Early Uber Eats designer Ron Goldin downloaded the driver app and did deliveries to understand user pain points firsthand. This direct immersion revealed a terrible onboarding process and built extreme empathy that drove crucial product improvements.

To convince executives at traditional companies of AI's potential, abstract presentations fail. Instead, provide tangible, immersive experiences. A ride in a Waymo car, for instance, serves as a powerful product demo that makes the future feel concrete and inevitable, opening minds in a way slideshows cannot.

Tock rejected traditional focus groups and instead embedded its software engineers directly into restaurants to work shifts as hosts. This forced immersion gave the engineering team firsthand experience with the end-user's pain points, leading to a far more intuitive and effective product than surveys could produce.

Go beyond static prototypes by using text-to-video tools like Flow or Sora to create promotional clips. This final step allows stakeholders to visualize the product in a real-world context and emotionally connect with the user experience, making your pitch significantly more persuasive.

Toyota's Lexus brand requires design engineers to immerse themselves in the user experience before starting a project. This empathy-driven approach led to innovations like the "cockpit style" interior, where every control is easily accessible without reaching, creating a truly user-centric product.

Design thinking's immersion phase goes beyond understanding customer needs. By having innovators physically mirror the customer's experience, it forces them to confront and dismantle their own unexamined biases, leading to a fundamental reframing of the problem itself.

Instead of telling clients about a problem with data, create an immersive experience that forces them to feel their customers' frustration firsthand. This emotional "penny drop" moment, as shown by ad agency ABM's pitch to British Rail, is more persuasive than any slide deck and can beat giant competitors.

Waymo identified that the first ride transformed anxiety into acceptance. Unable to offer rides at scale, they created a 360-degree VR video to virtually place people in the car, demystifying the technology and replicating the game-changing “demo” experience for a mass audience.

Instead of presenting user research in dense slide decks that are quickly forgotten, create a short (1-2 minute) highlight reel of video clips showing customers speaking in their own words. This emotional, direct evidence is a powerful hack for creating alignment and is much harder for executives to argue with.