Aelgyrr Sønstegard
Senior conversation design practitioner with experience spanning the full landscape of conversational AI — voice and IVR, chatbots, multimodal interfaces, and LLM-driven systems — across enterprise clients in healthcare, finance, government, and travel & hospitality. Specializes in establishing and leading Conversation Design practices, mentoring designers, and bridging technical and business stakeholders in scalable AI strategy.
Experience
Independent Practice (2025–Present)
Remote [Seattle, WA]
Authored Blind Trust: AI Perils and Pitfalls (And How to Avoid Them), a structured field guide to thirteen recurring failure modes in conversational AI — including fluency-as-credibility, confidence mirroring, sycophancy, scope-blindness, and automation complacency. First draft complete and in active circulation among practitioners and decision-makers, with continued refinement underway
Developed and refined a "Word Journey" methodology (Orðferð) for end-to-end conversational interface design, with associated tools, frameworks, and ROI guidance for organizations evaluating or deploying conversational AI
Continued portfolio development and public-facing writing through celticviking.net and LinkedIn, with engagement from peers and senior practitioners across the field
Principal Conversational AI Strategist (2022–2025)
Blink UX (an Mphasis company), Remote [Seattle, WA]
Led conversational design for a major American financial services firm on a multi-year, $1M+ engagement spanning multiple business units and use cases
Designed LLM-driven solutions using fine-tuned and retrieval-based architectures; bridged technical and business stakeholders around scalable AI strategies grounded in how ML models actually learn, generalize, and fail
Established a new Conversational AI Design practice, including tools, processes, standards, templates, presales materials, and AI design guidelines
Advanced conversation design across prompt engineering and prosody tuning via SSML for production voice deployments
Built proprietary project-estimating tools that supported sales and presales engagements, enabling consultative conversations with clients on the speed/quality/cost trade-offs of conversational AI work
Mentored junior designers and trained client teams on the Kore AI platform; led peer review and editing across the practice
Senior Voice User Experience Designer (2021–2022)
Optum Rx / Optum / United Health Group, Remote [Seattle, WA]
Established and led a Conversation Design practice for a Fortune 5 healthcare and pharmacy services enterprise, with work spanning Optum Rx's mail-order pharmacy business and broader Optum / UHG initiatives.
Designed voice and conversational experiences that reduced transfers to live agents by 17%, freeing agent capacity for higher-complexity calls
Designed across voice, SMS, and synchronized hybrid modalities for healthcare-regulated, high-volume contexts
Mentored junior designers and led the establishment of design process, standards, and review protocols across the new practices
Principal User Experience Designer (2018–2020)
Voxai Solutions, Remote [Seattle, WA]
Principal voice and conversational UX designer for the United States Postal Service, supporting hundreds of thousands of daily calls
Spearheaded multimodal Visual IVR initiative; achieved 37% increase in caller success rates and corresponding agent deflection
Designed synchronized hybrid-modality conversations — including voice-with-SMS interactions where spoken instructions guided users through input displayed on screen
Educated stakeholders on conversational design principles — both theoretical foundations and applied practice — to align engineering, product, and business teams around shared design standards
Worked across the Genesys platform stack (Voxai's standard) and Nuance tools deployed in USPS's hybrid environment
Principal Voice Interface Designer (2018)
Nuance Communications, Remote [Burlington, MA]
Designed audience-segmented voice experiences calibrated for varying caller demographics, contexts, and task complexity
Spearheaded multimodal Visual IVR initiative; achieved 37% increase in caller success rates and corresponding agent deflection
Worked extensively in the Nuance Design Suite, including platform-native authoring, prosody tuning, and behavioral modeling tools
Earlier Principal-level Work
Principal Speech Solutions Architect at Interactive Intelligence (now part of Genesys), where I led the design and creation of Interaction RITA — a real-time conversational system for riders of the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) network. RITA delivered live transit information, station data, and simulated fare-card transactions through the BART API, with corollary documentation for sales and demo support. The scalable architecture prompted RFPs from transit agencies in Seattle, Boston, Houston, and Atlanta. I also led design for a Phase 1 speech-enabled IVR for the nation's largest provider of educational software, projected to save the company tens of thousands of dollars in agent costs within the first year of deployment.
Established and led an internal Conversational Design practice for Fortune 500 client engagements.
Education & Training
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA — Professional Certificate in Design Thinking
Saybrook University, Pasadena, CA — Post-graduate study in Psychology of Creativity
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY — M.S., Human-Computer Interaction