Mustafa Suleyman
AI capability is advancing faster than the organisations buying it can absorb. Boards are committing serious capital to systems whose behaviour will change before the contracts are signed, in markets where the regulatory floor is still moving. The question is no longer whether to invest. It is how to set strategy around technology that does not yet sit still.
Mustafa Suleyman helps senior leaders set strategy around AI that is moving faster than the organisations meant to use it, drawing on his work as CEO of Microsoft AI and his record as co-founder of DeepMind and Inflection AI.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Mustafa Suleyman
- Few people in AI both ship the product and frame the public debate. As CEO of Microsoft AI he runs Copilot, Bing and Edge for hundreds of millions of users, while The Coming Wave was shortlisted for the Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year and called Bill Gates’s favourite book on AI.
- His “containment problem” framework gives boards a working language for asking governance questions about AI without lapsing into either hype or fatalism.
- He has been inside the founding team of three of the most consequential AI organisations of the past fifteen years: DeepMind in 2010, Inflection AI in 2022 and Microsoft AI in 2024. That operating vantage point on how AI strategy actually gets built is uncommon in the speaker market.
- A Senior Fellowship at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard Kennedy School and a board seat at The Economist Group give him sustained credibility on policy and governance, not only on product.
Biography highlights
- CEO of Microsoft AI since March 2024, with responsibility for Copilot, Bing, Edge, MSN and GroupMe.
- Co-founder of DeepMind (2010), former head of Applied AI; the company was acquired by Google in 2014 in its largest European deal at the time.
- Co-founder and former CEO of Inflection AI, where he built the Pi assistant with Reid Hoffman and Karen Simonyan.
- Author of The Coming Wave (Crown, 2023) with Michael Bhaskar: New York Times bestseller; shortlisted for the Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year; book of the year at the Financial Times, the Economist, Bloomberg and the Guardian.
- Senior Fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard Kennedy School; board member of The Economist Group.
- CBE in the 2019 New Year Honours; named to TIME’s 100 Most Influential People in AI in 2023 and 2024; TED main-stage speaker, “What is an AI anyway?” (April 2024).
Biography
DeepMind, Inflection AI and Microsoft AI are three of the most consequential AI organisations of the past fifteen years. Mustafa Suleyman co-founded two and now runs the third.
He co-founded DeepMind in 2010, where he led the applied AI work and the DeepMind Ethics and Society research unit. He went on to co-found Inflection AI in 2022 with Reid Hoffman and Karen Simonyan, building Pi, an assistant designed for emotionally responsive conversation. In March 2024 Microsoft brought him in as CEO of Microsoft AI, with responsibility for Copilot, Bing, Edge and the company’s MAI frontier model team.
His public argument turns on the containment problem. It is the task of keeping powerful technologies inside the control of the institutions meant to govern them, even as those technologies become cheaper and more accessible.
He developed that argument in The Coming Wave, the book he wrote with Michael Bhaskar. It became a New York Times bestseller and was named a book of the year by the Economist, the Financial Times, Bloomberg and the Guardian. Outside Microsoft, he sits on the board of The Economist and is a Senior Fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard Kennedy School.
Key speaking topics
- The future of artificial intelligence
- AI governance and the containment problem
- Frontier AI development and consumer deployment
- AI strategy for boards and senior leaders
- Technology, power and the nation-state
- The next wave of general-purpose technologies
- AI safety and alignment
Ideal for
- CEOs and boards setting AI strategy and capital allocation
- Chief technology officers and chief product officers responsible for AI deployment
- Government leaders, regulators and policy advisors working on AI rules
- Senior leaders in financial services, healthcare, media and consumer technology
Audience outcomes
- A working language for talking about AI risk and AI opportunity in the same conversation, anchored in the containment problem
- A clearer view of what frontier AI labs are actually building, from someone who runs one
- A sense of where consumer AI is heading over the next two to three years, beyond the current news cycle
- An honest read on which AI claims are worth taking seriously and which to discount
Talks
Suleyman’s TED main-stage talk from April 2024, which proposes a new metaphor for understanding AI as a kind of digital species, with all that the framing implies for control, deployment and safety.
Key takeaways:
- A working vocabulary for thinking about AI’s character and limits, not as a tool and not as a humanlike intelligence
- Why the digital species frame changes how leaders approach deployment and control inside their own organisations
- Where consumer AI is going over the coming years, from someone who runs one of the largest consumer AI businesses in the world
Suleyman’s argument for why the next decade will be shaped by a wave of fast-proliferating, general-purpose technologies, drawn from his New York Times bestseller of the same name.
Key takeaways:
- The containment problem and why it sits at the centre of any serious AI strategy
- The four characteristics of the wave (asymmetry, hyper-evolution, generality, autonomy) and how each one creates a different category of risk
- What organisations and governments can practically do, given that the technology is moving faster than the regulation around it