AI optimizes. But someone still has to make it mean something.
Our current generation of AI product strategy is all about efficiency. But efficiency at scale has a shadow: it normalizes. It defaults to the statistically dominant—the most common syntax, the most common patterns, the most common cultural assumption, the most common way of making meaning—and treats that default as neutral.
It isn’t.
AI systems are trained predominantly on text produced by people who already had access to the institutions that produce text. That’s not a bug that better engineering will fix. It’s a structural condition. And at scale, it means your AI products are quietly encoding one culture’s way of meaning-making as the standard for everyone, including the customers who don’t share that culture, and whose trust you’re trying to earn.
At best, the output feels generic. At worst, it’s alienating to the very humans you’re trying to reach, in ways your team may not be equipped to recognize, because the bias is in the baseline everyone’s treating as normal.
That’s the gap I work in.
As an advisor and former innovation executive with a background in applied linguistics, CX design, and product strategy, I help leadership teams figure out what wisdom, judgment, and human interpretation need to stay in the loop (and where) so your products stay meaningful and trustworthy to all the humans you’re building them for. Not just a human in the loop. Wisdom in the loop.
Language diversity and AI ethics. Differentiation and product moats. Building trust with global customers who don’t experience the world the way your training data does. These are the problems I help leaders solve.
Marcy Carbajal has spent twenty-five years studying how humans make meaning and what happens when systems get it wrong.
Trained as an applied linguist and cultural ethnographer, with graduate research at Princeton in cultural hermeneutics and indigenous cosmovisions, she came up through the classroom before moving into product strategy: first as a college professor and published specialist for A Writer’s Reference (Macmillan), then as a UX, CX, and product strategist for organizations ranging from Khan Academy and REI to Walgreens.
That path, from linguistics to pedagogy to enterprise product leadership, has turned out to be just the right preparation for a core strategic problem that AI has made urgent. She understands, at a foundational level, how language and symbols carry meaning and how to build the organizational judgment that keeps products from dissolving into something technically correct but humanly empty.
She now works with executive teams who sense that AI-only strategies are missing something and need someone who can name what it is, and architect the path forward.
Khan Academy
HMH
National Geographic Learning
Macmillan
REI
Walgreens
Allstate
United Airlines
Khan Academy HMH National Geographic Learning Macmillan REI Walgreens Allstate United Airlines
Work Experience
“Marcy is one of my all-time favorite thought partners.
In the time I was able to work with her, I learned so much from her about user experience and feel lucky to be able to carry her wisdom with me.
Marcy is a thoughtful planner, an empathetic listener, and is incredibly effective at getting things done. And throughout the life cycle of the project, she applies her amazing super power of synthesis, telling simple, clear stories in very complex spaces.
If you are looking for someone to help you understand and solution a complex problem space, you will not find a more generous, knowledgeable, and effective partner as Marcy!”
Amy Lein, VP Learning Experience Design, HMH
via LinkedIn
“Marcy has the unique ability to approach complex problems with an incredible amount of clarity and thoughtfulness. I was part of a large team trying to overhaul software for a Fortune 100 company when Marcy joined our team as a strategist.
She immediately went to work helping us answer the big questions we struggled to answer ourselves.
What's unique about Marcy is her ability to switch gears on a moment's notice and to handle whatever challenge is tossed her way. I've witnessed her interact with business, technology, and other design partners within the organization, and she's able to have intelligent, knowledgeable, and influential conversations with all interested parties.”
John Tinman, Bounteous
via LinkedIn