Aric Dromi

Why organisations work with Aric Dromi

• Nine years as an in-house Futurologist at Volvo Cars gives him an operator’s view of how a global manufacturer actually absorbs autonomous, electric and connected technology, not a consultant’s slide on it.
• He works across the same problem from three angles, corporate strategy, government policy and civic infrastructure, which is unusual in technology foresight and useful when a brief touches more than one of them.
• Founder of TEMPUS.MOTU and advisory board member at NTT Innovation Institute and UNLEASH, with a network that spans telecoms, mobility, energy and the UN Sustainable Development Goals agenda.
• Pushes against deck-driven strategy. His stated rule, that any strategy worth executing should fit on a napkin, lands well with executives tired of frameworks that do not survive contact with the operating business.
• Comfortable in uncomfortable territory. He frames himself as a “professional troublemaker” and is booked for sessions where leadership wants their assumptions stress-tested, not validated.

Biography highlights

• Nine-year tenure as in-house Futurologist at Volvo Cars, advising on autonomous, electric and connected vehicle strategy.
• Founder of TEMPUS.MOTU, a strategic advisory and think tank serving corporate and public-sector clients.
• Advisory board, NTT Innovation Institute, the corporate research arm of NTT Group.
• Innovation Advisory Board, UNLEASH, the global innovation lab built around the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
• Earlier roles at Ericsson, Microsoft and Cellcom, where he was Chief Knowledge Officer.
• Author of The Intellectual Rage and The Prophet, plus further titles published under the pen name D.B. Solomon.

Biography

Volvo did not hire a futurologist for nine years to predict the next car. It hired one to help the leadership team work out what a car company even is once mobility becomes autonomous, electric and connected. That brief, sustained over almost a decade inside one of Europe’s most identifiable industrial brands, is the foundation of how Aric Dromi thinks.

He now runs TEMPUS.MOTU, a strategic advisory and think tank that takes the same posture into other sectors. The work spans corporate strategy, government policy and city-scale infrastructure, with engagements that have included clients such as Mastercard, Siemens, Volkswagen, Telefonica, the World Bank and the IFC, alongside government work in Kazakhstan and Moscow city.

His public positions reflect the same range. He sits on the advisory board of NTT Innovation Institute, the research arm of one of the world’s largest telecoms groups, and on the Innovation Advisory Board of UNLEASH, the global lab built around the UN Sustainable Development Goals. The point of those affiliations is not credentialing. It is access to the actual conversations where technology, capital and policy are being negotiated.

Dromi is direct about what he is for and what he is against. He calls himself a professional troublemaker, writes books that read more like critiques than playbooks, and tells executive audiences that any strategy worth doing should fit on a napkin. Leaders book him when they want their assumptions broken in a room where it still costs less than breaking them in the market.

Key speaking topics

• AI, automation and the future of work
• Autonomous and connected mobility
• Smart cities and urban infrastructure
• Data, privacy and digital governance
• Strategic foresight under exponential change
• Innovation strategy and corporate transformation
• Geopolitics of technology

Ideal for

• Boards and CEOs of industrial, mobility and energy businesses are confronting AI and automation as a strategy question, not an IT one.
• CSOs, CIOs and heads of innovation are responsible for translating foresight into operating decisions.
• Government and city leaders are working on smart-city, mobility and digital infrastructure programmes.
• Executive offsites and leadership summits where the brief is to break orthodoxies, not confirm them.

Audience outcomes

• A clearer view of how AI, automation and connected systems will reshape the audience’s specific industry, not technology in general.
• Sharper questions for the next strategy cycle, framed around capability, governance and societal licence to operate.
• A working sense of where corporate, policy and civic decisions intersect, and where leaders are exposed when they assume they do not.
• Confidence to retire foresight tools that no longer survive contact with the operating business.
• A direct, sometimes uncomfortable challenge to assumptions the leadership team has stopped questioning.