Charlene Li
Most organisations have AI budgets. Most are still running pilots. The problem is not investment – it is that AI has been framed as a strategy in its own right, which turns a deployment decision into an open-ended design problem. Meanwhile, the gap between AI experimentation and scaled competitive advantage is narrowing fast. Organisations that cannot move AI into production – aligned to business goals they already have – will cede ground to those that already have.
Charlene Li is a New York Times bestselling author and business transformation strategist who helps executive teams move AI from funded pilot into competitive advantage – her central argument, drawn from 30 years of research and advisory work with 14 Dow Jones Industrial 30 companies, is that organisations do not need an AI strategy: they need AI serving the strategy they already have.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Charlene Li
- Her central argument inverts the standard AI conversation: organisations do not need a separate AI strategy – they need AI deployed in service of the strategy already in place. That reframe moves boards from analysis paralysis to sequenced action, in a space where most external voices add complexity rather than remove it.
- The Disruption Mindset reverses thirty years of received innovation wisdom: disruption does not create growth – growth creates disruption. That distinction changes how leadership teams set strategy and allocate resources, not merely how they talk about change.
- Winning with AI (2025, co-authored with Dr. Katia Walsh, Harvard Business School’s inaugural Chief Digital Officer) is grounded in two years of research and 50+ executive interviews, and includes the Six-Quarter Walk planning tool – a practical sequencing instrument designed to be used without external consultants.
- Her research spans the full arc of technological disruption – internet, social media, digital transformation, generative AI – giving her longitudinal credibility when leadership teams are being asked to make bets on technologies whose business implications are still contested.
- As the founder of Altimeter Group, a firm built explicitly to compete with Gartner, Forrester, and IDC before being acquired by Prophet, Li has operated as both a researcher and an entrepreneur navigating the disruption she now advises on – a position most AI strategy voices cannot occupy.
Biography highlights
- New York Times bestselling author of six books, including The Disruption Mindset, Open Leadership, Groundswell, and Winning with AI: The 90-Day Blueprint for Success (2025, co-authored with Dr. Katia Walsh)
- Founder of Altimeter Group (2008), a research and strategy firm that competed directly with Gartner, Forrester, and IDC; acquired by Prophet in 2015
- Former Chief Research Officer at PA Consulting; currently leads Quantum Networks Group
- Graduate of Harvard College (magna cum laude, A.B.) and Harvard Business School (MBA)
- Named one of the 100 Most Creative People in Business by Fast Company; Top 50 Leadership Innovators by Inc.; LinkedIn Top 10 Voices on Company Culture (2022)
- Keynote speaker at the World Economic Forum, TED, and South by Southwest; regularly cited in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and Reuters; has appeared on 60 Minutes and CNBC
Biography
The most common failure point in AI transformation is strategic misdiagnosis. Charlene Li’s research – two years of fieldwork and more than 50 executive interviews for Winning with AI: The 90-Day Blueprint for Success (2025) – found that organisations treating AI as a strategy in its own right fall behind those that deploy it in service of the strategy they already have. That distinction, between AI as initiative and AI as instrument, is what separates pilot programmes from scaled competitive advantage.
The same counterintuitive rigour runs through her earlier body of work. The Disruption Mindset (2019) challenged a core assumption of competitive strategy: disruption does not create growth – growth creates disruption. Companies that make disruption the goal, rather than the outcome of aggressively pursued growth opportunities, build the wrong culture and the wrong metrics. That argument, backed by research, has changed how board-level strategy conversations are framed, not just concluded.
Li’s analytical credibility was built at Altimeter Group, the research firm she founded in 2008 as a deliberate competitor to Gartner, Forrester, and IDC – and which was acquired by Prophet in 2015. She subsequently served as Chief Research Officer at PA Consulting before founding Quantum Networks Group. Across those institutions, she has worked with organisations including 14 of the Dow Jones Industrial 30. She holds a Harvard MBA and an undergraduate degree from Harvard College, earned magna cum laude.
Named one of the 100 Most Creative People in Business by Fast Company and one of Inc.’s Top 50 Leadership Innovators, Li has keynoted the World Economic Forum, TED, and South by Southwest, and is regularly cited by The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. What distinguishes her from others working the same ground is the research arc: she has tracked and advised on each major wave of technological disruption – internet, social media, digital transformation, generative AI – from inside analytical and advisory institutions, not from the outside looking in.
Key speaking topics
- AI strategy and competitive deployment
- Disruptive transformation and growth strategy
- Leadership in the digital age
- Future of work and AI’s workforce implications
- Organisational culture and the disruption mindset
- Strategic decision-making under technological uncertainty
- Business model disruption and innovation
Ideal for
- C-suite and board members responsible for AI investment and transformation decisions
- Chief Digital Officers, Chief AI Officers, and technology transformation leads
- Strategy and innovation leaders at established organisations facing competitive disruption
- Senior HR and people leaders managing workforce implications of AI adoption
Audience outcomes
- A clear framework for aligning AI with existing business strategy – rather than building a parallel AI initiative
- Understanding of why most AI pilot programmes stall and what organisationally moves them into scaled production
- The Disruption Mindset distinction: why pursuing disruption as a goal is a strategic error, and what to pursue instead
- Practical tools for sequencing AI investments against business priorities, including the Six-Quarter Walk planning framework
- A more confident leadership posture for communicating AI strategy internally – to boards, to workforces, and across the organisation
Talks
Designed for large conference audiences, this session makes the case that organisations do not need a separate AI strategy – they need AI working in service of the strategy already in place – and equips leaders with a framework to move from ambition to deployment.
Key takeaways:
- Ground AI initiatives in the organisation’s existing purpose, values, and business strategy, rather than treating AI as a standalone programme
- Identify the specific ways AI can strengthen and defend competitive advantage, and prioritise accordingly
- Understand the workforce, leadership, and culture implications of moving from AI pilots to scaled AI deployment
An in-company executive session focused on aligning AI with organisational objectives, building executive-level consensus, and developing a coherent, actionable plan that commands leadership commitment.
Key takeaways:
- Align AI direction with the company’s overarching strategic objectives rather than technology-led priorities
- Identify the highest-impact AI initiatives and develop the governance structures to execute them
- Address workforce evolution and risk management within a unified AI roadmap
Charlene Li reframes the disruption imperative – arguing that disruption is the result of growth aggressively pursued, not a strategy in itself – and helps organisations build the leadership, culture, and strategic posture to create disruptive growth.
Key takeaways:
- Understand what disruption actually is and is not, and how organisations can create the conditions for disruptive growth
- Identify and prioritise the right disruptive growth moves and align the organisation around them
- Develop the leadership behaviours and cultural shifts required to sustain a disruption-oriented strategy
This session examines how AI is reshaping employee expectations, engagement, and the nature of work itself – and makes the case for a new leadership approach centred on long-term relationships with employees, not annual engagement surveys.
Key takeaways:
- Understand how employees’ personal use of AI is changing their expectations of the workplace
- Identify the experiences that employees value most in an AI-integrated working environment
- Build rich collaboration and belonging frameworks that support a fundamentally different model of work
A session on how leaders can extend and scale their leadership through digital and AI-enabled channels – without losing the relationship quality that drives genuine engagement.
Key takeaways:
- Develop a personal leadership approach that scales through digital channels without reducing to broadcast communication
- Apply the principles of listening at scale, sharing to shape, and engaging to transform to distributed and hybrid teams
- Identify the right digital tools to match strategic goals, rather than adopting technology for its own sake