TLDR: At Adobe MAX 2025, Aakash Kumar, VP of User Experience and Head of Design at MakeMyTrip, detailed how the company is leveraging Adobe’s AI tools, including Firefly and Express, to redefine digital travel experiences. This collaboration has significantly sped up design workflows by 30-50% and ensures market-safe, copyright-compliant content creation. MakeMyTrip’s design philosophy remains user- and business-focused, adapting to generative AI by shifting from traditional funnels to ‘intents and conversations’ and emphasizing personalization based on real user feedback. Kumar also expressed optimism about multimodal interfaces in travel tech and believes AI will augment, not replace, designers by handling menial tasks while human creativity and ‘taste’ remain essential.
At Adobe MAX 2025 in Los Angeles, Aakash Kumar, Vice President of User Experience and Head of Design at MakeMyTrip, shared insights into how the company is transforming digital travel experiences through its strategic adoption of Adobe’s AI tools. The discussion highlighted MakeMyTrip’s enduring design philosophy, the critical role of user feedback, the impact of generative AI, and the future trajectory of travel technology.
Kumar emphasized that MakeMyTrip’s core design philosophy has consistently been dual-focused: prioritizing both user needs and business objectives. He stated, “Our design philosophy has been pretty consistent for a long time. It has to be user-focused and business-focused, both. You look at the users and business together; it can’t be in isolation, one versus the other.” With the advent of generative AI, the design team is re-evaluating traditional customer journeys, transitioning from a funnel-based approach to one centered on ‘intents and conversations,’ while maintaining the fundamental goal of serving both users and the business.
User feedback is paramount in MakeMyTrip’s iterative design process. Kumar noted, “You can do thousands of tests and usability studies, but when the actual product goes out to the user, that’s when the real feedback arrives.” This data-driven approach, analyzing conversions and interactions, continuously refines their designs.
Personalization has yielded significant results for MakeMyTrip. Kumar cited the homepage redesign as an example, where the company shifted from a desktop-first to a mobile-first approach and then pioneered a personalized homepage around 2015–16. Subtle customizations, such as displaying recent searches, stemmed from observing user struggles and proactively simplifying their next steps.
The partnership with Adobe is a long-standing one, recently evolving to an enterprise license. MakeMyTrip is now actively exploring Adobe tools like Firefly and Express, which have accelerated design workflows by an impressive 30 to 50 percent in certain scenarios. A key benefit of Adobe’s enterprise offering, according to Kumar, is the assurance of market-safe and copyright-safe content, which aligns with MakeMyTrip’s ethical principles and was a primary driver for the enterprise license adoption.
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Looking ahead, Kumar is optimistic about multimodal interfaces in travel technology, envisioning a cohesive blend of voice, video, audio, text, and visual inputs. Regarding the impact of AI on design jobs, he maintained a positive outlook, suggesting that AI will automate menial tasks, thereby boosting productivity. However, he firmly believes that human designers will remain indispensable for their unique ‘taste,’ quality, and originality, as models are trained on existing data and human creativity is essential for ‘thinking out of the box.’
