Leveraging Design Thinking Towards the Convergence of AI, IoT and Blockchain: Strategic Drivers and Human-Centered Use Cases.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly transforming and reshaping human interactions, severely impacting organizational processes and operations. However, it faces substantial challenges, such as collecting, evaluating, and anonymizing data, which brings along privacy risks for sensitive user data and tends to diminish the human perspective as the principal focus of many activities in our world. The relationship between Design Thinking (DT) and AI is meaningful on two interrelated and reciprocal levels: (1) The impact and perceived benefits of AI on the DT process; (2) DT as an important concept to understand the opportunities offered by the combination of AI with Blockchain and the Internet of Things. Hence, we investigate human-centered use-cases building on AI, Blockchain, and IoT by interviewing experts such as entrepreneurs, technology researchers, investors, and academics. We find that AI significantly affects streamlining and enhancing the DT process while the DT process offers great potential to create human-centered use cases leveraging AI, Blockchain, and IoT. Notably, we suggest that the DT process should pay particular attention to industrial and organizational capabilities during the empathize and define stages, the process performance requirements throughout the ideation and prototyping stages, and the output at the testing stage.