Eliel Johnson

I'm a maker who leads, and I never stopped making things. For the past 25+ years, I've led design at scale. Most recently, as VP and Head of Design at CVS Health, I founded and ran the AI Design Lab, a program dedicated to embedding AI directly into the UX design process itself. Not just the products we were designing. That meant building new workflows and adapting both the tools and process to increase velocity. Before that, I spent 12 years at Charles Schwab as the first VP of UX, building the design, research, and content team from 5 to 250+ people and leading the design of award-winning products across brokerage, wealth management, and mobile. I led the design of Schwab Intelligent Portfolios, an AI-driven robo-advisor that grew to $100B AUM. That was 2015, before AI was a boardroom priority. Earlier, I co-founded Thread Experience, a boutique design agency whose clients included VMware, TIBCO, Sony, SAP, and Wells Fargo. Today I'm building with AI-native development tools, using the current generation of prototyping and coding environments to ship ideas fast. For the first time, senior judgment and hands-on making aren't in tension. AI closes the gap between thinking something and shipping it. The leverage on experience now compounds at the speed of code. I write and speak about where design is headed. Specifically, the design problems nobody has yet solved for agentic AI. I call the framework the Delegation Layer. The interaction paradigm we've designed around for 30 years is breaking. The products that figure out what replaces it will define the next decade. I serve on the UserTesting Executive Advisory Board. I've spoken at the Stanford D School, Cornell University's Johnson School of Business, the Federal Reserve Bank, the McKinsey Design Leaders Conference, Config, AIGA, and Finnovate. I hold multiple design patents. I'm looking for my next Head of Design or VP Design role at a company where AI is central to the product, not bolted on. Series A through public, Bay Area or remote. Teams nimble enough to move fast and experienced enough to care about craft. I also take on a small number of advising engagements for companies working through hard AI product strategy questions where design judgment matters. If either sounds like a fit, let's talk.