Brian Solis

Why organisations work with Brian Solis

• Operator and analyst in one seat. He runs ServiceNow’s global Innovation and Executive Briefing Centers while writing and researching, so the frameworks he presents are stress-tested on live enterprise engagements.
• Twenty-plus year track record naming shifts early. His “digital Darwinism” argument, developed across The End of Business as Usual, WTF and X, forecast customer-behaviour-led disruption before most boards were discussing it.
• Anthropological lens on AI and technology. He frames innovation around how customers and employees are actually behaving, not around the technology stack, which gives CX, marketing and transformation leaders usable material rather than vendor abstractions.
• Published thesis on the current executive question. Mindshift (Wiley, 2024) sets out how leaders move from reactive management to visionary direction in an AI-first operating environment, making him directly relevant to transformation and CEO agendas right now.
• Credible with both technology and customer experience audiences. His work is regularly cited across ServiceNow, Salesforce alumni networks, and customer-experience publications, which lets a single booking land with CIO, CMO and CXO communities.

Biography highlights

• Head of Global Innovation, ServiceNow, overseeing Innovation and Executive Briefing Centers in Silicon Valley, New York, London, Paris, Sydney and Singapore.
• Former Global Innovation Evangelist, Salesforce.
• Former Principal Analyst, Altimeter Group, covering digital transformation, customer experience and disruption.
• Author of eight business books including Mindshift (Wiley, 2024), Lifescale (Wiley, 2019), X: The Experience When Business Meets Design, What’s the Future of Business and The End of Business as Usual.
• Ranked in Thinkers360 Top 50 Metaverse Thought Leaders, 2023.
• Hosts the (r)evolution video series and the WTF podcast, with a combined following of more than 700,000 across social platforms.

Biography

Digital transformation has been oversold and under-delivered inside most large enterprises. Programmes launch, dashboards light up, and the underlying operating model stays the same. Brian Solis has been writing about this gap for two decades and now sits inside it, as Head of Global Innovation at ServiceNow, running Innovation and Executive Briefing Centers across Silicon Valley, New York, London, Paris, Sydney and Singapore.

His argument across eight books is consistent. Customer and employee behaviour shifts first, technology amplifies the shift, and organisations that treat innovation as a theatre of announcements get outrun by the ones that rewire how decisions are made. He captured this as “digital Darwinism” in The End of Business as Usual and sharpened it in X: The Experience When Business Meets Design and What’s the Future of Business.

Mindshift, published by Wiley in October 2024, reframes the same question for an AI-first environment. It is aimed at executives who need to move their teams from reactive management to a visionary posture, spot trends early and convert them into prioritised innovation bets. Before ServiceNow, Solis was Global Innovation Evangelist at Salesforce and, before that, Principal Analyst at Altimeter Group, where he built much of the public research base he still draws on.

He is one of the few voices in this space who operates at the intersection a senior buyer actually cares about: the analyst who names the shift, the author who frames it for a boardroom, and the operator responsible for making it real inside a global enterprise.

Key speaking topics

• Digital transformation and digital Darwinism
• AI-era leadership and the mindshift from reactive to visionary
• Innovation strategy and the future of the enterprise
• Customer experience and behavioural change
• Disruption and emerging technology trends
• The future of work and employee experience

Ideal for

• CEO, CIO, CDO and transformation leads responsible for enterprise-wide digital and AI strategy.
• CMO, Chief Customer Officer and CX leads rebuilding the customer model around new behaviour.
• Innovation, R&D and strategy leaders moving from proof-of-concept to operating-model change.
• Board and executive offsites framing the next three to five year technology and experience agenda.

Audience outcomes

• A sharper read on which behavioural and technology shifts are material for their sector right now.
• A working definition of the difference between innovation theatre and innovation that changes the operating model.
• Language to argue internally for a move from reactive programmes to a visionary, trend-led agenda.
• A framework from Mindshift for spotting, prioritising and acting on emerging opportunities in an AI-first environment.
• Specific cues for aligning customer experience, employee experience and technology investment around the same thesis.