Marco Tempest
Most leadership teams understand that emerging technology will reshape their business. Far fewer can describe what a robot, a drone swarm, a generative model or a mixed-reality system actually changes about customer attention, trust and decision-making. The gap between technical capability and human reception is where strategy quietly fails.
Marco Tempest is a Swiss cyber illusionist, MIT Media Lab Director’s Fellow and creative technologist at NASA JPL who shows leaders what emerging technology actually does to human attention, perception and belief.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Marco Tempest
- He works inside the technology he talks about. NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, MIT Media Lab and ETH Zurich Space are his day-to-day environments, not credentials borrowed for the stage.
- He treats perception as the strategic variable. Audiences leave with a sharper sense of how attention, framing and trust are engineered, which is the part of technology adoption most leadership conversations skip.
- His material is built with the tools clients want to understand: drones, robots, augmented reality, generative systems. The demonstration is the explanation.
- Seven TED talks and keynotes at SIGGRAPH, Davos, Cannes Lions and IBC give him a tested vocabulary for translating complex systems into language a board can act on.
- He has the rare standing to brief a NASA mission team in the morning and headline a Fortune 100 leadership offsite in the evening, and to make the same argument in both rooms.
Biography highlights
- Director’s Fellow, MIT Media Lab.
- Creative Technologist and Consultant, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory; NASA Honor Award recipient.
- Director, Pi Innovation Hub, ETH Zurich Space.
- Founder and Director, MagicLab, New York.
- Seven-time TED speaker; SIGGRAPH 2020 keynote.
- Merlin Award for Best Contemporary Magician (2010); World Magic Award for Best Contemporary Magic (2009); Mandrakes d’Or (1994); Special Fellowship, Academy of Magical Arts.
Biography
A drone swarm performing in formation looks like a technology demo until you watch how an audience reacts to it. The reaction is the product. That is the lens Tempest brings to every emerging technology conversation: not what the system can do, but what it does to the person watching.
He holds the working credentials to make that argument seriously. He is a Director’s Fellow at the MIT Media Lab, a Creative Technologist at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory with a NASA Honor Award for his contribution to COVID-19 ventilator work, and director of the Pi Innovation Hub at ETH Zurich’s Space division. He also runs MagicLab, a New York consortium that prototypes illusion and digital technology together.
The performance work is the testing ground for the ideas. Seven TED talks and keynotes at SIGGRAPH, Davos, Cannes Lions and IBC have used robots, AR, drones and generative systems as live material, not slideware. The Merlin Award, World Magic Award and Mandrakes d’Or sit alongside the academic and engineering affiliations because the discipline is the same one: engineering perception with precision.
For executive audiences, the value is specific. Tempest gives leadership teams a working model of how attention, trust and belief actually behave around new technology, drawn from the labs where that technology is being built. A board that has heard him is better equipped to ask the second-order questions about adoption, narrative and human response that strategy decks routinely miss.
Key speaking topics
- Emerging technology and human perception
- Robotics, drones and autonomous systems
- Augmented and mixed reality
- Generative AI and creativity
- Innovation storytelling
- Space technology and exploration
- The psychology of attention and trust
Ideal for
- Boards and executive teams setting AI, robotics or XR strategy
- CTO, CIO and chief innovation leaders shaping emerging-technology roadmaps
- Marketing and brand leadership rethinking customer attention in saturated channels
- Leadership offsites and innovation summits where the technology argument needs to land with non-technical executives
Audience outcomes
- A working mental model for how attention and trust shift when new technology enters a customer relationship
- Specific examples, drawn from NASA JPL, MIT Media Lab and live performance, of how robots, drones, AR and generative systems behave in front of real audiences
- Sharper questions to put to internal technology and innovation teams about adoption and human response
- A reframing of innovation storytelling as a discipline with rules, not a soft skill
Talks
A keynote on how breakthrough technologies move from laboratory to public imagination, drawing on Tempest’s work at MIT Media Lab, NASA JPL and live performance.
Key takeaways:
- How the same techniques that engineer wonder on stage shape adoption of new technology
- What robots, drones and AR actually change about audience attention
- A practical view of innovation storytelling for executive audiences
Live demonstration and analysis of how emerging systems, including generative AI, AR and autonomous machines, reshape perception and belief.
Key takeaways:
- The psychology of deception applied to technology adoption
- What leaders miss when they treat new technology as a feature rather than an experience
- How to brief teams on the human side of technical capability