Tom Goodwin
Most companies bolt new technology onto old structures. They digitise the existing business instead of asking what that business would look like if they built it today. The hard part is telling which technologies are noise and which change the basis of competition, then acting before the answer is obvious to everyone.
Tom Goodwin helps companies tell which new technologies actually change their business, and rethink how they operate around the ones that do.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Tom Goodwin
- His 2015 observation that Uber owns no vehicles and Airbnb no real estate became the standard way executives describe asset-light competition. He gives a leadership team the same lens on its own business: where value is moving, and who is positioned to own the customer.
- He has made technology bets inside two of the world’s largest advertising and media groups, as EVP and Head of Innovation at Publicis-owned Zenith Media and before that as SVP of strategy and innovation at Havas Media. He advises others now on calls he has had to make himself.
- His read on AI cuts against both the hype and the gloom. Under the banner he calls “nowism,” he argues the technology to grow already exists and the constraint is nerve and imagination. Boards leave with something to act on, not another warning about the future.
- He has spent two decades translating technology for commercial audiences, as a columnist for The Guardian, TechCrunch, and Forbes and as host of the Euronews series The Edge. Operators follow the argument and can repeat it, without needing a specialist to decode it.
Biography highlights
- Author of Digital Darwinism: Survival of the Fittest in the Age of Business Disruption, published by Kogan Page and translated into several languages
- Author of the 2015 TechCrunch essay “The Battle Is For The Customer Interface,” one of the most widely cited descriptions of platform business models
- Former EVP and Head of Innovation at Zenith Media, part of Publicis Groupe; earlier SVP, Strategy and Innovation at Havas Media
- Founder of the innovation consultancy All We Have Is Now, advising Fortune 500 companies and startups
- Named LinkedIn’s #1 Voice in Marketing
- Host of The Edge, a technology series for Euronews; columnist for The Guardian, TechCrunch, Forbes, Adweek, and Marketing Week
Biography
In 2015, a single paragraph in TechCrunch changed how executives talk about competition. It pointed out that Uber owned no vehicles, Airbnb no real estate, Alibaba no inventory, and Facebook made no content. The author was Tom Goodwin, then senior vice-president of strategy and innovation at Havas Media.
The line stuck because it named something leaders could feel but had not put into words: value was moving from owning assets to owning the customer relationship. Goodwin had spent his career inside that shift, later running innovation at Publicis-owned Zenith Media and advising large companies on where to place their bets.
His argument now centres on artificial intelligence, and it runs against the prevailing mood. Most organisations, he contends, use new technology to make the old business run more smoothly, when the real opportunity is to rebuild what the business does. He calls the practical version of this “nowism”: the tools to grow already exist, and the limit is nerve and imagination.
That case reaches a wide audience. Goodwin hosts The Edge, a technology series for Euronews, and has been named LinkedIn’s #1 Voice in Marketing. He set out the full argument in his book Digital Darwinism, published by Kogan Page.
Key speaking topics
- Artificial intelligence and business strategy
- Digital transformation
- Platform and asset-light business models
- The future of business
- Technology and consumer behaviour
- Marketing and the customer interface
Ideal for
- CEOs and boards setting the direction of a digital or AI strategy
- Chief Marketing and Chief Digital Officers deciding where technology changes the customer relationship
- Innovation, strategy, and transformation leads under pressure to show a return on technology investment
- Senior leadership teams at large incumbents facing platform-native competitors
Audience outcomes
- A way to judge which technologies change their business and which are noise
- A concrete test for their own model: what the company would look like if it were built today
- Language to explain asset-light and platform competition to their own teams and boards
- A more pragmatic read on AI that stays on what is usable today
Talks
A 50-minute read on the technology and consumer trends that will affect a business in the year ahead, separated from the ones being oversold.
Key takeaways:
- Which current technologies carry real commercial weight, and which are hype
- How shifting consumer behaviour and new business models change the competitive picture
- Where the macroeconomic backdrop should reset a leadership team’s priorities
A working method for redesigning a business around AI from a blank slate, instead of adding AI to what already exists.
Key takeaways:
- The question to start from: how the business would be built today if AI came first
- Where AI changes structure, talent, data, and customer experience, with examples from companies already doing it
- How to close the gap between an AI ambition and the current operating model
An examination of why past success can block future growth, and what in a company’s culture to change and what to protect.
Key takeaways:
- Why the strengths that built a company can become the barrier to its next phase
- Which existing values are worth reinforcing rather than discarding
- How culture, not technology, becomes the platform for sustained change