Lauren Ducrey
Employees are told AI will augment them, and quietly conclude it will replace them. The doubt surfaces as disengagement: quieter meetings, and less of the judgement that made people worth hiring in the first place. Most AI rollouts hand a workforce new tools without giving anyone language for what remains theirs.
Lauren Ducrey spent seven years writing the language of Google Assistant and Gemini, and now helps organisations put into words what their people bring to work that AI cannot.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Lauren Ducrey
- Seven years inside Google as a senior UX content strategist, writing the conversational personality of Google Assistant and Bard/Gemini. When she talks about what AI can and cannot do with language, she is describing a system she helped build.
- The Humanifesto is a six-stage method that runs from 45 minutes to half a day, at a 25-person Google Cloud offsite or a 500-person UNOi México keynote, in English, French, Spanish and Portuguese.
- Every session produces a written piece per attendee and a gallery of those pieces the internal comms team can publish afterwards.
- Tongues Tied (2021), the EP Cordes sensibles with Paris guitarist Hadrien Remy (2022), and laureate of the 2022 Moving Words competition for “The Second Cactus”. She also writes bespoke opening and closing pieces to a client’s brief.
- Indeed programmed her Humanifesto session as an interactive breakout at FutureWorks in Phoenix, September 2026, where it carries SHRM recertification credit. At AXA, the session sold out fast enough that the team ran it again the same week.
Biography highlights
- Senior UX content strategist at Google for seven years, designing the conversational personality of Google Assistant and, later, Bard and Gemini
- Author of Tongues Tied (2021) and creator of Cordes sensibles (2022), an EP of poetry set to guitar with Paris musician Hadrien Remy, and laureate of the 2022 Moving Words competition
- Interviewed by Le Monde, Bloomberg QuickTake and The Huffington Post on the Assistant’s personality, which she was then leading for French-speaking markets
- Sessions delivered for Meta Creative Shop, Google Cloud, AXA, PepsiCo, Renault, Squarespace and Editora Moderna in Brazil
- Has taught and performed at Columbia University, IRCAM Paris, The Shed in New York and Maison de la Conversation in Paris
- HEC Paris graduate, with master’s degrees in literature and social innovation, and a former political speechwriter
Biography
Someone had to decide how the Google Assistant apologises. For seven years that was part of Lauren Ducrey’s job as a senior UX content strategist at Google, writing conversational personality into the Assistant and later into Bard and Gemini. Every phrasing was a design decision, worked out with psychologists and tested against how people actually talk to machines.
That work left her treating language as operating infrastructure. Before she left, she was running workshops inside Google that used poems to practise listening and productive disagreement. A leader who cannot describe their own contribution has little to defend when the restructure arrives. One of Google Cloud’s Partners leaders put the condition to her plainly at an offsite: no time to reflect, multitasking as a permanent fact of the job.
The format she built for this is the Humanifesto, six stages from an opening poem to a send-off. In the middle, everyone spends fifteen minutes using AI to draft a statement of what they bring that a machine cannot. Meta Creative Shop gave it the closing slot of a full-day global offsite, and volunteers queued to read their pieces aloud to 130 colleagues. At Editora Moderna’s product launch in Brazil, it held 150 school directors past 7:30pm on a Monday.
Tongues Tied came out in 2021, followed in 2022 by Cordes sensibles, an EP of poems set to guitar; her piece “The Second Cactus” took the 2022 Moving Words award. She has read at The Shed in New York and taught at Columbia University and IRCAM in Paris. In September 2026, Indeed placed her Humanifesto session on the FutureWorks programme in Phoenix, where it carries SHRM recertification credit.
Key speaking topics
- Human capability in an AI-enabled workforce
- Language as organisational infrastructure
- Emotional intelligence and leadership under automation
- Generative AI as a reflection tool
- Employee engagement at offsites, all-hands and leadership summits
- Creativity and expression inside technical teams
- Poetry as a workplace practice
Ideal for
- CHROs and heads of L&D rebuilding employee development around AI capability
- Internal communications and culture leads running offsites, all-hands and leadership summits with AI-heavy agendas
- Conference programmers who need one booking to cover a panel, a workshop and the opening and closing slots
- Creative, marketing and product directors whose teams are questioning their own value against generative tools
Audience outcomes
- A written Humanifesto: a short personal statement of what each person contributes that AI cannot reproduce
- One concrete use for generative AI they can apply immediately, prompting it to reflect their own thinking back to them rather than to write on their behalf
- Shared language for what a team does well, drawn from what people in the room actually wrote
- Vocabulary for naming what they are experiencing during restructures and AI rollouts, which is the precondition for raising it with a manager
- A gallery of attendee-written pieces the organisation can publish internally afterwards
Talks
Her signature keynote, reframing the AI transition as the moment emotional intelligence becomes the scarce commercial skill, drawn from her seven years designing AI at Google.
Key takeaways:
- Why the language layer of an AI product is a design problem, and what that reveals about how teams communicate
- AI used as a collaborative mirror that amplifies a team’s own thinking
- A live poetic segment built around the client’s own theme
An interactive session guiding participants to identify their distinctive leadership contribution through metaphor and storytelling, then co-create a collective manifesto for the room.
Key takeaways:
- Clarity on an individual leadership strength that is difficult to automate
- A shared statement capturing what the group is collectively good at
- A method for surfacing strengths that usually stay unspoken in senior teams
A commissioned piece written to the event’s theme, performed to open or close proceedings.
Key takeaways:
- The conference theme expressed in language delegates will remember
- A moment that connects an otherwise sequential agenda
- A shareable artefact for post-event communications