Abigail Posner

Why organisations work with Abigail Posner

• Holds a rare combination of credentials in cultural anthropology (Harvard, magna cum laude), creative strategy (Publicis New York, DDB New York), and senior technology leadership (13 years at Google). Few speakers can address AI and human creativity from inside all three worlds.
• Pioneered Humanizing Digital at Google, an anthropology-led research programme exploring the emotional relationship between people and technology. Her frameworks come from original fieldwork conducted inside Google.
• Led AI integration and a cultural transformation programme for 4,000+ Google sales professionals. Speaks from direct experience about what works and what fails inside one of the most AI-fluent companies in the world.
• Provides concrete methodologies, the Expansiveness Edge framework and the Human Code approach, that teams can apply immediately to specific business problems.

Biography highlights

• Former Director, U.S. Creative Works at Google; thirteen years at the company
• Pioneered Humanizing Digital, Google’s anthropology-led thought leadership series on the emotional relationship between people and technology
• Founder of Human Code Company; host of the Human Code podcast
• Magna cum laude graduate of Harvard University in social anthropology
• Contributor to The Economist, The New York Times, Business Insider, CNBC, Forbes, and Fast Company; ongoing columnist for The Drum
• Recipient of the United Nations Media Impact Award

Biography

Google spent more than a decade trying to understand the emotional logic behind why people engage with digital content. The Humanizing Digital research programme came out of that effort, an anthropology-led series Abigail Posner pioneered while at the company.

The route there was unusual. Posner is a magna cum laude graduate in social anthropology from Harvard who spent years in brand strategy at Publicis New York and DDB New York. As Director of U.S. Creative Works at Google, she led creative strategy for YouTube’s largest global advertisers and ran a cultural transformation programme for over 4,000 sales professionals.

Posner now leads Human Code Company, the consultancy she founded after leaving Google. Her Expansiveness Edge and Human Code frameworks address the question every leader is asking: what do my people uniquely contribute when every competitor has the same AI tools. Both frameworks come from years of anthropological fieldwork done inside Google.

Her writing appears in The Economist, The New York Times, Business Insider, CNBC, Forbes, and Fast Company; she is an ongoing columnist for The Drum. The United Nations awarded her its Media Impact Award for the work.

Key speaking topics

• Human creativity in the AI age
• The Expansiveness Edge framework
• AI as a creative amplifier
• Cultural anthropology applied to business
• The future of work in an AI economy

Ideal for

• CMOs, brand and marketing leaders working out how AI changes their craft
• Chief Innovation Officers and senior creative leaders inside marketing, product, or innovation teams
• CHROs and learning leaders building creative capacity across the workforce
• Senior leadership teams setting an organisation-wide position on what humans do and what AI does

Audience outcomes

• A named framework, the Expansiveness Edge, for combining different disciplines and perspectives within an individual to produce ideas competitors cannot replicate
• A working answer to where human judgement still beats AI in their function, and which work to defend against automation
• Specific exercises they can run inside their own teams to activate creative thinking on demand
• A reframe of AI as an amplifier of human ingenuity, with concrete ways to deploy it that way