Strategic AI & design leadership
AI-native design leadership, embedded in your team.
You get a senior partner who diagnoses where AI creates real leverage, designs and builds it, and leaves your team with repeatable patterns.
How we work
Structured engagements, run on a repeatable method.
Most help comes split in two: strategists who hand you a deck and leave you to execute it, or builders who need someone else to tell them what to build. This is both in one place — the same senior judgment that diagnoses where AI creates real leverage also designs and ships the solution, so nothing gets lost in translation between the thinking and the doing.
01 — Clarity
See where AI actually creates leverage.
A focused diagnostic engagement — where AI creates real leverage versus where it's hype, mapped to a clear decision about what to build and what to ignore. The low-risk way to experience the thinking before committing to more. Most engagements start here.
02 — Vantage
The full engagement including strategy and execution.
Senior AI and design leadership with hands-on execution — diagnosis, workflow design, and the build itself, delivered on a defined engagement. The leadership a full-time CDO brings, working in your business now instead of after a six-month hire.
03 — Partnership
Ongoing leadership after the build ships.
For founders who want a senior design and AI partner on a standing basis once the core work is done. Continued strategic leadership as your company and its AI footprint keep growing — without a permanent executive hire.
Selected Work
Where we've done this before.
Enterprise-grade AI and design judgment, applied to the challenges scaling companies actually face.
Enterprise AI platform development & governance
Built the foundation for how Walmart merchants deploy AI agents.
We led the design of AI patterns and frameworks for Walmart's merchandising and supplier organization. The work became the foundation for the governance frameworks, guardrails, and protocol infrastructure that now allow individual employees to spin up and deploy agents at scale across one of the largest retail operations in the world.
McKinsey & Company / Medtronic — Surgical platform redesign
Unified the clinical workflow for a global MedTech leader's surgical planning platform.
Fragmented communication and disjointed data systems were creating friction at every step of Medtronic's Surgeon Hub platform. We led all design efforts — research across 19 surgeons and lab engineers, journey mapping, and high-fidelity prototyping — delivering a mobile-first redesign that reduced cognitive load and established the UX architecture for platform scaling.
View case study →McKinsey & Company / Teck Resources — Generative AI tool for industrial operations
An AI strategy and toolset for mine equipment maintenance workers.
We designed a conversational AI copilot for maintenance workers at a large-scale mining site, built to reduce equipment downtime and eliminate fragmented diagnostic workflows. Embedded as design lead on a five-week engagement, we owned research, journey mapping, and interface prototyping — from shop floor to boardroom presentation.
View case study →
About
Fortune 100 expertise, built for scaling companies.
Ruth Design Co. brings enterprise-level AI strategy and design to scaling companies at the moment it matters most — when design and AI decisions will either compound or constrain growth. Every engagement is led personally by founder Tyler Burton.
Tyler Burton, Founder & Principal
Tyler brings 12 years of product design experience across creative agencies, enterprise product organizations, and management consulting — with a track record of embedding in complex, high-stakes environments and delivering systems that actually ship.
Before founding Ruth Design Co., he spent two years as a consultant with McKinsey & Company, where he learned to diagnose business problems before proposing design solutions. He led product design at Walmart, helping establish the agentic AI pattern library and governance frameworks now deployed across one of the largest retail AI ecosystems in the world.
He founded Ruth Design Co. to bring that combination — consulting rigor, enterprise-grade design, and hands-on AI capability — directly to the founders and operators who need to move fast without making design and AI decisions they'll have to undo later.
Work Together
The next step is a conversation.
Book a 30-minute Clarity Conversation. We'll map where AI and design can move the needle fastest for your business — and whether a Fractional CDO engagement is the right fit.