AI is moving fast. Faster than platforms, faster than policy, and faster than most organizations are prepared for. As autonomous agents take on decisions, workflows, and entire roles, the Cloud industry is becoming the invisible engine behind a fundamental shift in how humans interact with technology and with each other.
At CloudFest 2026, keynote speaker Roger Rohatgi will tackle that shift head-on. Roger brings a rare mix of creative leadership, enterprise-scale experience, and deep thinking about what happens when AI moves beyond screens and into everyday life. From award-winning storytelling to leading human experience design at BP, and now shaping the future of agentic AI as Chief AI Officer at Chai, Roger’s perspective sits at the intersection of design, technology, and responsibility.
Ahead of his session, we connected with him to explore his journey, his thinking on AI, and why Cloud providers play a far bigger role in this future than they might realize.
Your career path is anything but linear. How did you go from creative storytelling to shaping enterprise-scale digital experiences?
Curiosity and creativity have always been drivers. Long before job titles, it was about storytelling and expressing ideas visually and emotionally, whether that was graphic design, motion, film, or digital experiences. Early tools like Photoshop, After Effects and Flash opened the door to creating worlds that felt alive, but they also revealed an important lesson very quickly: the most beautiful experience in the world means nothing if people can’t use it.
That realization shifted everything. It moved the focus away from aesthetics alone and toward experience. How people feel, how they engage, and whether something actually works in the real world. That thinking carried through roles in agencies, technology companies, and eventually into large-scale enterprises, where experience design stops being a nice-to-have and becomes mission-critical.
You were the first digital design leader in BP’s history. What did that role teach you?
Scale changes everything. BP isn’t just a company, it’s an ecosystem that shapes how the world works. When I joined, they were at the start of a massive digital transformation, but the big question wasn’t technology. It was humanity.
The challenge was simple to ask and hard to answer: how do you put humans at the center of hundreds of thousands of digital tools and interfaces? That led to building an entirely new design organization focused on human experience design, or HXD. We weren’t just designing interfaces. We were designing how people interacted with energy systems, data, and each other, while also factoring in sustainability and planetary impact.
For anyone in the Cloud space, this is a familiar problem. Infrastructure scales fast. Experience often doesn’t unless it’s intentional.
AI is now moving beyond screens. How does that change the idea of user experience?
We’re entering a new phase. Traditionally, humans designed experiences for humans based on what we thought people needed. With AI, particularly agentic AI, that dynamic begins to flip.
We’re now designing systems that can make decisions, choose actions, and shape experiences on our behalf. That introduces a new concept: artificial experience, or AX. It’s not just about how humans interact with AI, but how AI decides to interact with humans.
For Cloud providers, this really matters. These agents rely on data, compute, orchestration, and reliability. The Cloud becomes the highway these experiences run on. If the experience goes wrong, it’s not abstract. It affects real decisions, real businesses, and real lives.
What does agentic AI really mean in practice?
Agentic AI is about autonomy. These systems don’t just recommend actions, they take them. They book travel, manage schedules, respond to messages, negotiate on your behalf, and increasingly make decisions humans used to own.
This will feel normal very quickly. The danger isn’t that AI makes decisions, it’s that we stop noticing which decisions AI is making or which decisions we’ve outsourced to AI. The opportunity is that, if done well, AI can multiply human potential by removing friction and cognitive load.
The question for leaders isn’t whether this will happen. It’s where you draw the line between decisions you retain and decisions you delegate.
What mindset shift do builders and leaders need to make now?
Invest in experience. The UX of today is the foundation for the AI of tomorrow. As AI capabilities level out, experience becomes the differentiator.
Every organization will have access to similar models, tools, and agents. What will separate them is how thoughtfully those systems are designed, governed, and integrated into human workflows. That’s where Cloud providers have an opportunity to lead, not just enable.
What can CloudFest attendees expect from your keynote?
Urgency, clarity, and a challenge. This isn’t a speculative future. It’s already unfolding. Cloud infrastructure sits beneath every AI agent, every automated decision, and every scaled experience.
My goal is to help Cloud professionals see the role they play in shaping not just systems, but society. This future won’t be built by one company or one platform. It requires shared responsibility and intentional design across the entire ecosystem.
Join the conversation at CloudFest 2026
CloudFest 2026 runs March 23–26 and brings together the builders, operators, and decision-makers shaping the future of the Cloud. Roger’s keynote will challenge assumptions, expand perspectives, and connect the dots between AI, experience, and the infrastructure powering it all.
If you’re serious about where AI is heading and what role the Cloud plays in getting it right, this is a session you won’t want to miss. It’s happening on Wednesday, 25 March at 1730 on the Studio Stage.
Register now and be part of the conversation.
