IA agentica speakers

Why organisations work with Andreas Welsch Two decades inside SAP, including a vice president role connected to its Global AI Center of Excellence, give him a working knowledge of enterprise AI at the scale Fortune 500 boards actually operate. His AI Leadership Handbook is built on 60+ named interviews with AI leaders and offers a practitioner framework rather than commentary on the market. The 9 Steps to Successful AI Projects gives leadership teams a sequence to challenge stalled programmes against, covering ownership, strategy alignment, cross-functional delivery and governance. His What’s the BUZZ? podcast, running since 2021 with hundreds of AI executives, keeps his material grounded in what is currently working inside enterprises, not what was true 18 months ago. Named LinkedIn Top Voice, Thinkers360 Top 10 in AI, Generative AI and Agentic AI, and DataIQ Data & AI Leader of the Year Finalist 2025, which signals he is taken seriously by the audiences that book him. Biography highlights Founder and Chief AI Strategist, Intelligence Briefing Former Vice President at SAP, with leadership roles connected to its Global AI Center of Excellence and Business AI go-to-market function Author of AI Leadership Handbook and The HUMAN Agentic AI Edge Host of What’s the BUZZ? AI in Business podcast since 2021 Adjunct Professor at West Chester University of Pennsylvania; Editorial Board member, Journal of AI, Robotics, and Workplace Automation LinkedIn Top Voice; Thinkers360 Top 10 in AI, Generative AI and Agentic AI; DataIQ Data & AI Leader of the Year Finalist 2025; PEX Network Top 30 AI Leader 2025 Biography Enterprise AI has moved past the question of whether to invest. The harder question now is why most programmes never leave pilot. Welsch’s work answers it from the operator’s seat. Over two decades at SAP, including a vice president role connected to its Global AI Center of Excellence, he watched Fortune 500 organisations buy capability and fail to convert it into operating advantage. That experience is the substrate of the AI Leadership Handbook, his best-selling book drawn from 60+ interviews with AI leaders. The book sets out a practitioner sequence, The 9 Steps to Successful AI Projects, that leadership teams use to challenge stalled programmes against ownership, strategy alignment, cross-functional delivery and governance. Through Intelligence Briefing, the advisory he founded after SAP, Welsch now works with senior teams on agentic AI specifically: where autonomous systems sit on the org chart, how accountability survives when decisions are delegated to machines, and what workforce design looks like when AI agents are colleagues rather than tools. His second book, The HUMAN Agentic AI Edge, makes that argument in book form. His What’s the BUZZ? podcast, running since 2021, keeps the material fresh by putting him in regular conversation with named AI leaders inside Accenture, IBM, NVIDIA, PwC, SAP and Siemens. Thinkers360 ranks him in their top 10 globally on AI, Generative AI and Agentic AI; DataIQ named him a Data & AI Leader of the Year finalist in 2025. Key speaking topics Enterprise AI strategy and operating advantage Agentic AI and autonomous systems in the enterprise AI governance and responsible adoption Generative AI for business outcomes Workforce design for the AI-ready organisation AI leadership and executive readiness Change management for AI programmes Ideal for Boards, CEOs and executive committees commissioning enterprise-wide AI strategy CIOs, CTOs, CDOs and Chief AI Officers responsible for moving AI from pilot to operating model CHROs and people leaders redesigning roles around AI capability Industry conferences and leadership summits in technology, financial services, manufacturing and professional services Audience outcomes A sharper read on why most enterprise AI programmes stall and what changes when they do not Familiarity with The 9 Steps to Successful AI Projects as a diagnostic for their own programme A working position on agentic AI: where it belongs in the operating model and where it does not Specific governance questions to take back to the board on accountability, data privacy and risk A view of what other Fortune 500 AI leaders are actually doing now, from Welsch’s podcast research

Why organisations work with Ashlea Atigolo She has co-built a generative AI product, Finley AI, that has been recognised on the WealthTech100 2024 list, so the advice she offers boards is grounded in shipped technology rather than commentary. She brings a regulated-industry lens. Her work spans wealth management, private equity and fintech, where the question is not whether to deploy AI but how to do it without breaking trust, compliance, or customer relationships. She is a credible voice on women in AI without leaning on the topic alone. The named recognition (TechRound Top 64 Women in Tech, Great British Businesswoman finalist, Fintech Powerlist) sits alongside the technical and commercial credentials. She is equally fluent as a keynote speaker, panel host and workshop facilitator, which makes her a flexible fit for AI summits, leadership offsites and investor-facing events. Biography highlights Co-founder of INATIGO, a generative AI venture builder. Co-founder of Finley AI, listed on the WealthTech100 2024. Managing Partner at Consult Venture Partners, advising executives on generative and agentic AI adoption. Former Co-Founder and Co-Managing Director of City Wharf Private Wealth, awarded Europe’s Most Innovative Wealth Management Model at the 2021 WealthBriefing European Awards. Listed on TechRound’s Top 64 Influential Women in UK Technology (2022) and named on the Fintech Powerlist. Speaker and host at Fintech Week London, Fintech Connect and Chatbot Africa AI Summit. Biography Most organisations have an AI strategy. A much smaller number have AI in production, talking to customers, sitting inside regulated workflows and answering to a compliance function. Ashlea Atigolo works at that second layer. As co-founder of INATIGO and its flagship product Finley AI, listed on the WealthTech100 2024, she has built generative AI systems for personal finance rather than written about them. Her route into AI was operational, not academic. Before INATIGO she co-founded City Wharf Private Wealth, where her co-leadership won Europe’s Most Innovative Wealth Management Model at the 2021 WealthBriefing European Awards. That background gives her advisory work a distinctive cast. She understands wealth, private equity and fintech as live operating environments, not case studies, and her current role as Managing Partner at Consult Venture Partners is built on that. Her independent recognition is dense and recent. She has been named on TechRound’s Top 64 Influential Women in UK Technology, included on the Fintech Powerlist, and shortlisted as a finalist for the Great British Businesswoman Awards in technology. She has advised Adobe directly and has been engaged through GLG, AlphaSense and GuidePoint by executives in fintech, private equity and financial services. On stage she is most useful to organisations that need a builder’s view of generative and agentic AI: what to deploy, what to delay, how to govern it, and where the human still has to sit inside the workflow. She hosts and keynotes at Fintech Week London, Fintech Connect and Chatbot Africa AI Summit, and is equally credible in a board workshop as on a main-stage panel. Key speaking topics Generative and agentic AI in financial services AI product strategy and deployment in regulated industries Conversational and empathetic AI design Responsible AI, trust and governance Fintech and wealth management innovation Women in AI and inclusive technology teams Leadership through technological disruption Ideal for Boards and executive committees in financial services, wealth management, private equity and fintech sizing up generative or agentic AI investments. CIO, CTO, CDO and Head of Innovation audiences moving from AI pilots into operating deployment. Fintech, AI and wealth-management conferences looking for an operator-speaker rather than a commentator. Internal AI summits, leadership offsites and women-in-tech programmes inside large enterprises. Audience outcomes A clearer picture of where generative and agentic AI is genuinely production-ready in regulated industries, and where it is not. A working vocabulary for governance conversations: agents, guardrails, oversight, human-in-the-loop. A view of how a builder, not a vendor, sequences AI adoption inside a regulated business. Named examples of fintech and wealth-management deployments that buyers can take into their own strategy conversations.

Why organisations work with Cassie Kozyrkov She built the Decision Intelligence function inside Google from scratch, ran it for five years, and named the field itself. When a CEO asks what Decision Intelligence is and why their AI investment should sit inside it, she is the primary source rather than an interpreter of someone else’s framework. She personally trained more than 20,000 Googlers across every function in data-driven decision-making and AI, so she knows how to make the material land with non-technical executives as well as engineers. Her current leader-track work is about what changes when AI acts rather than advises. She puts several tests to executives: whether the AI roadmap is proactive, whether attention is being treated as an investment, and whether a pilot has a named senior owner and a business metric it should move. She teaches this at scale outside the boardroom. Making Friends with Machine Learning began as an internal Google course and is now public, and she created the MasterClass certificate course Data-Driven Decision-Making in the Age of AI, built on her own frameworks and featuring DJ Patil, the first US Chief Data Scientist. She served a full term on the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Innovation Advisory Council, working on how AI affects financial markets, and has worked with senior leaders at Lenovo, NASA, and Gucci. Biography highlights Google’s first Chief Decision Scientist (2018 to 2023), leading the firm’s decision intelligence practice inside Research and Machine Intelligence. Founder and CEO of Kozyr, an AI advisory and education business serving senior leaders and their teams. Personally trained more than 20,000 Googlers in data-driven decision-making and AI, and guided over 500 decision intelligence projects inside Google. Creator of the MasterClass certificate course Data-Driven Decision-Making in the Age of AI, built on her own frameworks and featuring DJ Patil, the first US Chief Data Scientist. Also created Making Friends with Machine Learning, originally an internal Google course and now free on YouTube. Has spoken in more than 40 countries and on all seven continents, including the United Nations, the World Economic Forum, Web Summit, and SXSW. Member of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Innovation Advisory Council (2023 to 2024); Duke University Few-Glasson Distinguished Alumna. Biography The dashboards are built, the models are in production, and senior leaders still cannot name a single decision that is demonstrably better for any of it. That gap is the subject Cassie Kozyrkov has worked on for a decade, first inside Google and now with leadership teams across industries. At Google, she became the company’s first Chief Decision Scientist in 2018 and held the role until 2023. She built a new function that sat between Research and Machine Intelligence on one side and the operating business on the other, and used it to run AI and data through a discipline she calls Decision Intelligence. By the time she left, she had personally trained more than 20,000 Googlers and influenced over 500 projects against that framework. The reason her work travels beyond Google is that she made the material legible. Her course Making Friends with Machine Learning, built inside Google and later released in full on YouTube, explains in plain English how machine learning fits into business decisions. Her writing in Harvard Business Review, Fortune, Fast Company, WIRED, and The Wall Street Journal has done the same for non-technical executives, and her Decision Intelligence Substack has become a working reference for practitioners. Today she runs Kozyr, advising leadership teams on AI strategy and decision design. Her current executive work centres on what changes when AI stops advising and starts acting. One of the tests she puts to leaders is blunt: name the senior owner who wants the outcome and the metric it should move. The harder question is where the hours AI frees up get reinvested. Her MasterClass certificate course Data-Driven Decision-Making in the Age of AI, which features DJ Patil, the first US Chief Data Scientist, takes the same method to a general professional audience. Key speaking topics Decision Intelligence Agentic AI and the leader’s changing role AI strategy and adoption Data-driven decision-making Machine learning for business leaders AI literacy for executives and general audiences Bias and judgement in AI systems Ideal for CEOs, boards, and executive teams setting AI strategy and capital allocation against it Chief Data, Analytics, and AI Officers building a decision-intelligence operating model Transformation and strategy leaders responsible for turning AI pilots into business results All-staff and mixed-ability audiences at conferences or internal AI days, where technical and non-technical people need the same starting point Audience outcomes A working definition of Decision Intelligence and where it sits relative to data science, analytics, and AI investment. A sharper diagnostic for why AI projects stall: wrong decision scoped, wrong owner, or wrong question asked of the model. Shared language across technical and non-technical leaders for debating AI initiatives without defaulting to buzzwords. A test to apply to every AI pilot in the business: who the senior owner is, and which metric it should move. A decision about where the organisation reinvests the hours AI gives back, before the saving is quietly absorbed as extra output.

Why organisations work with Christer Holloman He built the playbook he now teaches. As founder and CEO of Divido, he scaled a white-label Buy Now Pay Later platform to 10 countries and an exit into NatWest, raising roughly $50 million from American Express and Sony along the way. His book “Transactional to Transformational: How Banks Innovate” is built on named case studies from Bank of America, BBVA, Citi, Deutsche Bank, ING, J.P. Morgan, Lloyds and Santander, not generic frameworks. He has been on the bank side as HSBC’s first Entrepreneur in Residence, so he speaks to incumbents from inside their own constraints, not as an outsider throwing stones. He works at the live edge of fintech: digital assets, open banking as a commercial play rather than a compliance exercise, and the shift from agentic AI into agentic commerce. Swedish by background, London and New York by career, multilingual, and at ease in a boardroom with both a retail CEO and a risk committee. Biography highlights Founder and CEO of Divido (2014-2022); company acquired into NatWest in 2024. Author of “Transactional to Transformational: How Banks Innovate” (Wiley, 2021). Author of “The Social Media MBA” series and “How to Sell Online” (Wiley). Entrepreneur in Residence, HSBC (2022-2023). Co-founder and CEO of sustainable finance platform Credential. MBA, Said Business School, University of Oxford. Forbes contributor on fintech; former tech writer for Sky News. Biography Buy Now Pay Later looked like a retail feature before it looked like an asset class. Divido, the company Christer Holloman founded out of an Oxford MBA thesis in 2014, was one of the first platforms to treat it as infrastructure: a white-label product that banks and lenders could plug into any merchant, in any country, without rebuilding their own stack. By 2022 the business had raised around $50 million from investors including American Express and Sony, operated in 10 markets, and counted Mastercard, BMW and HSBC among its clients. In 2024 it became part of NatWest. That operator experience is the spine of everything he now teaches. After Divido, HSBC made him their first Entrepreneur in Residence, an unusual role that put a founder inside one of the world’s largest banks to challenge how it builds, buys and partners on new technology. It is also the reporting line behind his Wiley book “Transactional to Transformational: How Banks Innovate”, a collection of case studies drawn from named executives at Bank of America, BBVA, Citi, Deutsche Bank, ING, J.P. Morgan, Lloyds, Santander, Standard Chartered and others. The thesis is unsentimental: incumbents can innovate, but only when the operating model, not the PR team, gets redesigned. He has since moved to New York, co-founded the sustainable finance platform Credential, and continued to write for Forbes on fintech. Earlier in his career he launched Glassdoor in Europe for Rich Barton and ran digital product at The Times and The Sunday Times, which gives him a media-trained way of explaining complex regulated products to non-specialist audiences. What senior audiences get is someone who has raised the money, signed the bank partnerships, lived with the compliance questions and then written the book. He is particularly sharp on where AI, digital assets and embedded finance are about to collide inside balance-sheet businesses, and on the specific question of what serious incumbents should do about it. Key speaking topics Fintech and the future of banking Open banking as commercial strategy Digital assets and tokenisation Agentic AI and agentic commerce Buy Now Pay Later and embedded finance Innovation inside regulated industries Scaling a venture from founder to exit Ideal for Bank and insurance executive committees, innovation boards and retail banking leadership CDOs, CIOs and heads of innovation in financial services and large regulated enterprises Fintech, payments and retail finance conferences Corporate venture and M&A teams assessing fintech partnerships or acquisitions Audience outcomes A clear read on how incumbent banks are actually innovating right now, drawn from named case studies rather than consulting templates. Practical judgement on when to build, when to partner with a startup, and when to acquire. A working view of where open banking, digital assets and agentic commerce are converging into the next retail financial product. Founder-level honesty about what it takes to sell into, partner with and exit to a large bank.

Why organisations work with Collin Croome Operator experience running from Apple in 1991 through agentic AI, which means a roadmap gets tested against what has shipped rather than against a vendor deck. Agency ownership rather than commentary: he ran coma2 e-branding for more than 20 years, with offices in Munich and New York, delivering 800 plus digital projects for Audi, Hugo Boss, Microsoft, Siemens and Deutsche Telekom. Live demonstrations of current AI systems on stage, so a leadership audience sees what the technology does instead of hearing it described. Author of Praxisbuch Metaverse and 30 Minuten Metaverse (GABAL Verlag), Certified Professional Speaker with the German Speakers Association, and a recurring on-air digital expert for ProSiebenSat.1 and RTL. Bilingual delivery in English and German, which matters for DACH leadership groups briefing a mixed international room. Biography highlights Independent marketing consultant and multimedia evangelist to Apple, 1991 to 2001, presenting on Apple’s stands at CeBIT and MacWorld Expo. Co-developer of the first German Apple multimedia seminar in 1992, and author of two internal Apple white papers on multimedia and marketing. Co-founder and owner of coma2 e-branding for more than 20 years, with offices in Munich and New York. 800 plus digital projects for Audi, Hugo Boss, Microsoft, Siemens, Deutsche Telekom, TUI, Nespresso, KPMG and Triumph. Author of Praxisbuch Metaverse (GABAL Verlag, 2023) and 30 Minuten Metaverse (GABAL Verlag, 2022). Certified Professional Speaker and Professional Member of the German Speakers Association, and a recurring digital expert on ProSiebenSat.1 and RTL. Biography A job application arrived at Apple’s Munich office in 1991 on a floppy disk. It held a HyperCard multimedia presentation built by a nineteen-year-old with no formal training, in a field that barely had a name yet. Apple gave him the work: several talks a day on the Apple stand at CeBIT, explaining what multimedia was. Collin Croome stayed with Apple as an independent consultant until 2001, running trainings and co-developing the first German Apple multimedia seminar in 1992. He co-founded coma2 e-branding in the mid-1990s and ran it for more than 20 years, from Munich and from a New York office. The agency delivered more than 800 projects for Audi, Hugo Boss, Microsoft, Siemens, Deutsche Telekom, Nespresso, TUI and KPMG, covering the arc from early corporate websites through e-commerce to immersive formats. His keynote work now sits on generative AI, agentic AI, and what artificial general intelligence would mean for organisations. The distinction he draws for boards is between systems that answer and systems that act. An agent that plans a workflow and then executes it changes what delegation means inside an organisation, and he runs those systems live on stage rather than describing them. He speaks in English and German, has written two books on the metaverse for GABAL Verlag, holds Certified Professional Speaker status with the German Speakers Association, and appears as a recurring digital expert on ProSiebenSat.1 and RTL. Key speaking topics Generative AI in the enterprise Agentic AI and autonomous AI agents Artificial general intelligence and superintelligence AI and the future of work Digital transformation and technology adoption Physical AI and robotics Ideal for CEOs and executive boards setting AI investment priorities for the next planning cycle. CHROs and people leaders redesigning roles around agentic AI. CMOs and customer experience leads, where his agency background supplies brand-side reference points. DACH leadership groups needing a keynote in German or English. Audience outcomes The working distinction between generative AI, agentic AI, AGI and superintelligence, with examples of where each currently sits. A view of what agentic systems can already execute without supervision, demonstrated live rather than described. Named examples from three decades of digital shifts, for judging which technology claims hold and which do not. Sharper questions to put to internal teams and vendors on AI roadmaps.

Why organisations work with David Rowan He runs the climate-tech and health-tech investment funds at Voyagers and has personally backed more than 180 early-stage tech companies. The view he brings to a board is from active deal flow, not from a research summary. Nine years editing WIRED UK gave him direct working relationships with the founders of WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Google, Spotify, Didi, Xiaomi and Nest while those companies were still being built. He reports on the frontier from inside the rooms where it is designed. His Penguin bestseller Non-Bullshit Innovation came out of a 20-country investigation into what real corporate innovation looks like once the theatre of accelerators and chief disruptive growth officers is stripped away. Boards get a tested set of strategies, not a list of trends. Every talk is researched and built around the sector in the room. Recent briefs include aviation (SITA), banking, insurance, legal services, shipping, gaming, real estate, luxury fashion and television. He converts frontier technology into the decisions a CEO has to take this quarter. Repeat clients include Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Google, Sky, Salesforce and Warner Bros. He has also keynoted for Temasek, Mercer in Hong Kong, Marubeni and Bank of America’s Asia-Pacific Conference. Biography highlights Founding Editor-in-Chief of WIRED UK, 2008-17 Author of Non-Bullshit Innovation (Penguin); Amazon #1 business bestseller; Financial Times Business Books of the Month; translated into Japanese, Korean, Russian and Ukrainian More than 900 keynotes globally; event moderator for the World Economic Forum, the UK and French governments, the G8 Innovation Conference, the Royal Academy of Engineering, TED, the Web Summit main stage, Buckingham Palace, GITEX Global in Dubai and the AI Summit at GITEX Türkiye Technology columnist for The Times, GQ, Condé Nast Traveller and The Sunday Times Investor in 180+ early-stage tech companies; the named billion-dollar businesses include Grammarly, Improbable, Maven Clinic, Cerebral, Commure, Rebellion Defense, Kitopi and Onfido Founder of Voyagers; manager of its climate-tech and health-tech investment funds; adviser to Lakestar Biography The length of task an AI agent can autonomously complete is doubling every seven months. Autonomous robots are already running factory shifts. Most boards are setting strategy from briefings that pre-date both. David Rowan’s working life sits inside the gap between those two realities. As founding Editor-in-Chief of WIRED UK, he built working relationships with the founders of WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Google, Spotify, Didi, Xiaomi and Nest while those companies were still scaling. He has since backed more than 180 early-stage tech companies. Among those that became billion-dollar businesses are Grammarly, Improbable, Maven Clinic, Cerebral, Commure, Rebellion Defense, Kitopi and Onfido. He now runs the Voyagers climate-tech and health-tech investment funds. His Penguin bestseller Non-Bullshit Innovation came out of a 20-country investigation into how incumbent businesses actually generate new value, once the theatre of accelerators and chief disruptive growth officers is set aside. The book was named a Financial Times Business Book of the Month and translated into Japanese, Korean, Russian and Ukrainian. Its argument is that genuine innovation is a discipline with specific, testable strategies. His next book is on culture as the differentiating asset for organisations in an era when AI risks commodifying everything else. Repeat clients include Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Google, Sky, Salesforce and Warner Bros. He moderates for the World Economic Forum, the UK and French governments, the G8 Innovation Conference and the Royal Academy of Engineering. His stated KPI for a keynote: leave the audience 91% excited about the future, and 9% afraid. Key speaking topics AI strategy for established businesses Exponential technology and industry disruption Innovation as a managed discipline inside incumbent organisations The future of work in the age of AI agents Culture and talent strategy under AI commodification Sector-specific technology foresight Ideal for CEOs and boards setting AI strategy for established businesses CHROs and Chief People Officers reshaping talent strategy as AI changes the shape of work Chief Innovation, Digital and Strategy leaders translating frontier technology into operating decisions Senior leadership teams in sectors facing acute technology disruption: finance, real estate, aviation, media, healthcare, insurance, automotive, legal services and gaming Audience outcomes A clearer separation of what is genuinely real at the AI frontier from what remains hype A practical triage of technology decisions: what to fund this quarter, what to pilot, what to ignore The 17 strategies from Non-Bullshit Innovation, applied to the audience’s own sector A sector-specific reading of what AI agents are likely to do to operating models and headcount over the next 24 months

Why organisations work with Elemi Atigolo He has put a generative AI product through UK financial regulation. Finley AI worked with the FCA Advice Unit on guidance models before evolving into an agentic financial AI agent that institutions integrate by API, which gives him a reference point on supervision and compliance that few AI speakers hold. He has handled the work he now advises on. A wealth manager at HSBC and a partner at St. James’s Place before he co-founded City Wharf Private Wealth, he has dealt with client suitability and adviser workflow first-hand. His thinking is on the record. His 2026 paper on the Agentic Profit Paradox sets out how agentic AI can improve client outcomes while weakening the human-bounded revenue that funds a firm’s margins, which reframes AI from an efficiency question into a question about the business model itself. He works at executive level, not only with technology teams. At Consult Venture Partners he advises boards on where generative and agentic AI changes the operating model and the economics, a conversation that needs someone who has carried both commercial and regulatory responsibility. Biography highlights Managing Partner and co-founder of Consult Venture Partners, advising boards on generative and agentic AI adoption. Founder of the Autonomy Economics framework and author of the 2026 paper “The Agentic Profit Paradox and the Reorganisation of Value Capture”. Co-founder of INATIGO (WealthTech100 2024, selected by FinTech Global from 1,300 companies) and lead developer of Finley AI, now an agentic financial AI agent delivered by API, which engaged the FCA Advice Unit on guidance models. Former HSBC Wealth Manager and former partner at St. James’s Place; co-founder of City Wharf Private Wealth, Highly Commended for Most Innovative Wealth Management Model at the 2021 WealthBriefing European Awards. Member of the Forbes Advisor Advisory Board (since October 2024) and the MIT Technology Review Global Insights Panel; named in the Powerlist Top 30 Tech Titans 2021 for Fintech and Data (Refinitiv/LSEG) and a UK FinTech Awards “Innovator of the Year” finalist. Contributor to FT Adviser and The Banker; featured by The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, BBC, CNBC Africa, IBM, and Wealth Adviser; speaker at an Economist Impact summit (2023). Holds a BSc in Computer Science and Distributed Information Systems and an MA in Accounting and Finance. Biography Finley AI went through the UK Financial Conduct Authority’s Advice Unit before most banks had written an AI policy. Built by INATIGO, the company Atigolo co-founded, it began in 2019 as a conversational assistant. It now runs as an agentic financial AI agent that institutions integrate by API. That history anchors his work, at the point where AI in finance meets supervision and the realities of client suitability. His route into AI is unusual. He managed client portfolios at HSBC, became a partner at St. James’s Place, and co-founded City Wharf Private Wealth, a digital wealth firm recognised at the 2021 WealthBriefing European Awards. He has sat on both sides of the client relationship and the technology that now reshapes it. His current research turns that experience into an argument. In a 2026 paper he set out the Agentic Profit Paradox: firms adopt agentic AI to stay competitive, and in doing so erode the human-bounded revenue that produced their margins. He calls the wider field Autonomy Economics, the study of how value capture and commercial defensibility shift once work no longer needs continuous human direction. For a board, the question is rarely what AI can do, and almost always what to build, what to buy, what to govern, and what it does to the business model. Through Consult Venture Partners, where he is Managing Partner, Atigolo answers it as someone who has both written the models and signed the client suitability forms. Key speaking topics Generative AI in financial services AI agents and conversational interfaces in wealth management AI, regulation, and the FCA AI product strategy for regulated firms Client experience and adviser workflow in an AI-enabled firm Fintech innovation and WealthTech AI adoption for finance leaders Ideal for CEOs, COOs, and boards in banking, wealth, asset management, insurance, and private capital setting AI strategy Chief Technology, Data, and AI Officers scoping generative and agentic AI deployment in regulated environments Heads of Advice, Distribution, and Client Experience reworking the adviser-client model Compliance, risk, and regulatory leads assessing AI governance, and executives weighing what autonomous systems do to margins and operating models Audience outcomes A clear view of where generative and agentic AI is already viable in regulated financial services, and where it is not A working vocabulary for AI agents, conversational interfaces, and the governance questions behind them A sharper read on what the FCA and comparable regulators expect when AI touches client guidance A realistic picture of what changes for advisers, clients, and operating models when AI moves from pilot to live A view of how agentic AI can strengthen client outcomes while undermining the revenue that historically funded them, and what that means for strategy

Why organisations work with Karl Lillrud He is inside the problem he speaks about. He is a keynote speaker for and advisor to Volvo Cars on data, analytics, and AI, work that runs across AI readiness, governance, business cases, and production readiness. His work connects AI directly to revenue mechanics: pricing, conversion, retention, and customer acquisition, the parts of the P&L the C-suite is actually accountable for. Nine published books, including “You, Me and AI” and “AI, Your Second Brain: Evolve or Go Extinct”, give leadership teams a shared language for the second-order effects of AI on work, governance, and customer trust, beyond the productivity headlines. He sits on the Harvard Business Review Advisory Council, and Thinkers360 placed him in its 2026 Top 50 on artificial intelligence, digital twins, and AR/VR. The same pairing of keynotes and advisory work runs through Spotify, SEB, Klarna, and H&M, including subscriber growth and pricing at Spotify and fixed income and commodities at SEB. Biography highlights Keynote speaker for and advisor to Volvo Cars on data, analytics, and AI. Keynote speaker for and advisor to Spotify, SEB, Klarna, and H&M, and worked with Swedbank to June 2026 on its financial crime and sanctions screening platforms. Founder of Pricelizer, a Swedish e-commerce startup named to CNBC’s 20 hottest startups list in 2015, and of PodManager AI, an AI-driven podcast production platform. Author of nine books, including “You, Me and AI” and “AI, Your Second Brain: Evolve or Go Extinct”. Member of the Harvard Business Review Advisory Council since August 2024, and a two-time TEDx speaker. Ranked 16th in Global Gurus’ 2026 Top 30 Motivational Speakers list, and listed by Thinkers360 in its 2026 Top 50 on artificial intelligence (48), digital twins (8), and AR/VR (18). Biography Volvo Cars brings Karl Lillrud in on two fronts, as a keynote speaker and as an advisor on data, analytics, and AI. The advisory brief runs across AI readiness, portfolio governance, business cases, and production readiness. Those are the decisions that settle whether an approved AI strategy survives contact with an operating business. He has done versions of the same work at Spotify, on subscriber growth and pricing, at SEB in fixed income, and at Swedbank on financial crime and sanctions platforms. He has been building digital businesses since the late nineties. Pricelizer, which he founded in 2013 to attack the abandoned-cart problem he kept hitting as an operator, landed on CNBC’s 20 hottest startups list in 2015. He also founded PodManager AI, an AI-driven podcast production platform. His books reflect the same instinct. “You, Me and AI” treats the technology across 54 chapters covering work, creativity, education, governance, and the human-machine boundary, rather than as a productivity story. “AI, Your Second Brain: Evolve or Go Extinct” focuses on how leaders and their teams should actually integrate the tools day to day. The two sit inside a catalogue of nine published books, written for people who have to make decisions. Global Gurus ranked him 16th in its 2026 Top 30 Motivational Speakers list. Thinkers360 placed him in its 2026 Top 50 on artificial intelligence, digital twins, and AR/VR. He joined the Harvard Business Review Advisory Council in August 2024. Key speaking topics Artificial intelligence and the C-suite agenda AI in retail and consumer experience Digital commerce and customer acquisition Innovation and business model reinvention Leadership in technology-driven organisations AI ethics and governance Future of work in the AI era Ideal for Boards and executive committees moving from AI strategy approval to execution. CEOs, CMOs, and chief digital or commerce officers in retail, telecoms, and consumer brands. Innovation, transformation, and AI leads inside large enterprises building the operating model for AI. Founder and growth-stage leadership teams using AI as a commercial wedge. Audience outcomes A sharper read on which AI use cases move commercial metrics and which are theatre. A vocabulary for discussing AI’s second-order effects on customers, employees, and brand trust at board level. Concrete reference points from operators who have shipped AI inside consumer-facing businesses. A clearer view of where leadership attention should sit next versus where it can wait. Confidence to challenge vendor narratives and refocus internal AI portfolios on revenue impact.

Why organisations work with Kate Ancketill Ten consecutive years delivering the headline trends keynote at the NRF Big Show in New York. Martine Reardon, NRF’s CMO and EVP of Content and Retail Strategy, attributes the repeat invitation to her audience feedback scores. An outside reference point for the argument a team is already having internally. A product director at EasyJet credited her material with helping move the business off three-year fixed budgets and roadmaps toward faster testing. Twenty-five years of client work at GDR Creative Intelligence with more than 100 brands, among them P&G, Tesco, Sephora, Microsoft, Google, Mastercard, Moët Hennessy, Lego, and the BBC, which is where her examples come from. A three to five year forecasting horizon, close enough for a board to commit budget against and argued from field research in Seoul, Dubai, Beijing, Tokyo, New York, London, and the Nordics. The 2025 Speaker Awards named her Best AI and Future Technology Speaker, and BizTech Magazine listed her among its top thirty IT influencers in 2024. Biography highlights Founder and, for twenty-five years, CEO of GDR Creative Intelligence, the London trends, foresight and strategy consultancy, which she has now closed to speak and advise full time. Ten consecutive years as trends keynote at the National Retail Federation Big Show in New York, and on the programme at NRF Big Show Europe in Paris in September 2026. Innovation partner to more than 100 brands, including P&G, Tesco, Sephora, Microsoft, Google, Samsung, Mastercard, Nestlé, L’Oréal, Richemont, Moët Hennessy, Lego, and the BBC. Keynotes delivered on five continents, to conference audiences of 3,000 and to leadership teams of ten. 2025 Speaker Awards, Best AI and Future Technology Speaker. BizTech Magazine Top 30 IT Influencers, 2024. Broadcast, podcast and print commentator on high street decline, consumer behaviour, sustainability in business, and machine learning and AI. Biography The trends keynote at the NRF Big Show in New York has gone to Kate Ancketill for ten consecutive years. Martine Reardon, NRF’s CMO and EVP of Content and Retail Strategy, attributes the repeat invitation to her audience feedback scores. She appeared at NRF Big Show Europe in Paris in September 2026. For twenty-five years she ran GDR Creative Intelligence, innovation partner to more than 100 brands, among them P&G, Tesco, Mastercard, Moët Hennessy and the BBC. The consultancy tracked consumer-facing innovation across physical and digital channels and turned it into commercial implications on a three to five year view. She has now closed GDR to speak and advise full time. The three to five year horizon does the commercial work. It is far enough out to change a format decision or a technology investment, and near enough that real examples already exist. Those examples come from field research in Seoul, Dubai, Beijing, Tokyo, New York, London, and the Nordics. The material tends to get used once the event is over. Her content was referenced repeatedly in Nationwide’s afternoon exercise on future ideas, and at SSP International people messaged on Teams after the webinar to carry on the conversation. Her most requested talk goes a step further and teaches the method itself, a practical toolkit for projecting three to five years ahead that she rebuilds for whichever sector is in the room. Key speaking topics Business futurism on a three to five year horizon Consumer-facing AI across retail, banking, travel and hospitality Organisational adoption of AI Practical forecasting method for business leaders The future of customer experience Gen Z and Generation Alpha as future customers The future of the high street and physical retail Sustainability and consumer brands Ideal for Conference organisers building an AI agenda for non-technical audiences Boards in consumer-facing businesses, across retail, hospitality, banking and travel, making three to five year capital and format decisions CMOs, CX directors and innovation leads who need an outside reference point for a case they are already making internally HR and people leaders upskilling teams on AI and developing the next generation of board members Audience outcomes Which retail and consumer innovations are worth acting on in the next three to five years, and which can wait Named examples of how global brands are already putting AI in front of customers A three to five year planning horizon they can take into a board or budget conversation Gen Z and Generation Alpha as commercial customers, with the buying behaviour that follows Ideas specific enough to start on the next working day, and an argument colleagues can repeat

Why organisations work with Kemal Apaydin He speaks from the builder’s seat. He is currently building an AI product that prices and anticipates risk for health insurers, so his read on where agentic AI works and where it breaks comes from shipping it. He connects the frontier to the decision that follows it. His sessions take a live example such as the open-source agent OpenClaw and turn it into the choice leaders actually face: how much autonomy to delegate, and where to keep a human. He has built at the edge of more than one technology cycle. Before AI he founded one of Turkey’s early blockchain communities, which gives him a pattern-level view of how emerging technology moves from hype to infrastructure. He treats privacy and human agency as design questions, not disclaimers. That framing is useful for organisations that want the upside of autonomous systems without signing away control of their data or their decisions. Biography highlights Founder of Alon Health, an AI product that uses wearable-device data to help health insurers assess and anticipate risk, based in Berlin. Alon Health went through Y Combinator. Founder of ARTI Innovation and a TEDx speaker (TEDxOZU, Özyeğin University). Founder of Blockfellow, an early blockchain community and co-working initiative in Turkey. Co-founder and CEO of Chain Networking, and co-founder of Shelly Sleep, a privacy-oriented sleep-diagnostic wristband. Studied at Bilkent University and completed executive study with Harvard Business School Online. Biography An open-source project called OpenClaw spread to tens of thousands of developers within days of launch, letting an AI agent read your messages and act across your accounts. That shift, from software that answers to software that acts, is what Kemal Apaydin works on. He builds in it rather than watching it. His company, Alon Health, applies the same idea inside insurance. It reads signals from wearable devices to help insurers anticipate risk and shape decisions about pricing and cover. Building it has given him a grounded read on where autonomous systems earn trust and where they lose it. This is not his first frontier. Before AI, he founded Blockfellow, an early blockchain community in Turkey, and ran education programmes that pulled hundreds of students from Istanbul universities into the field. The pattern across his work stays the same: get inside a technology while it is still forming, then figure out what it will mean once it settles. He can take a live system like OpenClaw and walk leaders through the question underneath it: how much of a purchase or a decision they will hand to software, and what they keep for a human. That conversation matters for any organisation weighing how far to let autonomy run. The harder one sits right behind it. When an agent acts on someone’s behalf and gets it wrong, who is accountable? Key speaking topics Autonomous and agentic AI Personal AI assistants Enterprise AI strategy and adoption Designing and deploying autonomous AI workflows AI governance, safety, and responsible autonomy Privacy and human agency in AI systems Applied AI in insurance and risk Ideal for Chief technology and chief information officers weighing where to deploy agentic AI and where to hold back Innovation and digital transformation leaders who want a builder’s read on personal AI, not a vendor pitch Strategy teams and boards mapping how autonomous systems change products and accountability Insurance and financial services leaders looking at AI-driven risk and the data questions it raises Audience outcomes They leave knowing what today’s AI agents can actually do, and what the demos leave out, drawn from systems already in use. A working test for deciding which tasks to hand to autonomous software and which to keep under human control. The governance and accountability questions to settle before an agent acts on the organisation’s behalf. A builder’s view of where agentic and personal AI are heading, and what it changes for their sector.

Why organisations work with Kieran Gilmurray He has shipped AI and intelligent automation programmes inside named enterprises including Rapid7, Mercer, and Pearson, with documented savings in the tens of millions. That track record sits behind every framework he presents. His three books on generative AI, agentic AI, and organisational digital transformation give boards a structured reference, not a hype reel. They are written for the executive who has to decide, not the engineer who has to build. He treats agentic AI as an operating model question. The conversation moves quickly from “what is an AI agent” to which decisions an agent should own, what governance the board needs to put around it, and how the workforce is redesigned in response. Seven LinkedIn Top Voice recognitions and Thinkers360 rankings in generative and agentic AI mean the audience is hearing from a voice already widely cited in their own feeds, which lifts the in-room credibility of the conversation. Biography highlights Author of Agentic AI: A Business Leader’s Guide to the Future of Work and Digital Labour, The A to Z of Generative AI, and The A-Z of Organizational Digital Transformation. CEO and Founder, Kieran Gilmurray and Company Limited. Chief AI Innovator, Technology Transformation Group. Seven-time LinkedIn Top Voice in AI and related categories. Listed by Thinkers360 in the Top 50 Generative AI and Top 100 Agentic AI thought leaders. MBA (1st Class Distinction, Entrepreneurship Award) and MSc in Computer Science, both Queen’s University Belfast. Biography The gap between AI ambition and AI in operation has become the defining management problem of the decade. Pilots prove the technology works. Boards then struggle to convert those pilots into structural advantage, and most leadership teams still lack a clear view of which decisions an AI agent should now own. This is the territory Kieran Gilmurray works in. As CEO of Kieran Gilmurray and Company Limited and Chief AI Innovator at the Technology Transformation Group, he advises boards and executive teams on moving generative and agentic AI from concept into operating reality. His work spans finance, HR, customer service, and the wider digital labour stack. The credibility behind the advice is operational. Programmes he has led inside Rapid7, Mercer, and Pearson are referenced across his bureau profiles with quantified outcomes in the tens of millions of pounds and dollars. His three books, including Agentic AI: A Business Leader’s Guide to the Future of Work and Digital Labour, give business leaders a structured way to think about agent design, governance, and workforce redesign without retreating into engineering language. Independent recognition reinforces the position. Kieran has been named a LinkedIn Top Voice seven times and ranks on Thinkers360 leaderboards for both generative AI and agentic AI. He holds an MBA with distinction from Queen’s University Belfast and an MSc in Computer Science from the same institution, a pairing that maps directly onto the audience he writes for: business leaders who need the technology to make commercial sense. Key speaking topics Agentic AI and digital labour Generative AI for business leaders AI strategy and operating model design Intelligent automation at enterprise scale Digital transformation in regulated industries AI governance and board-level oversight Future of work in the age of AI Ideal for Boards and executive committees moving from AI pilots to enterprise deployment CIOs, CTOs, CDOs, and Chief AI Officers designing operating models around generative and agentic AI CHROs and transformation leads redesigning roles and workflows as AI agents enter the workforce Industry conferences in financial services, professional services, technology, insurance, and the public sector Audience outcomes A working definition of agentic AI that distinguishes it from generative AI and earlier automation, with examples from named enterprises A board-level view of where AI agents are already producing operating savings and where they are still pilot theatre A practical map of governance questions a leadership team must answer before scaling AI agents across functions A clear framing of workforce redesign as AI shifts which decisions sit with humans and which sit with digital labour

Why organisations work with Mike Walsh He works on the operating-model question inside AI: who decides, on what data, with which machine systems, and what that does to org design. The Algorithmic Leader (Page Two, 2019) sets out ten principles for leading in the algorithmic age, built from his interviews with business leaders and AI researchers, and has been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Korean, German, Polish and Russian. His next book gives boards a reference point on hybrid human and machine workforces. Abundant Intelligence: How Digital Labor Will Rewrite the Rules of Business, written with Deloitte’s global AI leader Nitin Mittal, is published by Harvard Business Review Press on 12 January 2027. Through Tomorrow he advises CEOs and senior teams at multinationals including the BBC, HSBC, Philips, Fujifilm, Richemont, and Televisa. He publishes before he presents. The Harvard Business Review column and the HBR Press book mean a buyer can read the argument before booking it. Biography highlights CEO of Tomorrow, a global consultancy on designing companies for the 21st century. Co-author, with Deloitte’s global AI leader Nitin Mittal, of Abundant Intelligence: How Digital Labor Will Rewrite the Rules of Business, published by Harvard Business Review Press on 12 January 2027. Author of The Algorithmic Leader (Page Two, 2019), ten principles for the algorithmic age, translated into six languages, and of Futuretainment (Phaidon, 2009), winner of an Art Directors Club design award in New York. Regular Harvard Business Review columnist, with bylines in Inc., BusinessWeek, Forbes, and the Wall Street Journal, and author of the Substack briefing The Future Is Elsewhere. Creator of The Future Is Elsewhere, a series of short films on AI and emerging technology shot in Tokyo, Seoul, Istanbul, and Mexico City, and host of the Between Worlds podcast, 192 episodes between 2015 and 2025. Speaker at the NDTV World Summit 2026 in New Delhi and named visionary speaker across Cloudera’s EVOLVE26 conference series. Biography Boards now buy AI tools faster than they redesign the organisations using them. The Algorithmic Leader, published by Page Two in 2019, was an early attempt to put that mismatch into a framework senior leaders could use, with ten principles for working in an environment where machine systems share the decision load. The book has since been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Korean, German, Polish and Russian. The work sits inside a longer career arc. Tomorrow, the consultancy Walsh founded in Hong Kong, advises CEOs and executive teams of multinationals including the BBC, HSBC, Philips, Fujifilm, Richemont and Televisa on reinvention in the algorithmic age. Earlier roles include running Jupiter Research’s Australia and New Zealand business, where he relaunched the brand into the paid search and online classifieds market, and group strategy at News Limited, News Corporation’s Australian arm. Publishing has been the spine of the practice. Futuretainment, published by Phaidon in 2009, won an Art Directors Club design award in New York. The Dictionary of Dangerous Ideas followed in 2014. As a regular Harvard Business Review columnist, with bylines in Inc., BusinessWeek, Forbes and the Wall Street Journal, Walsh writes for the same audience he advises and speaks to. The next book sharpens the operating-model question. Abundant Intelligence: How Digital Labor Will Rewrite the Rules of Business, written with Deloitte’s global AI leader Nitin Mittal and published by Harvard Business Review Press on 12 January 2027, starts from an assumption built into the way most companies are run: that there is only so much expertise to go round, and that it is expensive. The argument is that AI agents change the price of thinking, and that the harder executive skill becomes deciding where to aim it. He took that argument to the NDTV World Summit in New Delhi in October 2026, where he put it that AI agents will come to outnumber people, and that India’s global capability centres and technical workforce place it early in the shift, and to Cloudera’s EVOLVE26 series. Key speaking topics Abundant intelligence and the economics of cheap cognition AI agents and digital labour Algorithmic leadership and decision-making Designing organisations for the 21st century Digital ethics in machine-led decisions The future of work in an AI-driven economy Strategic foresight for senior leaders Ideal for Boards and executive committees setting AI strategy beyond pilots CEOs, COOs and Chief Strategy Officers redesigning operating models Chief AI Officers, Chief Digital Officers and transformation leads Leadership and learning programmes preparing senior cohorts for AI-era decision-making Audience outcomes A clearer language for the leadership question inside AI investment, not just the technology question A framework, drawn from The Algorithmic Leader, for ten shifts in how senior teams decide and operate Named cases of how multinationals are restructuring around hybrid human-and-machine work A sharper view of which executive habits, hiring patterns and decision rights age badly in an AI-driven business A working definition of digital labour and what it changes for org design, talent and accountability