AI-Driven Compliance & Financial Intelligence Platform
Description
A U.S. defense-sector organization sought to enhance its audit-readiness and financial oversight capabilities through AI-enabled tools. The goal was to create a secure, human-centered system that could surface insights from current and historical resources — helping teams identify trends, assess resource impact, and strengthen organizational readiness.
The project represented a strategic opportunity to advance the agency’s AI maturity and demonstrate how intelligent automation could reduce audit preparation complexity, improve transparency, and support data-driven decision-making.
This initiative contributed to the foundation for multi-million-dollar AI financial contracts that would expand the Department of Defense’s capability and understanding of AI-assisted operational tools.
Challenge / Goal
Design a trusted, scalable, and human-centered compliance tool to support defense teams in preparing for audits and managing financial intelligence — ensuring:
- AI-assisted insights were transparent, interpretable, and actionable
- Complex compliance data could be understood across technical and non-technical audiences
- Collaboration remained efficient and measurable under secure conditions
From Insight to Impact
Translating research, design, and storytelling into measurable outcomes.
Discover
Led stakeholder and user interviews to identify pain points within audit preparation and financial oversight workflows. Synthesized findings to uncover opportunities where AI could enhance visibility, efficiency, and trust. Developed alignment maps to connect user needs with organizational readiness and future capability goals.
Explore
Directed the design of AI-assisted interfaces that surfaced audit and financial insights in clear, interpretable formats. Created user flows, conceptual wireframes, and visualization frameworks demonstrating how users could navigate data and measure progress dynamically. Championed an iterative, agile UX process that balanced high-level strategy with daily execution.
Establish
Partnered closely with leadership to communicate UX progress and insights through bi-weekly sprint reviews. Translated technical advancements into human-centered narratives that emphasized clarity, impact, and trust. Advocated for the role of design in shaping AI transparency and adoption across the organization.
Impact
- Established a scalable UX framework guiding future AI-assisted compliance and financial tools.
- Strengthened cross-functional collaboration through transparent, user-centered delivery practices.
- Enabled the foundation for multi-million-dollar AI contracts expanding DoD’s AI capabilities.
- Elevated UX as a strategic function within the defense AI ecosystem.
Received client accolades and firm leadership's recognition for trust, organization, and consistent value delivered every sprint.
My Role
As UX Lead, I guided design direction across a six-month period of performance — shaping the user experience vision, aligning design strategy with AI capability development, and advocating for human-centered practices across cross-functional teams.
- Led two initial discovery sessions to establish alignment, direction, and measurable design objectives.
- Advocated for structured collaboration by implementing an organized JIRA framework to enhance visibility, transparency, and accountability across teams.
- Supported agile delivery and sprint cadence — facilitating prioritization discussions, refining user stories, and ensuring design progress aligned with program objectives.
- Maintained active engagement with leadership, data science, and policy teams to ensure AI outputs were human-interpretable and ethical in use.
- Delivered continuous value through two-week sprints, balancing rapid iteration with long-term strategic design alignment.
Generated Artifacts
Legal obligations and the confidential nature of the work, I am unable to share specific project artifacts or client details.
- Interactive user research synthesis dashboard visualizing key findings from stakeholder workshops and interviews.
- AI design of experience illustrating full-node view of a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system, including user touchpoints and data flows.
- Prompt architecture framework showing relationships between user intent, system logic, and AI-driven recommendations.
- Dynamic behavioral interaction prototypes highlighting adaptive responses and system feedback in key user scenarios.
- Facilitation outputs such as co-creation canvases and journey modeling visuals used to align research insights with design behaviors.
- Visualization of generative responses demonstrating how users engage, refine, and validate AI outputs in context-sensitive workflows.
Reflection
This engagement reaffirmed the value of UX leadership in shaping trust and transparency around AI systems — particularly in high-stakes, compliance-driven environments. By integrating human-centered design within agile delivery, we demonstrated that even under secure, accelerated timelines, meaningful progress and measurable impact can coexist. The experience reinforced my belief that advocacy, alignment, and empathy remain the most powerful tools in designing for complexity.