Avenir du travail speakers

Why organisations work with Ayse Birsel She brings a method, not a mood. Deconstruction: Reconstruction is a four-step process (deconstruct, point of view, reconstruct, express) developed across two decades of paid client work, and groups can run it on a real problem in the room. Her design credentials are commercial, not theoretical: products and systems for Herman Miller, Toyota, Amazon, IKEA, Knoll, GE and Colgate-Palmolive, with Resolve for Herman Miller named by The New York Times among the defining furniture pieces of the last 100 years. She bridges product innovation and people innovation. The same method behind the Zoë Washlet for TOTO underpins Design the Work You Love, which is why teams leave with a tool they can apply to org design, not just to creativity. She is one of the Marshall Goldsmith 100 Coaches, and the cohort itself was formed inside her Design the Life You Love process. That credential signals trust from the most senior coaching network in business. Recognised by Fast Company as one of the Most Creative People in Business and by Thinkers50 on its Radar list of thinkers most likely to shape the future of organisations. Biography highlights Co-founder and Creative Director, Birsel + Seck, New York. Master’s in Industrial Design, Pratt Institute, on a Fulbright Scholarship; undergraduate in Industrial Design at Middle East Technical University. Author of “Design the Life You Love” (Penguin Random House, 2015) and “Design the Long Life You Love” (Running Press, 2022). Thinkers50 Radar list of 30 thinkers most likely to shape the future of organisations. One of Fast Company’s Most Creative People in Business (2017); member of the Marshall Goldsmith 100 Coaches. Work in the permanent collections of MoMA, Cooper Hewitt and the Philadelphia Museum of Art; clients include Herman Miller, Toyota, Amazon, GE, IKEA, Knoll, Staples, Colgate-Palmolive and TOTO. Biography Most organisations treat innovation as a personality trait. Ayse Birsel treats it as a process. Deconstruction: Reconstruction, the method she has used at Birsel + Seck for two decades, is built around four steps: take the problem apart, change the point of view, put it back together within real constraints, and give the result a clean form. It is the same logic she has applied to a Herman Miller workstation, a Toyota concept car and a TOTO washlet. Her credentials are commercial. Birsel + Seck, the New York studio she runs with Bibi Seck, has produced work for Amazon, GE, IKEA, Staples, Knoll and Colgate-Palmolive. The Resolve System for Herman Miller has been cited by The New York Times among the defining furniture pieces of the last 100 years, and her work sits in the permanent collections of MoMA, Cooper Hewitt and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She trained at Middle East Technical University and took a master’s at Pratt Institute on a Fulbright Scholarship. The translation from product to people came through her books. “Design the Life You Love” (Penguin Random House, 2015) and “Design the Long Life You Love” (2022) take the same four-step method and apply it to careers, relationships and ageing well. Marshall Goldsmith ran the program himself, and the Marshall Goldsmith 100 Coaches network was formed inside it. She is a member of that cohort and on the Thinkers50 Radar list of thinkers most likely to shape the future of organisations. For corporate audiences, this matters because the method is the product. Teams do not leave with a story about creativity. They leave having deconstructed a real brief, tested a different point of view and reconstructed an option they can take back to the operating model on Monday. Key speaking topics Innovation method and design thinking in practice Deconstruction: Reconstruction as a creative process for teams Designing the work, not just the workplace Life design and career reinvention for senior leaders Creativity under constraint Human-centred product and service design Long-life and longevity design Ideal for Innovation, R&D and product leaders looking for a repeatable creative method. CHROs and learning leaders running senior leadership offsites or executive development programs. Boards and executive teams working through reinvention, succession and second-act questions. Design, marketing and customer experience functions translate creativity into operating decisions. Audience outcomes A working knowledge of the four-step Deconstruction: Reconstruction process applied to a real organisational brief. A different point of view on a problem the team came in with, tested in the room. Language and structure for talking about creativity that does not depend on individual talent. A personal life-design or career-design artefact that senior leaders can take away from the session. Confidence that innovation can be run as a discipline, not staged as a culture programme.

Why organisations work with Bernard Marr His frameworks for data strategy and AI adoption are grounded in peer-reviewed academic research from Cambridge and Cranfield – which means they hold up to internal scrutiny in ways that practitioner opinion rarely does. Business Trends in Practice, winner of the 2022 Business Book of the Year Award, gives executive audiences a shared, structured vocabulary for decisions that are otherwise made in fragmented, jargon-heavy conversations. His Forbes column reaches approximately one million readers a month – meaning his conceptual framing is often already in the room before he arrives, which accelerates rather than starts the conversation. He advises organisations across the full spectrum of sectors – from Google and Microsoft to the Bank of England, NATO and the NHS – which gives him a pattern-recognition advantage that single-sector specialists cannot replicate. Where most AI speakers address technology adoption as an IT problem, Marr consistently frames it as a governance and leadership problem – which is what boards and C-suites are actually wrestling with. Biography highlights Research Fellow, Cambridge Judge Business School; subsequently at Cranfield School of Management – before founding Bernard Marr & Co in 2006 Author of more than 20 books on AI, data strategy and digital transformation, published in over 20 languages Business Trends in Practice named Business Book of the Year 2022; additional awards include the CMI Management Book of the Year, Axiom Book Award and WHSmith Best Business Book Award Ranked by LinkedIn as one of the top 5 business influencers in the world Regular contributor to Forbes and the World Economic Forum; media presence includes BBC News, Sky News, the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal and HBR Advisory clients include Amazon, Google, Microsoft, the Bank of England, NATO, the NHS, Shell and the United Nations Biography Bernard Marr spent his early career as a research fellow at Cambridge Judge Business School and then at Cranfield School of Management, where his published work – cited more than 5,400 times – focused on business performance, intellectual capital and strategic measurement. In 2006 he left academia to found Bernard Marr & Co, taking that analytical infrastructure into advisory work with some of the world’s most complex organisations. His books – more than twenty of them, translated into over twenty languages – are not airport business books. Data Strategy, AI Strategy, Generative AI in Practice and Future Skills each address a specific executive decision: how to treat data as a governed asset, how to build an AI adoption roadmap, how to prepare a workforce for automation. Business Trends in Practice won the 2022 Business Book of the Year Award. His writing for Forbes, published at a rate of around three articles per week, gives those frameworks sustained reach into executive audiences between engagements. What makes Marr useful to a board is not that he explains technology well – many speakers do that. It is that he consistently reframes technology questions as governance questions: who owns the data strategy, how do we assess AI risk, what does leadership fluency in this area actually require? These are the questions that stall transformation programmes, and they sit above the pay grade of a CTO. His advisory work spans Google, Microsoft, Amazon, the Bank of England, NATO, the NHS, Shell and the United Nations – a range that gives him cross-sector pattern recognition that sector-specific specialists cannot replicate. The organisations that benefit most from his work are those where the executive team is technically literate enough to know they don’t know enough, and needs a structured way to close that gap. Key speaking topics AI strategy and adoption for executive leadership Data strategy and data governance Generative AI and its organisational implications Digital transformation and business performance Future of work and future skills Emerging technology trends and business impact Strategic performance management Ideal for C-suite and board-level audiences navigating AI and data investment decisions Chief Digital Officers, Chief Data Officers and technology transformation leads Senior leadership teams ahead of major digital transformation programmes Corporate and enterprise conference audiences requiring clarity on technology without technical fluency as a prerequisite Audience outcomes A working framework for evaluating AI and data investments – not just a description of what they are Clearer language for discussing technology strategy at board level, with less dependence on specialist intermediaries Understanding of which emerging technology trends carry genuine near-term organisational implications versus which are still speculative A more structured approach to data governance and the conditions under which data generates strategic advantage Insight into the skills and capabilities organisations will need to build – and which to acquire versus develop internally

Why organisations work with Bert Rürup He has held the top advisory seat in German economics. As chairman of the German Council of Economic Experts from 2005 to 2009, he advised the federal government on the macroeconomic questions boards now face in their own planning. His work is embedded in German statute. The “Rürup Commission” he chaired set the path for raising the statutory retirement age to 67, and the Rürup-Rente pension product is named after him. He runs an active research platform. As President of the Handelsblatt Research Institute since 2013 and Chief Economist of Handelsblatt since 2017, he produces a continuous read on European macro conditions that boards can pressure-test against their own assumptions. He connects demographics to the balance sheet. Few speakers translate pension, healthcare, and labour-supply shifts into the fiscal and wage-cost consequences that actually show up in corporate plans. Biography highlights Chairman of the German Council of Economic Experts, 2005-2009. Chairman of the 2002-2003 federal commission on the long-term financing of pension, health and long-term care insurance, known as the Rürup Commission. President of the Handelsblatt Research Institute since 2013; Chief Economist of Handelsblatt since 2017. Former Professor of Economics at Darmstadt University of Technology, with earlier chairs at the University of Essen. Chairman of the Social Advisory Council for Pension Insurance, 2000-2009. Recipient of the Commander’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. Biography Germany’s pension architecture, labour supply, and fiscal outlook have been reshaped over the last two decades by a small number of expert commissions. Bert Rürup chaired the most consequential of them. The 2002-2003 federal commission he led on pensions, health and long-term care recommended the gradual rise of the statutory retirement age to 67, and gave its name to the Rürup-Rente, the state-subsidised private pension introduced in 2005. From 2005 to 2009 he chaired the German Council of Economic Experts, the country’s senior macroeconomic advisory body to the federal government. Before and after that role he sat on the Social Advisory Council for Pension Insurance, and on the Pension Reform Commission under Federal Minister Walter Riester. For boards trying to read German and European macro signals, the point is simple: he has been inside the rooms where those signals were shaped. Since 2013 he has led the Handelsblatt Research Institute, the research arm of Germany’s leading business daily, and since 2017 has been its Chief Economist. That platform keeps his work in weekly circulation among European senior management and investors, and gives corporate audiences a direct line into the macro debate as it is happening. His academic foundation sits at Darmstadt University of Technology, where he held a chair in economics, and earlier at the University of Essen. He holds an honorary doctorate and has been awarded the Commander’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany for his contribution to German economic policy. Key speaking topics German and European macroeconomic outlook Pension systems and the future of the welfare state Demographic change and its fiscal consequences Labour markets and workforce supply in Europe Public finance and fiscal policy The future of work in an ageing Europe Ideal for Boards and executive committees planning multi-year capital and workforce commitments in Europe CFOs, heads of reward, and pensions trustees reassessing long-term benefit liabilities Senior policy and government relations leaders in financial services, insurance, and industrial groups Investor conferences and strategy offsites that need a credible German macro view Audience outcomes A clearer reading of where German and European macro conditions are heading over the medium term A concrete sense of how demographic and pension policy shifts translate into labour cost and tax exposure Language senior audiences can use internally to talk about fiscal and welfare-state risk A view from inside the policy apparatus, not a commentator’s view of it

Why organisations work with Blaire Palmer She brings a BBC journalist’s instinct for the question leaders are avoiding, then makes the boardroom answer it in plain language. Her book Punks in Suits gives organisations a shared vocabulary for why old management habits, not strategy, are the real brake on growth. She has coached boards and executive teams across Airbus, Roche, Mattel, Santander, The FA, and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, so the challenge lands with commercial credibility. She runs That People Thing as her own consultancy, which means the keynote is the leading edge of a deeper body of work on leadership transformation, not a standalone act. Biography highlights Chief Executive and founder of That People Thing, a leadership consultancy working with boards and executive teams on culture and change. Author of four books including Punks in Suits: How to Lead the Workplace Reformation (Rethink Press, 2024) and What’s Wrong with Work? (John Wiley and Sons, 2010). Former producer on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, where she spent a decade in UK news and current affairs. Trained as one of Europe’s first accredited executive coaches after leaving the BBC. Named clients include Airbus, Roche, Mattel, Santander, The FA, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Govia Thameslink Railway, and Centre for Army Leadership. Regular contributor to Medium and Authority Magazine on leadership and the future of work. Biography Most organisations are not structured to change. They are structured to protect the habits that made them successful, and the people defending those habits are often the most senior in the room. Palmer’s work starts from that observation and builds out. She spent a decade as a producer on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, interrogating ministers and chief executives at eight minutes past seven in the morning. The habit of asking the uncomfortable question did not leave her when she moved into coaching at 29. It became the method. Since then she has spent more than two decades advising boards and executive teams at Airbus, Roche, Mattel, Santander, The FA, and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. She founded That People Thing to house that work. Her fourth book, Punks in Suits: How to Lead the Workplace Reformation, published by Rethink Press in 2024, sets out the argument that entrenched management orthodoxy, not competitive pressure, is what stalls most organisations trying to evolve. What a senior team gets from her is rare in the category. She has the reporter’s ability to cut through executive language, the coach’s patience to stay with a difficult conversation, and a published thesis specific enough to be argued with. That makes the keynote a starting point for a real internal debate rather than a motivational interval. Key speaking topics Leadership behaviour and change Workplace reformation and culture Trust and candour in senior teams Future of work Decision-making under pressure Leadership myths and orthodoxies Ideal for Boards and executive committees facing a culture or performance inflection point. CHROs and chief people officers leading leadership development at scale. CEOs integrating acquisitions or navigating a strategic reset. Leadership conferences for senior management populations. Audience outcomes A clearer view of which leadership habits are acting as a ceiling on organisational performance. A specific argument, drawn from Punks in Suits, that senior teams can take back into their own decision forums. Language for the conversations leaders have been avoiding with peers and direct reports. Recognition that culture and strategy move together, and a concrete starting point for aligning them.

Why organisations work with Bobby Umar He treats connection as a teachable skill, not a personality trait. The 5 C’s of Connection framework, drawn from his TEDxUWO talk, gives leaders and employees a structured way to build trust, credibility and influence inside and outside the organisation. His background is unusually broad for the topic: engineering at Bombardier, brand marketing at Kraft and Unilever, and Second City improv training. That mix shows up in how the work lands, structured enough for senior audiences, performative enough to hold a room. He is a recognised authority on LinkedIn as a professional channel. Multiple LinkedIn Top Voice designations, including an early Presentation Skills badge, mean leaders learn from someone who has built an audience the way they are being asked to. Inc. Magazine Top 100 Leadership Speaker and five-time TEDx speaker, which gives senior audiences confidence that the craft and delivery will match the content. Biography highlights Five-time TEDx speaker, including “The 5 C’s of Connection” (TEDxUWO) and “School: Learning to Fly” (TEDxUTSC). Inc. Magazine Top 100 Leadership Speaker, listed alongside Richard Branson and Brené Brown. LinkedIn Top Voice, with early badges for Presentation Skills, Thought Leadership and Personal Branding. Author of How to Network Anytime, Anywhere, With Anyone (#1 on three Amazon bestseller lists). Founder of DYPB (Discover Your Personal Brand), described as North America’s largest personal branding event, with 60 experts and over 300 delegates. Career background spans Bombardier (engineering), Kraft and Unilever (brand marketing) and Second City (performing arts). B.Eng., McGill University; MBA, McMaster University. Biography Most leadership development still treats connection as a soft skill that either comes naturally or does not. Bobby Umar’s work argues the opposite. His 5 C’s of Connection framework, popularised through a viral TEDxUWO talk, breaks authentic relationship-building into components that can be taught to engineers, sales teams, senior executives and entry-level employees alike. That argument is grounded in an unusual professional path. Before becoming a speaker, Umar trained as an engineer at McGill, ran brand marketing for Kraft and Unilever, took an MBA at McMaster and studied improv at Second City. The result is a practitioner who can move between the analytical and the performative without losing either audience. His credentials inside the speaking and creator economy are deep. Five TEDx talks. Inc. Magazine Top 100 Leadership Speaker. LinkedIn Top Voice across several categories. Author of How to Network Anytime, Anywhere, With Anyone, a #1 Amazon bestseller. Founder of DYPB, the personal branding conference that became the largest of its kind in North America. What makes him commercially useful to organisations is the translation step. Personal branding, networking, social audio, vulnerable storytelling: these are not pitched as marketing tactics but as the connective infrastructure of modern professional life. For organisations trying to develop influential leaders, engaged employees and externally visible experts, Umar offers a practical, structured account of how connection actually works. Key speaking topics Authentic networking and relationship-building Personal branding for leaders and employees LinkedIn presence and professional digital reputation Vulnerable storytelling and leadership communication Heart-centred leadership Employee advocacy and internal brand-building Connection skills in hybrid and remote teams Ideal for CHROs, talent and L&D leaders investing in employee engagement, advocacy and internal communication. Marketing, communications and executive leaders building external thought leadership programmes for senior teams. Sales and business development functions where individual networking capability drives revenue. Conference organisers building agendas on leadership, future of work, employee experience or culture. Audience outcomes A working language for connection, anchored in the 5 C’s framework, that audiences can apply immediately to internal and external relationships. A clearer view of how personal branding intersects with leadership credibility, especially on LinkedIn. Practical methods for using storytelling, vulnerability and digital channels to build trust at scale. A reframing of networking as a professional discipline, not a transactional activity reserved for extroverts. Confidence to put senior leaders and frontline employees on visible platforms without sounding scripted.

Why organisations work with Brett StClair He has run the inside of both sides of the problem: a Google regional product portfolio and the digital stack of a 40,000-person bank across 32 markets. That is rare credibility on the operating reality of AI inside a regulated enterprise. He frames AI adoption as a leadership and workforce problem first, technology problem second, which is what most boards actually need before they spend the next budget cycle on tooling. Through Teraflow.ai he works with enterprise clients on the implementation, not only the strategy. The keynote content is grounded in current delivery, not retrospective case studies. The “Rebel Technologist” thesis gives senior leaders a usable language for identifying and protecting the internal disruptors who actually move transformation programmes. Biography highlights Co-Founder and Chief Connector, Teraflow.ai, an enterprise AI and cloud consultancy. Former Head of Digital Products, Barclays Africa, leading digital modernisation across 32 countries. Former Google executive across mobile, YouTube, AdMob and Cloud for the Africa region. Host of the “Rebel Technologist” podcast on AI adoption and digital leadership. Computer Science, University of Cape Town. MBA, University of South Africa. Featured in BBC, Financial Times, Forbes and regional business press including ITWeb and Business Day. Biography Most enterprise AI conversations stall at the same point. Leaders agree the technology is significant. They cannot agree what to do with it on Monday. The gap between a board’s appetite for AI and an operating model that can actually absorb it is now the central problem in digital transformation, and it is exactly where Brett StClair works. StClair spent his Google years inside the product engine for Africa, with responsibilities across mobile, AdMob, YouTube and Cloud. He left to take on a different kind of problem: rebuilding Barclays Africa as a digital bank, leading product across 32 countries and an organisation of around 40,000 people. That experience, working at the seam between a hyperscaler and a regulated bank, sits behind his current work. As Co-Founder and Chief Connector of Teraflow.ai, he leads enterprise engagements on AI and cloud adoption with banks, healthcare organisations and large corporates. His “Rebel Technologist” thesis, carried through his podcast and keynotes, names a recurring pattern inside large firms: the internal disruptors who actually move transformation forward, and the leadership choices that determine whether they survive long enough to ship. His keynote from Google to global banking has been delivered to audiences including Mastercard, Vodafone, Standard Bank, Nedbank, FNB, Deloitte and Accenture, and his work has been referenced in BBC, Financial Times and Forbes coverage of AI and digital change. Key speaking topics Enterprise AI adoption Generative AI in regulated industries Digital transformation at scale DevOps and agile inside large organisations Cloud strategy for enterprises Innovation culture and internal disruptors Leadership in technology change programmes Ideal for CIOs, CDOs and CTOs setting AI and cloud strategy Transformation, innovation and digital leads moving from pilot to production Boards and executive committees in banking, healthcare and large corporates Heads of operations and HR designing workforce capability around AI Audience outcomes A clearer view of where AI investment converts into operating advantage and where it does not. A working language for governance, risk and capability around generative AI in regulated environments. Practical lessons from inside Google and Barclays Africa on what makes large-scale digital change actually land. A sharper sense of how to identify and protect the internal disruptors who carry transformation programmes through their hardest stages.

Why organisations work with Byron Reese He places today’s AI moment inside a 100,000-year arc of technology shifts, giving senior leaders a framework for long-range decisions that vendor briefings cannot supply. As CEO of Gigaom, he sits at the intersection of independent technology analysis and operating leadership, which lets him speak to both the engineering reality and the boardroom question. His five books, published by Simon & Schuster and BenBella, take positions on machine consciousness, automation, and the future of work that are specific and contestable, not generic optimism. He addresses AI without the doom-or-hype binary that dominates the speaking circuit, which is what most leadership audiences are quietly asking for. Biography highlights CEO and publisher of Gigaom, an independent technology research firm. Author of five books, including The Fourth Age (Simon & Schuster, 2018), described by The New York Times as “entertaining and engaging”. Founder of multiple technology companies, with two NASDAQ IPOs and several US patents to his name. Hosts podcasts on artificial intelligence, including Voices in AI and The Agora Podcast. Featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, Bloomberg Businessweek, USA Today and the Financial Times. Bloomberg Businessweek credited him with “quietly pioneer[ing] a new breed of media company”. Biography Most futurists work in five-year horizons because that is what corporate planning cycles demand. The cost is that the most important question, which is what AI actually does to the human story, gets answered by analogy and anecdote rather than by argument. Byron Reese works in a different timeframe. In The Fourth Age, published by Simon & Schuster in 2018, he argues that technology has reshaped humanity three times: fire and language, agriculture and cities, the wheel and writing. Artificial intelligence and robotics, he argues, are now driving the fourth. The book reframes machine consciousness, automation and the future of work as questions of philosophy and history rather than software roadmaps, and The New York Times called it “entertaining and engaging”. His credibility is operational as well as intellectual. As CEO and publisher of Gigaom, he runs one of the better-known independent technology research firms. Before that he founded and sold multiple companies, took two through NASDAQ IPOs, and built consumer internet platforms that Bloomberg Businessweek described as “a new breed of media company”. He holds several US patents in crowdsourcing and content technology. Reese is, by his own description, the “Future of” guy: he has written and spoken on the future of AI, work, banking, education, agriculture, and the planet. His later books, Stories, Dice, and Rocks That Think and We Are Agora, extend the same long-range argument into how humans forecast and how human collectives behave. The thread that connects all of it, and the reason boards keep booking him, is that he is willing to take a position on where this is going. Key speaking topics Artificial intelligence and the future of work The long arc of technology and human civilisation Automation and workforce redesign Machine consciousness and AI ethics Innovation in conditions of rapid technological change Reasoned optimism as a leadership stance on technology The future of education, banking and agriculture Ideal for Boards and executive teams setting long-range AI and automation strategy CHROs and workforce planners redesigning roles around AI capability Innovation and strategy leaders in financial services, education and industrial sectors Conference audiences looking for a substantive counterweight to AI hype and AI doom Audience outcomes A clearer mental model of where AI sits in the longer history of human technology Sharper questions for internal AI strategy conversations, particularly on workforce and capital allocation A credible counter-position to the dominant doom-or-hype framing of AI in the press A specific account of how automation reshapes employment, drawn from Reese’s published argument rather than generic forecasts Renewed confidence that leadership decisions on technology can be made with intellectual rigour, not faith

Why organisations work with Calum Chace He has built two books and two operating ventures around the same argument: that AI changes capability, then labour, then the structure of the economy. Boards hear a coherent thesis, not a trend update. He coined the term “economic singularity” and wrote the book on it. Leadership teams trying to think clearly about technological unemployment get the original framing, not a recycled version. Through Conscium, the AI safety company he co-founded in 2024, and the linked PRISM research non-profit, he speaks from inside the live debate on machine consciousness and agent evaluation, not from the sidelines. Thirty years across BBC journalism, Financial Times writing, KPMG strategic intelligence and CEO roles mean he frames AI for commercial audiences in language they already use. Biography highlights Co-founder of Conscium (2024), an AI safety company working on neuromorphic computing, AI agent evaluation, and machine consciousness. Co-founder of the Economic Singularity Foundation, a think tank on the future of jobs in an AI economy. Author of Surviving AI and The Economic Singularity, plus the techno-thrillers Pandora’s Brain and Pandora’s Oracle. Co-host of the London Futurist Podcast and the PRISM Podcast on sentient machines. Read Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford; trained as a journalist with the BBC; contributed to the Financial Times. Former director of KPMG’s strategic and commercial intelligence media practice and CEO of several businesses before moving to full-time writing and speaking in 2012. Biography Artificial intelligence is two distinct strategic questions for a board, not one. The first is what AI does to the products and services a business sells. The second is what it does to the labour the business buys. Calum Chace has spent a decade arguing that the second question is the one most organisations are underprepared for, and that the gap between AI as a capability story and AI as an economic story is where the strategic risk sits. His two non-fiction books frame that gap. Surviving AI deals with the long-term safety question once machines start to match and then exceed human capability. The Economic Singularity gave a name to the moment when technological unemployment becomes the dominant labour reality, and made the case that this is a question of decades, not centuries. The economic singularity is now a term other writers use; he wrote the book it came from. The work has continued into operating ventures. In 2024 he co-founded Conscium, an AI safety company developing neuromorphic computing, agent evaluation methods and research on machine consciousness. Conscium has since seeded PRISM, a non-profit researching sentient machines, which he co-hosts as a podcast. Earlier, he co-founded the Economic Singularity Foundation, a think tank on the future of jobs. Before any of that, Chace read PPE at Oxford, trained as a BBC journalist, wrote for the Financial Times, ran the media practice at KPMG’s strategic and commercial intelligence group, and held several CEO roles. That commercial background is why his talks for senior audiences sound like strategy conversations rather than technology briefings, and why he can argue both sides of the AI question, capability and consequence, in the same room. Key speaking topics Artificial intelligence and the two singularities The economic singularity and the future of jobs AI safety, alignment and machine consciousness Digital transformation and AI in the enterprise AI in healthcare AI in education The philosophy of AI Ideal for Boards and executive committees building a long-range AI strategy CHROs and people leaders facing workforce redesign around AI capability Conferences for technology, financial services, healthcare and professional services leadership Government, regulator and policy audiences working on AI governance and labour-market policy Audience outcomes A clearer separation between AI as a product question and AI as a labour question, and a sense of which one their organisation is more exposed to. A working definition of the economic singularity and a view on whether the case for serious technological unemployment is credible. A more informed position on AI safety, machine consciousness and agent evaluation as governance issues, not laboratory topics. Language and reference points senior leaders can use in their own board and investor conversations about AI.

Why organisations work with Carl Frey The 2013 paper Frey co-authored with Michael Osborne – estimating 47% of US jobs at risk from automation – is one of the most cited works in social science of the past two decades, with its methodology adopted by Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors, the World Bank, and the Bank of England. No comparable speaker in this space brings this level of intellectual provenance to the conversation. His concept of the “technology trap” gives boards a precisely named mechanism for diagnosing their own institutional response to AI: the pattern by which efforts to resist short-term disruption deny organisations the long-term gains that technology makes possible. How Progress Ends (Princeton, 2025) addresses the question now at the top of most board agendas – why do some organisations and nations sustain the capacity to benefit from new technology while others stagnate – and gives senior leaders a durable, historically grounded answer rather than a forecast. His analysis is built on 1,000 years of economic history, not current trend extrapolation. That means the framework he offers survives the next wave of AI announcements rather than becoming obsolete with each new model release. Advisory roles with the G20, OECD, European Commission, and OECD Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence mean he brings regulatory and policy intelligence that most academic speakers lack – organisations understand not just the technology but the governance environment forming around it. Biography highlights Dieter Schwarz Associate Professor of AI & Work, Oxford Internet Institute; Fellow of Mansfield College; Director, Future of Work Programme, Oxford Martin School, University of Oxford Co-author of “The Future of Employment” (2013, with Michael Osborne) – one of the most cited social science papers of the past two decades; 20,000+ citations on Google Scholar; methodology adopted by Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors, the World Bank, and the Bank of England Author of The Technology Trap (Princeton University Press, 2019) – Financial Times Best Books of the Year; winner of the Richard A. Lester Prize for Outstanding Book in Industrial Relations and Labour Economics (Princeton University) Author of How Progress Ends (Princeton University Press, 2025) – shortlisted for the FT/Schroders Business Book of the Year Award; finalist for the Lionel Gelber Prize Advisor to the G20, OECD, European Commission, and United Nations; former member of the OECD Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence and the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on the New Economic Agenda Ranked in the top 0.5% of economists worldwide by IDEAS/RePEC; contributor to the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, Scientific American, and The Economist (By Invitation) Biography The paper that put 47% of US jobs at risk of automation – co-authored at Oxford by Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne in 2013 – reshaped the global policy debate and became one of the most cited works in social science that decade. Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors used its methodology. So did the World Bank and the Bank of England. The Economist later described Frey as an “accidental doom-monger”: his own reading of the evidence was considerably more nuanced than the headlines. That nuance became the subject of his first book. The Technology Trap (Princeton, 2019) – Financial Times Best Book of the Year and winner of Princeton’s Richard A. Lester Prize – argued that the real risk of automation is not that work disappears, but that organisations and governments mismanage the transition. Drawing on the Industrial Revolution and the Computer Revolution, Frey named the failure mode precisely: resistance to short-term disruption, he showed, tends to deny access to the long-term gains. His 2025 book How Progress Ends – shortlisted for the FT/Schroders Business Book of the Year Award – extends the framework to the question now central to board strategy: why do some organisations and nations sustain the capacity to benefit from new technology while others stagnate? Frey’s answer, built from 1,000 years of economic history spanning Song China to the present, identifies the balance between decentralised innovation and the institutional capacity to scale as the deciding factor. As Dieter Schwarz Associate Professor of AI & Work at Oxford’s Internet Institute and Director of the Future of Work Programme at the Oxford Martin School, Frey advises the G20, OECD, European Commission, and United Nations. His analysis appears in the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, and Scientific American. IDEAS/RePEC ranks him in the top 0.5% of economists worldwide. Key speaking topics Automation, AI, and labour market transformation The technology trap: historical lessons for the age of AI Why progress stalls – and what organisations and nations can do about it Workforce strategy in an era of technological disruption AI, inequality, and the distribution of economic gains Industrial policy and the geopolitics of technological leadership The economics of innovation: decentralisation, scaling, and competitive advantage Ideal for Boards and C-suite leadership teams navigating AI investment decisions and long-term workforce strategy CHROs and transformation leads developing evidence-based frameworks for workforce planning under conditions of technological disruption Policy and public affairs functions in sectors facing direct automation exposure – financial services, professional services, manufacturing Strategy and scenario planning teams in organisations with significant AI or digital transformation programmes Audience outcomes A historically grounded framework for distinguishing automation that displaces workers from technology that expands what workers can do – and why the difference matters for investment decisions A working understanding of the “technology trap” mechanism: how to identify institutional resistance before it becomes strategically costly Concrete criteria for evaluating workforce and AI investment decisions against historical patterns of disruption, transition, and recovery Insight into the macro-economic and geopolitical conditions shaping AI adoption – including what the US-China competition for technological leadership means for business strategy Sharper language and stronger evidence for board-level conversations about AI, workforce, and long-term competitive positioning

Why organisations work with Carl Honoré He makes a specific, testable claim that most management culture resists: that slowing down is not a productivity concession but a competitive advantage, and he has two decades of cross-sector evidence to support it. His Slow Fix framework gives organisations a direct alternative to short-termism in problem-solving, not as a philosophical preference, but as a structured approach to decisions that actually hold. On ageing and the workforce, he converts a topic most organisations treat as a compliance or HR issue into a commercial argument: mixed-age teams outperform across measurable metrics, and ageism is a business risk, not just a social one. His work sits at the junction of two urgent organisational pressures – sustainable performance culture and the longevity economy – giving him a rare dual relevance for leadership teams and people functions simultaneously. As the originator of the Slow Movement – a framework covered by the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Economist and Time, among others – he brings a level of intellectual ownership that very few speakers in the workplace culture space can claim. Biography highlights Author of In Praise of Slow (2004), Under Pressure, The Slow Fix, and Bolder – published in 36 languages, with bestseller listings across multiple countries Two main-stage TED Talks – “In Praise of Slowness” and “Why We Should Embrace Aging as an Adventure” – with combined views in the millions In Praise of Slow described by the Financial Times as the foundational text of the Slow Movement Journalist whose work has appeared in The Economist, Observer, National Post, Houston Chronicle, Miami Herald, and Time Named 2024 Advocate for Aging by Next Avenue and the American Society on Aging Creator and presenter of BBC Radio 4 series Status by Carl Honoré; previously presented The Slow Coach for BBC Radio 4 and Frantic Family Rescue for ABC TV Australia Bolder selected as BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week and Reader’s Digest (UK) Book of the Month Graduated from the University of Edinburgh; reported across Europe and South America for over a decade before turning to books Biography Speed and youth are the two defaults of modern organisational culture. Carl Honoré has built a career and a global movement on the argument that both are miscalibrated, and that the evidence for changing them is stronger than most organisations acknowledge. In Praise of Slow (2004), the book that gave the Slow Movement its name and its intellectual framework, made a counterintuitive claim: that choosing when to be fast, rather than defaulting to fast, is a more reliable route to performance. The Financial Times placed it as the foundational text of the movement. His third book, The Slow Fix, extended that argument into problem-solving, building the case that organisations addicted to quick responses consistently underperform against those willing to invest time in diagnosis and depth. His more recent work, anchored in Bolder, applies the same analytical lens to age. The demographic case for rethinking older workers is well-established in research; the cultural and commercial case is Honoré’s contribution. His argument that ageism functions as a form of the same bias toward speed and novelty that distorts organisational decision-making, connects the two strands of his work into a coherent framework for leaders. In 2024, that work was recognised by both Next Avenue and the American Society on Aging, who named him an Advocate for Aging. Trained as a journalist at The Economist, Observer, and Time, among other outlets, Honoré brings a mode of inquiry to organisational topics that is grounded in evidence gathered across cultures and sectors, not in a single industry or institutional context. His two main-stage TED Talks have been viewed millions of times; his books are published in 36 languages. Key speaking topics Pace as organisational strategy The Slow Movement and workplace performance Multigenerational workforce design Ageism as a commercial risk Sustainable performance and decision quality The Slow Fix: problem-solving under pressure Status, hierarchy, and organisational culture Longevity and the future of work Ideal for CHROs and people leaders designing age-inclusive workforces and addressing talent retention across generations CEOs and senior leadership teams examining whether performance culture is undermining the quality of decisions and the depth of problem-solving Boards and executive committees navigating the commercial implications of ageing demographics and multigenerational customer bases Culture transformation leads and change management functions rethinking pace, productivity, and sustainable output Audience outcomes A clear framework for diagnosing where organisational speed becomes a liability – in decision-making, leadership, and creative work Evidence-based understanding of why multigenerational teams outperform and what structural changes enable that performance A reframed view of ageism as a commercial and strategic problem, not only a social or legal one Practical approaches drawn from the Slow Fix framework for tackling complex problems without defaulting to short-term solutions Greater awareness of the connection between pace culture and youth bias – and why addressing one typically requires addressing both

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

Why organisations work with Chris Dyer He ran the experiment before he taught it. PeopleG2 was a fully remote business through five Inc. 5000 listings and fifteen “best place to work” cycles, which means his culture and remote-work models come from operating evidence, not consulting observation. His “7 Pillars” (Transparency, Positivity, Measurement, Acknowledgement, Uniqueness, Listening, Mistakes) give an executive team a shared diagnostic vocabulary for culture, replacing the usual mix of values posters and engagement-survey theatre. He works at the intersection of culture and remote design, where most speakers pick a side. Buyers wrestling with hybrid productivity, distributed leadership, and connection in dispersed teams get one voice on both questions. Inc. Magazine named him the #1 Leadership Speaker on Culture, and his client roster includes NASA, Johnson & Johnson, Intuit, IKEA, and Southwest Airlines, which signals he holds a senior room across regulated, industrial, tech, and consumer settings. Biography highlights Founder and CEO of PeopleG2, a fully remote background-screening company, five-time Inc. 5000 honoree. Author of The Power of Company Culture (Kogan Page) and co-author of Remote Work (Kogan Page). Named #1 Leadership Speaker on Culture by Inc. Magazine; ranked #5 on the LeadersHum Power List. Listed among Global Gurus Top 30 Organizational Culture Professionals. Forbes Business Council member, Fast Company Executive Board member, and contributor to Inc.com. Keynote clients include NASA, Johnson & Johnson, Intuit, IKEA, and Southwest Airlines. Biography Most companies treat culture as something HR runs and leaders endorse. PeopleG2 was built the other way around. Chris Dyer ran the firm as a fully remote operation while it landed on the Inc. 5000 list five times and was repeatedly named a best place to work, which made culture a daily operating decision rather than an annual initiative. That experience produced a specific framework. The Power of Company Culture, published by Kogan Page, sets out seven pillars: Transparency, Positivity, Measurement, Acknowledgement, Uniqueness, Listening, and Mistakes. The book’s argument is operational. Each pillar maps to behaviours leaders can audit, and the cases used to test it sit inside companies like General Motors, Southwest Airlines, and VaynerMedia. His second book, Remote Work, also with Kogan Page, addresses the harder follow-on question: how do you keep a culture intact when your workforce is distributed. Inc. Magazine subsequently named Dyer the #1 Leadership Speaker on Culture, and his keynote work has placed him in front of leadership teams at NASA, Johnson & Johnson, Intuit, IKEA, and Southwest Airlines. What buyers tend to take from Dyer is permission to stop treating culture as soft. He gives senior teams a vocabulary, a diagnostic, and a set of operator decisions, grounded in a business he built and ran rather than a model he assembled from interviews. Key speaking topics Company culture as an operating system The 7 Pillars framework Remote and hybrid workforce design Employee engagement and retention Leadership in distributed organisations Future of work and AI integration in the workplace Burnout and recession-period leadership Ideal for CHROs and heads of People rebuilding engagement and retention strategy CEOs and executive teams setting the direction on hybrid or fully remote operating models Culture and transformation leads inside organisations carrying out post-restructure rebuilds Leadership development functions designing programmes for distributed managers Audience outcomes A shared diagnostic for which cultural levers in their organisation are actually moving performance A practical view of how to run a distributed or hybrid workforce without losing cohesion An operator’s account of how engagement, retention, and productivity reinforce each other when the right pillars are in place Concrete tactics from a CEO who tested them inside a five-time Inc. 5000 company