Lior Zoref
Most leadership teams still make their biggest calls inside a small room of senior people who broadly agree with each other. The cost is slow decisions, narrow options, and innovation programmes that surface the same ideas the company already has. The harder question is how to widen the input set, employees, customers, partners, networks, without losing speed or accountability.
Lior Zoref is a researcher and former Microsoft VP who shows leaders how to use crowd wisdom and collective intelligence to make faster, better decisions and surface ideas their own teams would never produce alone.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Lior Zoref
- He gives leaders a tested method for sourcing decisions and ideas from hundreds or thousands of people, drawn from his Bar-Ilan PhD research and his book Mindsharing rather than from anecdote.
- His TED 2012 talk, the first ever crowdsourced TED talk, is itself a working demonstration of the method, complete with a live audience experiment that hit within three pounds of the right answer.
- He has run the same playbook inside Microsoft as a VP, which means he can speak to senior teams about adoption, internal politics and the practical limits of crowd input, not just the upside.
- His current work on collective and artificial intelligence gives executives a usable frame for where human crowd input still beats algorithms, and where the two should be combined.
- Boards and CEO offices can put him in front of an audience that includes Bill Gates, Al Gore and Jeff Bezos at TED-level events without losing them on technical depth or losing the room on accessibility.
Biography highlights
- PhD in crowdsourcing, Bar-Ilan University; BA and MA in computer science, the Technion.
- Fourteen years at Microsoft, ending as Vice President of Marketing for Consumer and Online Services.
- Author of Mindsharing: The Art of Crowdsourcing Everything, listed by Inc. magazine among its top books for entrepreneurs.
- Delivered the first crowdsourced TED talk at TED 2012 in Long Beach, including a live ox-weighing experiment that became one of the conference’s most-discussed moments.
- Keynote client list includes SAP, KPMG, Jaguar, Kodak, Nike, LinkedIn, Element Fleet Management and the Consumer Technology Association.
- Coverage and citation in Fast Company, Harvard Business Review, NPR, The New Yorker, Inc. and the BBC.
Biography
The first crowdsourced TED talk was delivered in 2012 by a former Microsoft marketing VP who walked on stage at Long Beach with a live ox. Five hundred audience members guessed its weight. The crowd’s average came within three pounds. The point of the demonstration was simple. Groups, properly used, are often more accurate than the smartest individual in the room.
The speaker behind it, Lior Zoref, has spent the years since turning that idea into a working method for organisations. His PhD in crowdsourcing at Bar-Ilan University, combined with fourteen years inside Microsoft, gives him a rare double position. He can argue the academic case for crowd wisdom and explain what it actually takes to run it inside a large company with established hierarchies and politics.
Mindsharing, his book on the topic, was named by Inc. magazine among its best books for entrepreneurs and has been translated into multiple languages. It treats social and internal networks as a decision-making asset that most leaders still underuse, with examples drawn from how he crowdsourced his own TED talk and his book.
His current keynote work focuses on the line between collective human intelligence and artificial intelligence. The argument he brings to senior audiences is not that AI replaces the crowd, or that the crowd outperforms AI, but that organisations that learn to combine the two will out-decide and out-innovate those that pick a side.
Key speaking topics
- Crowd wisdom and collective intelligence
- Innovation and idea generation at scale
- Decision-making in complex environments
- Collective intelligence and artificial intelligence
- Leadership in the era of networked organisations
- Crowdsourcing for product, marketing and strategy
Ideal for
- CEOs and executive teams looking to widen the input set on major strategic decisions
- Innovation, R and D and product leaders running idea-generation programmes
- CMOs and customer experience leaders using community and customer crowds as a strategic asset
- Leadership offsites and TED-style flagship events that need a high-credibility, demonstration-led keynote
Audience outcomes
- A working understanding of when crowd input beats expert input, and when it does not
- Concrete techniques for running crowdsourced decisions inside an organisation, with named examples
- A clearer view of how to combine human collective intelligence with AI tools rather than treating them as substitutes
- A memorable, demonstration-led case for changing how senior teams generate options before they choose
Talks
A keynote on how leaders can use collective and artificial intelligence to make better decisions, set bolder goals and innovate faster than their competitors.
Key takeaways:
- How crowd wisdom works in practice, including the TED ox experiment and its implications for boardroom decisions
- How to design internal and external crowdsourcing programmes that produce usable answers, not noise
- How to position human collective intelligence alongside AI rather than in competition with it