Building Bridges - a British Academy Talent Development Grant

The programme equips the team with the technical, hands-on skills needed to move from analysing conversational AI to co-designing it. Building on our existing partnership with Ufonia, the programme responds to a real and well-documented gap: applied linguists understand how human interaction works at a fine-grained level, but rarely hold the engineering vocabulary to translate that understanding directly into product. Over twelve months, we close that gap through accredited training in conversation design, prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation, generative AI, and UX evaluation, alongside in-person collaboration and shadowing with industry engineers.

The grant translates the Interactional AI partnership into a formal training pathway for the next generation of researchers and conversation designers. It responds to repeated industry feedback that conversation-analytic insights are valuable to commercial Conversation User Interface development but require a bridge between academic methods and product engineering practice.

The award follows the British Academy Innovation Fellowship and is the team’s third major external grant supporting this research strand.

A development programme

Building Bridges: Training Applied Linguists in AI Conversation Design and Prompt Engineering to Enhance Human-Centric Conversational Agents

Adam Brandt and Spencer Hazel funded by the BA Talent Development Grant (TDA25\\250322)

Conversational AI is now embedded in healthcare, government, finance and everyday life. Designing these systems well is not just an engineering problem — it is a problem of social interaction, in which applied linguists have decades of empirical insight to contribute. Building Bridges turns that insight into practice, training the next generation of academic and industry collaborators and seeding a sustainable, cross-sector skills pipeline for human-centric AI design.

The focus