On October 3, 2026, I gave a talk at AI & Digital Bridge 2026 in Astana, Kazakhstan. I called it “Gamification in the Age of Agentic AI: Real-Time, Personalized Motivation at Scale.” It ran from 12:00 to 12:30 in Steppe Hall at the EXPO center, and you can find it in the official forum program under October 3, listed in Russian as “Как обратить AI на пользу человека?” (“How do we turn AI to people’s benefit?”).
Why AI & Digital Bridge matters
AI & Digital Bridge started in 2018 and describes itself as the leading technology forum in Eurasia. It is organized by the Astana Hub international innovation cluster together with Kazakhstan’s Ministry of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Development and the Astana city administration (official release).
This year it was the central international event of Kazakhstan’s AI Month, part of the country’s Year of Digitalization and Artificial Intelligence. President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev opened the forum on October 1 and called it “a golden bridge for international engagement in the field of emerging technologies.” The theme was “Kazakhstan is the Eurasian AI Hub,” and the organizers expected 20,000+ participants.
Who else was on the speaker list
More than 150 speakers from Kazakhstan and abroad took part (UzDaily). A few names from the forum’s top speakers list:
- Kai-Fu Lee, CEO of Sinovation Ventures and 01.AI. (Wikipedia)
- John Hopcroft, Turing Award laureate. (Cornell)
- Balaji Srinivasan, founder of Network School and former CTO of Coinbase. (balajis.com)
- Omar Al Olama, UAE Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence. (Wikipedia)
- Audrey Azoulay, former Director-General of UNESCO. (Wikipedia)
- Jon Huntsman, Vice Chairman and President of Strategic Growth at Mastercard and former US ambassador to China and Russia. (Wikipedia)
The full list is on the forum’s website.
What I talked about
AI works fast, and products, services and content are now abundant. Human attention is the scarce thing, and in a lot of places, the AI is not getting it. Herbert Simon saw this coming in 1971: “A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”
Most design is function-focused. It assumes people will do the job because they are supposed to. Human-Focused Design remembers that people have feelings, insecurities and reasons why they want, or don’t want, to do things. That is what the Octalysis Framework is for: eight Core Drives, from Core Drive 1 (CD1): Epic Meaning & Calling to Core Drive 8 (CD8): Loss & Avoidance, and every behavior a person takes is powered by at least one of them.
Agentic AI makes something new possible: a perfect designer, for every person, on the spot. One learning goal can become four different quests, depending on whether a person is driven most by Epic Meaning & Calling (CD1), Core Drive 2 (CD2): Development & Accomplishment, Core Drive 3 (CD3): Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback, or Core Drive 5 (CD5): Social Influence & Relatedness. But AI motivators also ship variable output, constant availability and real-time personalization by default. So the question of whose interests the design serves matters more than ever.
A case from Astana itself
I shared a case from the host city. Astana Hub’s platform already had XP, Social Coins, badges and a leaderboard, but the rewards paid for completion, not quality. They paid for the wrong thing. My team at The Octalysis Group rebuilt the experience around the eight Core Drives across all four phases of the player journey. Astana Hub’s target was a 30% increase in active users, and the result went far past that target.
Five moves for Monday morning
I closed with five moves:
- Audit every AI feature against the 8 Core Drives first.
- Design the journey around the AI, not just the AI.
- Reward contribution over completion.
- Design the delegation screen like a storefront.
- Keep the human in the loop with a reason to stay.
About me, briefly
I created the Octalysis Framework. My book Actionable Gamification has sold 100,000+ copies, my design work has reached 1.5 billion+ people, and my research has 3,700+ academic citations.
This talk is part of my Human-Focused AI work: making AI something people want to use, not just something they’re told to use. You can find all my talks and writing on it on one page.
Watch the full talk
The session was recorded. Follow me on LinkedIn or on X at @yukaichou, and I’ll share the video once it’s available.
If you’d like to bring Human-Focused Design to your organization’s AI rollout, you can reach me through my speaker page.