From Wedding Dresses, to the Future of AI Agents
An interview with ÌníOlúwa Abíódún, product designer & entrepreneur
We sat down with ÌníOlúwa (Ìní) Abíódún in a London café over a cranberry juice and a croissant.
Ìní is a product designer who’s packed about five careers into one: a barrister, bridal designer, illustrator, agency founder, and, most recently, one of the most in-demand AI-forward product designers in London.
She’s refreshingly honest about the traits that contributed to her impressive career rise: endless curiosity, a habit of asking for things, and a refusal to get comfortable.
Ìní also shares how she designs with AI day to day, what made Intercom’s design culture so special, and the agents that keep her life running.
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Growing Up
Ìní was born in Ilora, a sleepy town in Nigeria, and grew up around Ìbàdàn, a big, sprawling, old Yoruba city, in a family of proper high achievers. Both her parents are full professors, the top rank in Nigerian academia: her mum in early childhood education, her dad in sports psychology. Her mum, a former English teacher, made English non-negotiable. Ìní needed little persuading. She read Shakespeare by 12, and old school friends still joke that she read the dictionary on repeat.
“I just wanted to know everything about everything.”
It was also a time of political unrest in Nigeria. She recalls school runs where burning tyres in the road meant turning around and finding another way. “It was scary as a child, but I also found it fascinating.” That curiosity sent her down rabbit holes about Nigerian and colonial history and its effects across generations.
She spent her lunch money on Archie comics. Soon she was daydreaming of a future as a fashion designer and stylist to Veronica Lodge, jetting around the world and sketching the clothes. She even named the atelier she planned to run in Paris.
Visit her portfolio today, and you’ll find she built that atelier after all.
Having skipped a few years at school, Ìní sat a university entrance exam she assumed was practice. She, of course, passed and started university two years early at just 15. Fashion was the dream, but as she puts it, “there’s no way I’m telling my dad I want to study fashion.”
So, she chose law.
An Accidental Business
In her second year, a friend spotted one of Ìní’s sketches and asked her to make the dress. She’d never made a piece of clothing in her life, but in classic Ìní style, she jumped on the opportunity. Within weeks, she’d made a dress and was receiving orders for more.
“That’s how my business was born, actually. Accidentally.”
By graduation, she was designing bespoke wedding gowns and had won a national fashion competition, dressing Nollywood A-list actress Dakore Egbuson-Akande for the red carpet at the 2015 Africa Magic Viewers’ Choice Awards.
She kept the business going all the way through law school.
Starting Over
Marriage took Ìní to South Africa, where she studied at STADIO School of Fashion in Johannesburg and became a mum. Next up was a Luxury Brand Management MBA at Glasgow Caledonian University, London, until the pandemic arrived with the family’s bags literally by the door.
Who knows what influence Glasgow would have had on Ìní’s design career…
For the first time since she was 16, she didn’t have a business. “I was like, okay, let’s break it all down to the basics. What skills do I have?”
Illustration and graphic design were skills she’d been using for years. Her bridal business already offered illustrated wedding invitations and keepsake illustrations of the bride’s gown, and fashion school had taught her Illustrator, Photoshop and InDesign.
So, she started drawing families who couldn’t have photoshoots during lockdown. That grew into wedding invitations and websites, until an advert for a brand design course caught her eye.
Unable to afford the full course, she asked the UK-based designer running it if she could attend just one class for free. Instead, they offered her the whole thing at no cost.
“Closed mouths don’t get fed.”
Inspired by what she learnt, Ìní soon launched her own brand design agency, with a friend running operations so she could focus on “dreaming things up and executing.” It grew into a team of four, working with clients across the US.
London and Growth Design
In 2021, the family moved to London. Ìní wanted to go in-house, meet people and learn how tech companies really work. She joined a small tech company as a senior brand designer, moved into product, and then her manager nudged her towards growth design.
It clicked straight away. Growth design let her use her business mind and still practise the design she loves.
After a while, she could feel her learning flatten. She knew the landscape well and needed a bigger challenge.
“Comfort is the best friend of mediocrity.”
So she moved on, becoming Principal Product Designer at Gen Digital, a global cybersecurity company. What drew her in was the seniority and the scope: leading growth design across EMEA and APAC markets, working directly with market leaders to unlock where design could be most powerful for them.
Design Culture at Intercom
Then came Intercom (since renamed Fin). With a reputation for world-class design and a growing focus on AI, it was an opportunity she couldn't pass up.
Before joining, she'd already identified three designers she wanted to learn from: Domingo Widén, Daria and Molly Mahar.
Once in, she set up regular catch-ups with each of them. “I just spent my time soaking up knowledge from these people,” she says, “providing value when I can as a thank you.”
What she loved most was how approachable everyone was. If she was noodling on something that touched someone else’s area, she’d simply find the right person and ask. And when AI tools changed how quickly the team could ship, the culture really came alive, with off-sites, monthly design get-togethers and lunch-and-learns.
“Suddenly there was an explosion of creativity.”
Her advice for anyone weighing up their next role? Look for that kind of openness. “How autonomous are you going to be? Can you pick anything up, go off and work on it, and no one’s going to bat an eye?”
Fin Studio
Ìní’s proudest project is Fin Studio, which still lives in the product today. Setting up an AI agent was hard, largely because agents were missing the context they needed. Ìní and her PM noticed that customers who found the tutorials tended to stick around. The problem was that very few found them.
After a few failed ideas, she landed on a studio: a home for training and improving your agent over time. Activating an agent, she explains, “is not one and done. It is a loop,” but it shouldn’t feel “like a checklist I have to keep going through.”
She was the only designer on a project with 30+ cross-functional stakeholders and was already prototyping in code.
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Multiplying Her Impact
At AirOps, a small design team supported a company of more than 150 people. Ìní took ownership of the design system, art directed the rebrand and, together with the design team, built a brand portal so anyone in the company could create on-brand work themselves, right down to a set of AI skills installed for everyone.
“How are you enabling outsized impact beyond yourself? How do you multiply your one contribution?”
How Ìní Designs With AI
So why is Ìní in such demand? A lot of it comes down to how she works. Most of her product design now happens in code with Claude and Codex, from research right through to prototypes.
“I know a lot of people say that when you jump into code, it limits your ideas. I utterly disagree.”
She’ll often start with 15 versions of an idea and whittle them down, a habit she credits to Intercom’s culture of divergent thinking. “At my starting point, how wide can you go?” By the time someone asks if she’s considered another option, she usually has.
She still loves Figma, just not when there’s a deadline. “The canvas offers endless possibilities, and that slows me down. I keep the canvas for when I want to get lost.”
She’s just as thoughtful about helping other designers get to grips with AI, and is building an applied AI resource with games that teach concepts like evals for designers. “If I give you all of the very top technical bits, I will lose you.”
Ìní’s Toolkit
Ìní’s days run on a small army of agents. As a mum, Instinct handles her inbox and Wabi turns her daughter’s weekly learnings from school into on-the-go educational games, as well as organizing girls' night. She’s also built Rix to help her daughter’s maths learning. At work, an Obsidian setup inspired by Domingo, runs her daily check-ins, and Granola notes feed a weekly feedback report, so she’s never scrambling before a 360 review.
Each day ends with “rose, thorn, bud”: what went well, what didn’t, and what she can do better tomorrow. It’s a ritual she also does with her daughter.
For creative work, she reaches for Midjourney, Flora, Figma and Jitter. For product, it’s Codex, Claude, Conductor, Paper, Monologue and Inflight.
What’s Next?
Ìní is joining an industrial AI company to lead design across product and brand, and is thinking hard about what design leadership looks like in this new era. She’s excited to bring everything she’s experimented with to a young team, “but with bigger resources behind it now.”
From a dress for a university dinner to designing the future of AI agents. Ìní, we salute you.
About Ìní
ÌníOlúwa Abíódún is a product designer based in London.
Her work includes Fin Studio at Intercom and brand and design infrastructure at AirOps, with a particular focus on AI agents, design systems and helping small teams have an outsized impact.
Follow Ìní on LinkedIn, X and check out her portfolio.