Erica Dhawan
AI now drafts the email, summarises the meeting and proposes the decision before anyone has finished thinking. The danger for most organisations has flipped. Speed used to be the constraint. The new risk is moving fast on autopilot, quietly handing judgment to tools built only to assist it. What senior leaders want is for their people to keep thinking and deciding well as the tools accelerate.
Erica Dhawan helps organisations turn AI from a crutch into an edge, building the judgment, connection and human thinking that decide which teams win in an automated world.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Erica Dhawan
- Three named frameworks, each with a book behind it: Connectional Intelligence, Digital Body Language, and the Critical Thinking Intelligence argument in Use Your Brain, out from St Martin’s Press in January 2027.
- Thinkers50 ranked her among the world’s top management thinkers in 2025, having featured her in 2023 and 2021, and shortlisted her for its Digital Thinking Award in 2021. Real Leaders ranks her the number one female keynote speaker.
- Audiences leave with named tools they can run the next morning, including the Think Sandwich, the Friction Meeting, and a Decision Filter for what to automate and what to protect.
- The frameworks have been applied at the World Economic Forum, the US Army, Coca-Cola, FedEx, Goldman Sachs, Walmart and Cisco, across sector, hierarchy and culture.
Biography highlights
- Author of Use Your Brain: Think Deeper in a World on Autopilot, St Martin’s Press, January 2027, on protecting judgment as AI accelerates everyday work.
- Wall Street Journal bestselling author of Digital Body Language, published in nineteen territories, and co-author of Get Big Things Done: The Power of Connectional Intelligence with Saj-nicole Joni.
- Ranked by Thinkers50 among the world’s top management thinkers in 2025, previously featured in 2023 and 2021, shortlisted for its Digital Thinking Award in 2021, and named to its Best New Management Booklist in 2022.
- Ranked number one female keynote speaker by Real Leaders; TED talk on connection across distance has passed two million views.
- Writing has appeared in Harvard Business Review, Fortune, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and Fast Company.
- Founder and CEO of Cotential, with degrees from Wharton (BS), MIT Sloan (MBA) and Harvard Kennedy School (MPA).
Biography
Most organisations adopted AI faster than they built any habit of questioning it. When a tool can draft the document and summarise the meeting in seconds, approving the output becomes the default. Erica Dhawan argues that the real cost falls on capable people who quietly stop thinking for themselves.
Use Your Brain, out from St Martin’s Press in January 2027, is built for that problem. It hands teams three named rituals: a Think Sandwich that puts human judgment at both ends of any AI-assisted task, a Friction Meeting where one person is assigned to argue how the work is wrong, and a Decision Filter for what to automate, what to augment, and what stays human.
The argument sits on more than a decade of research into how people actually work together. Digital Body Language, a Wall Street Journal bestseller now licensed in nineteen territories, decoded the cues that replace tone and eye contact when teams work across screens. Thinkers50 gave it a place on its Best New Management Booklist in 2022 and shortlisted her for its Digital Thinking Award the year before. Her earlier book with Saj-nicole Joni, Get Big Things Done, introduced Connectional Intelligence.
Thinkers50 ranked her among the world’s top management thinkers in 2025, having featured her twice before, and Real Leaders has ranked her the number one female keynote speaker. She has briefed the World Economic Forum at Davos and the US Army, and worked with teams at Coca-Cola, FedEx, Goldman Sachs, Walmart and Cisco. Her November 2025 Fortune essay asked what happens to leadership when a generation grows up outsourcing its thinking.
Key speaking topics
- Use Your Brain: judgment and human thinking in the age of AI
- High-performing teams in the age of AI
- Connectional Intelligence and cross-silo collaboration
- Digital Body Language and hybrid communication
- Trust and engagement across distributed workforces
- Multigenerational and cross-cultural communication
- Connectional Intelligence for sales and client relationships
Ideal for
- CEOs and executive teams setting the tone for how AI is adopted across the organisation.
- CHROs and heads of culture building human capability alongside AI rollout.
- Learning and leadership development heads building judgment and collaboration at scale.
- Cross-functional and cross-geography teams that need to think and decide together, faster.
- Sales and client-facing leaders translating Connectional Intelligence into stronger customer relationships.
Audience outcomes
- A shared language for using AI as an amplifier of human judgment rather than a substitute for it.
- Practical tools for recognising cognitive autopilot and interrogating what AI hands you.
- The Four Laws of Digital Body Language for cutting ambiguity and building trust across distance, channel and generation.
- A clearer read on where speed without judgment is quietly costing the organisation in decision quality.
- A sharper understanding of how AI changes, but does not replace, the work of human connection.
Talks
Teams learn to catch the moment they start approving AI output instead of thinking, and leave with three rituals for putting judgment back around the machine.
Key takeaways:
- The Think Sandwich: human judgment opens and closes every AI-assisted task.
- The Friction Meeting: one person is assigned to argue how the work is wrong.
- The Decision Filter: what to automate, what to augment, and what stays human.
When two teams spend six months on the same problem without knowing the other exists, the fix is not better tools; this talk shows leaders how to surface the relationships and knowledge no system recorded.
Key takeaways:
- How to reach the tacit knowledge and relationship capital no AI system can retrieve.
- Where collaboration stalls between functions, regions and reporting lines, and how to unstick it.
- How to build trust across boundaries without adding meetings.
Every message now arrives polished, so this talk applies the four laws of digital body language to decode which signals still carry credibility and commitment.
Key takeaways:
- Which cues still signal care and effort now that polish is free.
- The four laws from Digital Body Language: value visibly, communicate carefully, collaborate confidently, trust totally.
- What gets automated, what gets drafted, and what has to come from a person.