AI and the Future of Experience
By Simon Hoza, Federica Busa, Mark Woodward
Expo 2025 Osaka is in its first month, and already the conversations filling our feeds are telling. More and more, they reflect not just what visitors came to see, but what they hoped to feel. There is a clear appetite for experiences that do more than guide people from point A to B; places that invite curiosity, allow for detours, and create space to linger.
As the experience economy gives real wings to experiential design, it is also reshaping it into industrialised templates. Scale and mass customisation is beginning to edge out the craft of the artists. The very tools that enable growth — efficiency metrics, replicable formats, optimisation models — can end up stripping away the emotional and memorable reasons people seek these experiences in the first place.
From Expo pavilions to public galleries, too many visits follow the same well-rehearsed routine: enter here, watch this for three minutes, move there, witness the “wow,” interact briefly, then exit through retail. And of course, end with a call to action: leave a message and make a pledge.
What gets lost is texture: the moments of variation, the emotional friction, the surprises that stick. So much time is spent mapping personas, plotting psychographics, and theorising behaviours, yet most visitors, regardless of background, are offered the same narrative structure. A short film. A seven-minute reveal. A timed activity. A polite prompt to reflect. The timings shift, but the narrative arc remains largely the same.
Structure is necessary. It gives shape to experience. But it also needs to support what anchors in memory. Neuroscience continues to show that people respond to contrast, complexity, and the unexpected. Visitors remember what caught them off guard. What delighted them. What made them pause. A templated journey, however elegant, will eventually blend into the background like a flat building façade with nothing to notice.
Even queues, often seen as problems to be solved. can be reframed. Disney has long treated them as part of the show: a narrative prelude, a moment of atmosphere, a space for connection. Not dead time, but meaningful time. And in the context of a World Expo, the management of queues should be less about booking another potentially templated journey, and to elevate more of the everyday pavilions and public spaces, instead of reserving all the depth for one or two gems.
This matters just as much in how we shape parks, plazas, neighbourhoods. Cities, after all, are the ultimate experience platforms. When we design for control instead of curiosity, we risk flattening the rich texture of urban life into something closer to a managed shuffle.
Which is why the role of artificial intelligence in this space is so compelling and, we believe, increasingly urgent. If used purely to replicate or scale templated journeys, AI could deepen the problem. But used generatively, it offers something more powerful.
AI can already respond to patterns of movement, detect changes in mood, suggest new pacing. Add to this the possibilities of generative systems and a different design philosophy begins to emerge. Less fixed path. More flexible journey. Less optimisation. More orchestration.
A Rehersed Routine. Illustration: Mark Woodward
And just as we have seen generative AI transform the world of language, diversifying narratives, tones and expressions, it also holds the potential to reimagine how experiences connect. Not just moments strung together, but themes in conversation. Journeys that have layers and depth, where creative logic guides the flow between ideas, spaces, and feelings.
Experience design has matured and there are new tools to move beyond the production line. Not by abandoning structure, but by designing it to connect more freely and creatively, to be more generous, responsive, and alive.
Join us in reimagining the AI future of experiential design.
Discover more meaningful, dynamic experiences that engage, surprise, and connect at hello@busawoodward.com
