Philipp Kristian

Why organisations work with Philipp Kristian

• He treats trust as an operating variable in digital and AI transformation, not a soft cultural theme, and equips leaders with language to discuss it at board level.
• His thesis predates the current AI debate. The Trust Economy was published in 2017 and has since been translated into German by Springer Gabler, giving his framework a longer track record than most current AI-trust voices.
• He brings an Asia-anchored view of technology adoption, drawing on a decade of work with Fortune 500s in Singapore and across JAPAC, which most Western-based speakers in this space cannot offer.
• He has lectured inside INSEAD Executive Education, CEDEP, Singapore Management University, and Civil Service College Singapore, so executive audiences encounter material that has been pressure-tested with senior cohorts.

Biography highlights

• Author of The Trust Economy (Marshall Cavendish, 2017) and RESET: Rethinking Our World And Creating A Different Future (World Scientific, 2021).
• German edition of The Trust Economy published by Springer Gabler in 2018.
• Faculty and lecturer engagements at INSEAD Executive Education, CEDEP, Singapore Management University, and Civil Service College Singapore.
• World Economic Forum Global Shaper, Kairos Society Fellow, and Leader of Tomorrow at the St Gallen Symposium.
• TEDx speaker, with keynote audiences including Meta, BCG, EY, Munich Re, Standard Chartered, Salesforce, LVMH, Microsoft, Deloitte, P&G, and Zillow.
• Based in Singapore, with a decade of innovation work across Asia for Fortune 500 corporations and high-growth scale-ups.

Biography

Trust is the part of digital transformation that the engineering plan does not solve. AI rollouts stall, data products fail to land, and customer adoption flattens for reasons that sit outside the technology stack. Philipp Kristian has spent more than a decade arguing that this is the real bottleneck, and that organisations need a strategy for it.

His 2017 book The Trust Economy, published by Marshall Cavendish and later translated into German by Springer Gabler, set out an early framework for how digital businesses earn and lose trust at scale. RESET, published by World Scientific in 2021, extends the argument into the post-pandemic shift in how people relate to institutions, technology, and each other.

The work has been refined inside executive classrooms. He has held faculty and lecturer engagements at INSEAD Executive Education, CEDEP, Singapore Management University, and the Civil Service College in Singapore, where the material is taught to senior public and private sector cohorts. The World Economic Forum named him a Global Shaper; the Kairos Society named him a Fellow; the St Gallen Symposium named him a Leader of Tomorrow.

Based in Singapore, he brings a non-Western reading of how trust travels through markets, regulators, and customer bases that most boards no longer treat as peripheral. Keynote audiences include Meta, BCG, EY, Munich Re, Standard Chartered, Salesforce, LVMH, Microsoft, Deloitte, and Zillow.

Key speaking topics

• Trust in AI and data systems
• Digital transformation and adoption
• Customer experience in digital businesses
• Future of work and human-technology collaboration
• Leadership in the digital economy
• Brand trust and reputation under technological change

Ideal for

• Boards and executive committees overseeing AI, data, and digital transformation programmes
• CIO, CTO, CDO, and Chief Trust Officer functions working through adoption and governance questions
• CMO and customer experience leaders rebuilding brand credibility in digital channels
• Financial services, professional services, and regulated industries facing trust and reputation pressure from AI deployment

Audience outcomes

• A working vocabulary for discussing trust as an operating asset in digital and AI strategy at board level
• A reading of why AI and data initiatives lose momentum at the adoption stage, with the levers leaders can use to keep them moving
• An Asia-anchored perspective on how trust is built and broken across regulators, customers, and employees in fast-digitising markets
• Specific examples drawn from a decade of innovation work with Fortune 500 corporations and scale-ups in Singapore and across JAPAC