Alec Ross

Why organisations work with Alec Ross

• He has advised both a US Secretary of State and a global venture capital firm on the same question: where power is moving as technology, capital and national interest collide. Boards get a single read across all three.
• The Industries of the Future sold into 24 languages and remains a reference text for executive teams framing long-range technology strategy. That gives him a shared vocabulary with global leadership audiences before he opens his mouth.
• The Raging 2020s offers a specific thesis, not a survey: the social contract between government, business and citizens is broken, and companies that misread the rebalancing will lose licence to operate. Leaders leave with a framework for where regulatory and political risk is actually heading.
• He built and sat inside the first serious technology policy function at the State Department, then moved to the investor side at Amplo. He speaks to both the regulator’s logic and the cap table’s logic, which most commentators cannot.
• Named to Foreign Policy’s Top 100 Global Thinkers and awarded the State Department’s Distinguished Honor Award. Credentials buyers can cite when justifying the booking internally.

Biography highlights

• Senior Advisor for Innovation to US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, 2009 to 2013, in a role created specifically to modernise the practice of diplomacy.
• Author of two New York Times bestsellers: The Industries of the Future (Simon and Schuster, 2016) and The Raging 2020s (Henry Holt, 2021).
• Distinguished Professor at the Business School of the University of Bologna; previously Distinguished Senior Fellow at Johns Hopkins University and Senior Fellow at Columbia SIPA.
• Board Partner at Amplo, a global venture capital firm, with director roles across technology, finance, manufacturing, human capital and cybersecurity companies.
• Co-founder of One Economy, a nonprofit that expanded broadband access for low-income households before broadband policy was a political issue.
• Named to Foreign Policy magazine’s Top 100 Global Thinkers and holder of the US Department of State Distinguished Honor Award.

Biography

The Senior Advisor for Innovation job at the State Department did not exist before 2009. It was built for Alec Ross, who spent four years travelling to forty-one countries turning emerging technology into an instrument of US foreign policy under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. That mandate, sitting at the join between diplomacy, national security and the technology industry, is the lens he has brought to every role since.

The Industries of the Future, published in 2016, mapped the sectors he believed would reorganise the global economy over the following decade: robotics, genomics, the commercialisation of data, the weaponisation of code. It sold into 24 languages and became a fixture on executive reading lists. The Raging 2020s, published in 2021, moved the argument on. The question is no longer which technologies win. The question is whether the contract between governments, companies and citizens holds, and what companies do when it does not.

Ross now teaches at the University of Bologna Business School and sits as a Board Partner at the venture capital firm Amplo, with director seats across technology, finance, manufacturing and cybersecurity. He reads a regulatory brief the way a former diplomat does and a growth plan the way an investor does, and has held both jobs in earnest.

What that produces for a leadership audience is judgement on questions that sit above the CTO and below the board: where the geopolitical weather is turning, which regulatory frames are about to land, which technology bets will still make sense when the politics catches up. Foreign Policy named him to its Top 100 Global Thinkers for a reason specific to this moment. Very few commentators have worked the diplomatic side, the commercial side and the academic side of the same argument.

Key speaking topics

• Geopolitics of technology and the US to China contest
• The social contract between governments, companies and citizens
• Artificial intelligence, data and national competitiveness
• Cybersecurity as a board-level risk
• Regulation, antitrust and the future licence to operate
• Long-range industry disruption and capital allocation
• Innovation policy and the future of work

Ideal for

• Boards and executive committees setting multi-year technology and geopolitical strategy
• CEOs, CSOs and heads of government affairs briefing for regulatory inflection points
• Financial services, technology and industrial leadership teams exposed to US, EU and China policy divergence
• Conferences convening CEOs, policymakers and investors on the intersection of technology and state power

Audience outcomes

• A sharper read on where regulation, capital and public sentiment are pushing the next decade of technology strategy.
• A working framework for pricing political and geopolitical risk inside commercial decisions.
• Named examples of how governments, companies and citizens are renegotiating the social contract, and the implications for licence to operate.
• A clearer view of which technology sectors are concentrating power, and where corporate strategy has to adjust.
• An investor and policymaker’s dual perspective on the same question, translated for operators.