John Whalen, PhD

John Whalen, PhD

11.9K Subscribers

CEO, AI Research Leader, Cognitive Scientist, O'Reilly Author

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John Whalen, PhD will transform your research with Agentic AI

I’m CEO of Brilliant Experience, have a PhD in cognitive science, and wrote Design for How People Think (O’Reilly).

For 20 years, I’ve helped teams at companies like Google, GSK, and Capital One better understand their customers, capture insights, and build better products.

When AI started reshaping research, I got curious and learned. My team ran “AI vs. Humans” studies to see where AI excels, where human judgment matters most, and how to effectively blend both.

I’ll teach you how to create trustworthy AI research workflows that let you trace every step and insight.

Then advance to the next course and learn to orchestrate agentic research teams, work strategically with synthetic users grounded in real data, and bring in human judgement so you can scale research without losing rigor.

Key Clients
Google
Capital One
Bloomberg
GSK
Pinterest

Alumni reviews

Thanh

Live cohort
Senior UX Researcher · Independent Consulting

Agentic AI for Product Teams: Build Workflows & Agents You Can Trust

This course delivered on being genuinely hands-on — every session paired concepts with real exercises rather than just theory, which made the agentic AI concepts stick in a way slide decks never do. John Whalen's command of the material came through clearly; he's clearly building and using this stuff himself, not just teaching from a script. The pacing worked well for turning new AI workflows into something I could actually apply to my UX research practice right away, not just file away as "interesting someday" knowledge. One caveat: the course is billed as accessible to people without a programming background, but I'd set expectations that it leans more technical than that framing suggests. Researchers coming in cold on the technical side may want to budget extra time to get comfortable with some of the tooling. Overall, highly recommend for UX researchers looking to seriously incorporate agentic AI into their workflow — just come in ready to stretch a bit on the technical side.

Tommie

Live cohort
UX Researcher · Docusign

Agentic AI for Product Teams: Build Workflows & Agents You Can Trust

This was an excellent course. John does a great job breaking down complex AI concepts into practical workflows that any researcher can use daily. He keeps up with the latest AI advancements and keeps you informed in this fast-paced environment. Overall, this course gave me a new perspective on how to use AI for research, and I would recommend this for anyone who wants to level up their skill set.

Olivia

Live cohort
Industry Communications Manager · Endress+Hauser

Agentic AI for Product Teams: Build Workflows & Agents You Can Trust

This course was truly enlightening. I'm not a UX researcher but still found it very valuable and applicable to my field. It certainly is a rather fast paced and challenging course, however John has a great way of bringing the material across. Thanks a lot!

Catherine

Live cohort
Product Research & Insights · Salesforce (Informatica)

Agentic AI for Product Teams: Build Workflows & Agents You Can Trust

Highly recommend John’s Maven course on Agentic AI for Research! The hands-on projects translate directly into real-world UXR applications, and the depth of the material is exceptional, allowing me to continuously refine and improve my multi-agent workflows.

Nitya

Live cohort
Senior Consumer Insights Researcher · Familiar Machines & Magic

Agentic AI for Product Teams: Build Workflows & Agents You Can Trust

John is an excellent teacher. The course gave me valuable hands on experience building multi-agent systems for research, while also giving me a clear conceptual framework for approaching this work. I left with a practical process I can immediately implement at my workplace, along with a much better understanding of which parts of the research process I can trust AI to support and where human judgment still matters. I also appreciated the opportunity to explore tools like Vurvey and have thoughtful discussions with peers about emerging areas like synthetic data and synthetic users.