How can we use technology to better guide customers through an emotionally difficult time?

Since its founding in 1937, the name DELA has stood for “bearing one another’s burdens.” And in 2025, this phrase is still highly relevant. It also applies to the bereaved who, together with DELA’s funeral directors, arrange a funeral for a loved one who has passed away. It is truly human work—how we imagine our own farewell, or how we must organise the farewell of someone else. It calls for the right support during an emotionally difficult time.

Fun fact: DELA has collaborated with Six Fingers several times in the past. This resulted in an inspiring roadmap that enabled DELA to develop its services for many years. Upon successfully completing this roadmap, the need for a renewed roadmap for the years ahead arose.

The challenge
DELA uses an Online Environment that connects funeral directors and bereaved families during the funeral planning process. DELA wants to optimally support customers by helping them make choices and by improving co-creation between next of kin and funeral directors. This includes user-friendly overviews, progress trackers, and visual suggestions that link the customer’s wishes to DELA’s offerings. Together with Six Fingers, DELA began to dream about the future of its online environment: what it is now, and what it will become.

The insight
When innovating a tech platform, it’s easy to get entangled in highly complex and technical features: more data, more analysis, and more personalisation to shift parts of human tasks to computers. But the real insight lay in a contrasting idea: all improvements to the online environment should actually strengthen the humanity of funeral directors and bereaved families. Employees should be supported, not replaced.

We looked at global examples of human-centered design, empathetic technologies, and imaginative AI applications to develop innovative, future-proof solutions. Take, for example, the Dalí Dream Tapestry, an AI-driven museum installation that connects the dreams of nine different visitors into a single image. What could such generative AI mean for a funeral, for the bereaved, and for the guests?

The inspiration we shared—fed by benchmarking and trend exploration—was bundled into a clear and structured roadmap. This roadmap illustrates the development of the online environment from a functional platform into an online and physical experience of the future. DELA now knows how it can deploy AI in the coming years to increase efficiency without compromising personal attention to customers.