Nina Schick
Most boards still treat AI as a software question their CIO will solve. The story is bigger than that. The contest is over compute, fabs, energy supply, and the sovereign infrastructure that will decide which companies and which countries hold the next decade of pricing power. Leaders who frame AI as a productivity tool are already a strategy cycle behind.
Nina Schick is a sovereign AI strategist and author of Deepfakes: The Coming Infocalypse who advises governments, defence institutions, and frontier AI companies on how the race for compute, energy, and semiconductors is reshaping corporate and geopolitical power.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Nina Schick
- She published the first book on generative AI in 2020, years before the technology entered the boardroom conversation, which means her current strategic claims sit on a public track record rather than a recent pivot.
- She is one of very few commercial speakers who has briefed both a sitting US President and a former NATO Secretary General on AI and statecraft, giving senior audiences direct access to the language used at the top of Western policymaking.
- Her “Industrial Intelligence” thesis reframes AI from a software adoption question into an infrastructure and energy question, which is the conversation CFOs, infrastructure heads, and strategy teams now need but rarely get from a generalist AI speaker.
- Through Tamang Ventures she holds active advisory roles with frontier firms including Synthesia, valued at $4 billion in its January 2026 Series E led by Google Ventures, alongside Qlik and Truepic, so she speaks from inside the capital and product decisions she describes, not from the outside.
Biography highlights
- Author, Deepfakes: The Coming Infocalypse (Hachette/Twelve, 2020), translated into multiple languages and widely cited as the first book on AI-generated content
- Briefed US President Joe Biden and advised former NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen as Director of Rasmussen Global
- Worked on Emmanuel Macron’s 2017 presidential campaign and advised on the Democracy Perception Index, the largest annual study on global attitudes toward democracy
- Founder of Tamang Ventures; advisor to Synthesia (valued at $4B in its January 2026 Series E), founding AI Council member at Qlik, advisor to Truepic
- Strategic analyst contributor across CNN, Bloomberg, and Sky News during a decade of European political crises including Brexit and the war in Ukraine
- Half-Nepalese and half-German, with degrees from the University of Cambridge and University College London; now based in the United States after a decade inside UK and EU policy
Biography
The race to dominate artificial intelligence is no longer a software race. It is a contest over fabs, energy, compute, and the sovereign infrastructure that will determine which states and which companies hold the next decade of pricing power. That argument, which Nina Schick calls Industrial Intelligence, sits at the centre of her current work with governments, defence institutions, and frontier AI companies.
She arrived at it earlier than most. Her 2020 book Deepfakes: The Coming Infocalypse, published by Hachette imprint Twelve, was among the first to describe the geopolitical and informational consequences of generative AI, written before ChatGPT existed as a public product. It introduced the concept of the Infocalypse and is cited as foundational reading in national security and policy circles.
That early thesis is grounded in a long career inside European policymaking. As Director of Rasmussen Global, she advised Anders Fogh Rasmussen, former NATO Secretary General, on political risk and the technological evolution of warfare. She worked on Emmanuel Macron’s 2017 presidential campaign and advised on the Democracy Perception Index, the largest annual machine-learning study on global attitudes toward democracy. She has briefed US President Joe Biden on AI, technological integrity, and statecraft, and works with the US Army, the United Nations, and Mastercard on AI and sovereignty. For seven years she also served as a strategic analyst contributor across CNN, Bloomberg, and Sky News during the Brexit, Trump, and Ukraine cycles.
Through Tamang Ventures, the advisory firm she founded, she now sits inside the companies building the new stack: Synthesia in enterprise AI video, valued at $4 billion in its January 2026 Series E led by Google Ventures, Qlik in data analytics where she is a founding AI Council member, and Truepic in digital provenance. Now based in the United States, she works with the institutions and capital allocators that will shape what the AI infrastructure stack looks like at the end of this decade. The combination of policy access, commercial proximity, and a public thesis published five years before the market caught up is what makes her useful in a boardroom.
Key speaking topics
- Industrial Intelligence and the AI infrastructure stack
- Generative AI and corporate strategy
- AI, semiconductors, and the US-China technology competition
- AI and energy demand
- Deepfakes, synthetic media, and information integrity
- AI in defence, NATO, and statecraft
- Sovereign AI and the future of national power
Ideal for
- Boards, CEOs, and strategy heads recalibrating long-range AI investment around infrastructure rather than tooling
- CIOs, CTOs, and chief data officers needing a geopolitical lens on supply, partnerships, and dependency risk
- Defence, security, and public sector audiences working on AI policy, sovereignty, and statecraft
- Investor and capital allocator audiences pricing AI exposure across compute, energy, and software layers
Audience outcomes
- A clear thesis about why AI is an infrastructure and energy contest, not only a software adoption question
- A working frame for assessing corporate exposure to compute, semiconductor, and energy supply constraints
- Specific examples of how policy, defence, and frontier AI companies are already operating inside the Industrial Intelligence framework
- Sharper questions to take into the next strategy review on AI, sovereignty, and dependency risk
- A grounded view of where deepfakes and synthetic media now sit in the corporate and political risk picture
Talks
A reframing of AI as a contest over energy, semiconductors, and compute rather than over software and models, and what that means for corporate strategy.
Key takeaways:
- Why the AGI race is being decided in fabs, data centres, and grid capacity, not only in research labs
- How nations and enterprises that control the industrial stack will define the next century of economic and military power
- What this implies for corporate AI strategy, capital allocation, and supply chain dependency
How semiconductors, data centres, and energy have become the new geopolitical weapons in the rivalry between the United States and China.
Key takeaways:
- The structure of the global semiconductor stack and where bottlenecks and chokepoints sit
- Why data centre and energy capacity is now a sovereign concern, not a procurement question
- Implications for companies operating across the US, China, and European jurisdictions
What Schick predicted in 2020 has become operational, and what enterprises and democracies now have to do about it.
Key takeaways:
- How synthetic media is being used in fraud, disinformation, and political interference today
- The state of detection, provenance, and digital integrity tools, including the work of firms such as Truepic
- What boards and communications leaders should now have in place to defend brand and institutional trust