Hi, I'm Banu.

I make complex systems legible and trustworthy.

I'm a product and service designer with a founder's fluency in business. I've spent 15+ years designing services across physical and digital settings, connecting industry and academia through innovation programs, and running my own practices. Now I design what a person needs to see before handing real work to an AI agent, and what they need to see to take it back.

New York

Get in touch Résumé

Selected work

What I've designed recently

Agentic workflowsHuman-in-the-loopAgent governanceGenerative UI0-to-1Enterprise B2B

Tax experts know the workflow. Now they can describe it and watch an agent run it.

Tax AI Agent Builder · Vertex Inc · Emerging Technology Group · 2025

Problem

Tax teams pull reports from different systems and compare them by hand to find discrepancies. The challenge was to let tax professionals turn that work into AI agents while keeping control of the plan and its execution.

My contribution

I led the 0-to-1 design through production handover in a 10-person technical team. People described a workflow in chat or edited it on a generated canvas, and the agent's plan stayed visible and correctable before it ran. During a run, each step showed its progress, explanation and evidence, with approval checkpoints reaching reviewers in Teams.

Outcome

Production-ready Builder handed over in 8 months·agents built with it now run inside the product

Explainable AIAnomaly detectionAlert designInformation modelEnterprise B2B

A tax rate changes. Nobody notices until the money is due.

Risk Monitoring Experience · Vertex Inc · Emerging Technology Group · 2026

Problem

Changes to tax rates, rules or configurations can affect transactions long before a tax team discovers the impact. An AI model could detect these anomalies; the design challenge was to turn them into timely alerts people could understand, assess and act on.

My contribution

I led design in an 8-person team of data scientists, developers and analysts. I defined the information model first, so each alert watched one concern and meant one thing when it fired, with severity scored per finding from the money at risk. AI explanations were labeled and linked to the rules, dates and transactions behind them, so people could check the evidence before acting.

Outcome

A proof of concept on real EU VAT data surfaced €40K+ in potential tax exposure, with evidence and explanations·five connected parts designed and prototyped in about 3 months

Service designSystems mappingMulti-party workflowsComplianceEnterprise B2B

The seller carries the audit risk. The proof sits with everyone else.

taXchain Proof of Delivery · Vertex Inc · Emerging Technology Group · 2025–26

Problem

Businesses selling goods across EU borders need proof of delivery to support their VAT exemption. That evidence is scattered across buyers, transport companies and business systems. Missing documents can leave the seller facing an unexpected tax bill.

My contribution

As the sole designer with the product owner and a small development team, I mapped how evidence moved between sellers, buyers, transport companies and the seller's ERP. Separating a delivery's progress from its evidence shaped each role's view: sellers see what is still waiting for documents, buyers confirm and upload from one place, auditors review documents and history together. Storyboards and Figma Make prototypes carried the demo scenarios for all three.

Outcome

Storyboards and prototypes became the development team's build reference·demonstrated at Vertex Exchange Europe, April 2026

B2CResearch-ledE-commerceInformation architectureDesign + code

Shoppers were abandoning their carts. The trouble started before checkout.

Precycle · Breative Design Lab client work · 2024

Problem

Precycle, a zero-waste grocery store in Brooklyn, had 78% mobile cart abandonment. High abandonment usually points to checkout, so the owners needed evidence of where shoppers were really getting stuck before deciding what to fix.

My contribution

I led the project from research through Shopify development. Analytics, 94 questionnaire responses and six interviews placed the friction before checkout: finding products, telling what was in stock and keeping one's place. I reorganized the store around how people shop for groceries, validated the categories through card sorting, and built and A/B tested the storefront myself.

Outcome

Online sales up 56%·cart abandonment fell from 78% to 65%·storefront maintainable by the owner and team without ongoing design or development support

What I bring

The work I'm best at

Agentic AI and human control

Delegating meaningful work takes confidence in what an agent can do and how a person can intervene. I define what it can do independently, who approves the rest, and how people inspect its actions and sources, correct mistakes or take the work back, so trust is designed in rather than asked for.

Enterprise UX and systems thinking

I make complex workflows visible across the people, systems and organizations involved. Working with domain experts, I connect regulatory requirements, data and system constraints to the decisions and handoffs people face, giving the team a shared foundation for what to build.

0-to-1 product design

I turn an uncertain starting point into a clear direction a team can believe in and build. Through research, information models and working prototypes, I give the team something concrete to test and commit to while the picture is still forming, then carry the design through engineering handover.

Product strategy and roadmap alignment

I bring explorations into the room early so engineers, domain experts and product leaders can examine the tradeoffs together. Through demos, workshops or prioritization exercises, I help turn those conversations into a sequence the team can build, with the reasoning behind the decisions kept visible.

AI-assisted prototyping in code

I use working prototypes to explore behavior, motion and states, giving teams something concrete to try and question. Figma Make and Claude Code are part of my daily practice; I choose tools that fit the team's environment and shape the interactions around what engineering can build.

Business judgment, built as a founder

Having founded and run service practices for 15+ years and raised $3M a year in program funding, I approach each brief as a business hypothesis: clarify the goal, surface the constraints and decide what needs validating first, so effort goes where the risk is.

I choose methods around what the team needs to understand. Sometimes that means combining a service blueprint with a technical flow so people, systems and handoffs are visible together. When an existing framework leaves something important out, I adapt it or create the artifact the team needs.

My story

How I got here

Complexity is the part I like. I've spent my career entering unfamiliar fields and becoming useful quickly: scientific publishing, engineering, healthcare, civic services and tax technology. I find the workflow underneath the expertise and the people carrying it, see where they lose time, context or trust, and redesign how the work gets done.

My recent work asks how people and agents should share responsibility. At Sente Labs, which I co-founded, I contributed business design and product strategy and co-authored Proof, Not Trust, a paper on zero trust for agentic systems: an agent's authority is verified outside the agent, and human oversight goes to the decisions that need it. Before that, I was the sole designer in the Emerging Technology Group at Vertex, a global tax technology company serving more than 60% of the Fortune 500. In its R&D lab, I worked with engineers and data scientists to explore what AI and other emerging technologies could do in a data-intensive, highly regulated domain.

My background spans product, UX and service design. I built an ed-tech platform for structural engineers, ran a boutique UX practice for startups and nonprofits, and grew a service design practice to 14 people and 150+ projects. These included innovation programs connecting industry and academia, with partners such as NATO and UNESCO.

That range of work keeps me curious about how people make sense of unfamiliar situations and decide what to do next. I ground my design explorations in cognitive science, and I want AI tools to expand how people think while giving them the clarity to question and choose.

When I see what a project needs, I pick it up. I like bringing people into the work and turning an uncertain beginning into something a team can believe in and build.

MICA, Master's in UX Design

Community work

Design for the communities I'm part of

Board member · Digital experience
Beacon, New York

Beacon Bonfire Music & Art Festival

Bonfire is a biennial, community-owned festival, recognized several times as one of the Hudson Valley's best music festivals. I design and manage its digital experience, from the website and ticketing to the forms artists, venues and volunteers use to get involved. I also built a shared knowledge base so new volunteers can pick up where others leave off. The latest festival brought together 400+ artists, 150+ performances across 20 venues and more than 5,000 attendees. Behind it were 100 volunteers who gave 1,000+ hours to make it happen.

beaconbonfire.com

Board member · Digital experience
Harlem, New York

Harlem Sculpture Gardens

Harlem Sculpture Gardens brings large-scale sculpture into the neighborhood's historic parks. Every spring since 2024, people have encountered the work on an ordinary walk through their neighborhood. I lead its digital experience, shaping how visitors find the sculptures, artists apply and funders understand what the exhibition brings to the community. The website gives people a way to explore work spread across several parks and plan a visit. I'm also supporting the planned expansion into Highbridge Park as the North By West Public Art District.

harlemsculpturegardens.com

Enablement team member
Global volunteer initiative

Habits for a Better World

Habits for a Better World is a nonprofit exploring how everyday habits affect human and planetary health, drawing on research and behavioral science. "Someone should do something about that" became "why not us?", and 450+ volunteer researchers came together. I joined a five-person enablement team to work out how the first research teams would collaborate across time zones, choosing tools and setting up ways to share their work. I also co-organized our first conference in December 2024, with 150+ attendees from more than 20 countries, six keynotes and twelve research presentations.

habitsforabetterworld.org