I think it's also very important to sometimes just lay things out so that everybody can kind of have a chance to pick apart and get their own interpretation and figure out where to go from there.
Awesome. And specifically, what's your exact role at Walmart today?
So currently at Walmart, my title is listed as senior manager, and I'm working for the first time in my career under more of a marketing wing than a strict product wing or UX wing. And the overlap's very similar. I work on a fabulous marketing team. We work on kind of all the newest propositions, and some of that's very AI adjacent, which is interesting.
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