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
- She has a named thesis built for the AI moment. Use Your Brain, her forthcoming book, gives executive teams a method for the problem they now all face: moving fast with AI without sliding into cognitive autopilot. Her argument is that speed has become the commodity and judgment the real differentiator.
- She owns two further published frameworks, Connectional Intelligence and Digital Body Language, each with its own book, research base and Fortune 500 application record. Few speakers in this space operate from a body of work this specific.
- Thinkers50 recognition and a Wall Street Journal bestseller give her credibility with boards and executive committees that are sceptical of soft-skill keynotes.
- The work has been pressure-tested across unusually wide terrain: World Economic Forum, US Army, Coca-Cola, FedEx, Goldman Sachs, Walmart and Cisco. The frameworks travel across sector, hierarchy and culture.
Biography highlights
- Author of the forthcoming Use Your Brain: How to Think Deeper in a World on Autopilot, on rebuilding judgment as AI accelerates everyday work.
- Wall Street Journal bestselling author of Digital Body Language: How to Build Trust and Connection, No Matter the Distance.
- Co-author of Get Big Things Done: The Power of Connectional Intelligence with Saj-nicole Joni.
- Named to Thinkers50; shortlisted for the Thinkers50 RADAR award for emerging management thinkers.
- Founder and CEO of Cotential, advising global organisations on 21st-century collaboration.
- TED speaker; talk on connection across distance has surpassed 2 million views.
- Contributor to Harvard Business Review, Fast Company and the Wall Street Journal.
- Education: Wharton (BS), MIT Sloan (MBA), Harvard Kennedy School (MPA).
Biography
Most organisations are racing to adopt AI. Far fewer are asking what it is quietly doing to the way their people think. When a tool can draft, summarise and recommend in seconds, the path of least resistance is to accept the output and move on. The real risk of the AI era, Erica Dhawan argues, is that people stop thinking for themselves while the machine does it for them.
Her forthcoming book, Use Your Brain, is built for that problem. It gives leaders and teams a practical method for staying in the driver’s seat: catching the moment a team slips into cognitive autopilot, interrogating what AI hands them, and protecting the judgment no model can supply. The message lands because it is practical rather than alarmist. Speed is now the commodity, and judgment is the edge.
That argument sits on more than a decade of work on how people connect and perform. Her Wall Street Journal bestseller Digital Body Language decoded the cues that replace tone, posture and eye contact when teams work across distance, channel and generation. Her earlier book with Saj-nicole Joni, Get Big Things Done, introduced Connectional Intelligence, the practical capability to combine networks, knowledge and ambition into outsized results. Thinkers50 has recognised her on this body of work, and her writing appears regularly in Harvard Business Review and Fast Company.
The work has been stress-tested in unusually varied rooms. She has briefed the World Economic Forum, the US Army, and global teams at Coca-Cola, FedEx, Goldman Sachs, Walmart and Cisco. Her TED Talk on connection across distance has been watched more than two million times, rare reach for a topic most speakers struggle to make concrete.
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 (optional, reinstated)
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. (optional, reinstated)
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
AI can make every individual faster. On its own it cannot make a team smarter. This keynote pairs the judgment at the heart of Use Your Brain with the connection of Connectional Intelligence, giving teams a shared model for out-thinking the moment rather than just out-pacing it.
Key takeaways:
- Spot cognitive autopilot: catch the moment a team stops thinking and starts deferring to the tool.
- The judgment edge: why speed has become a commodity and judgment the real differentiator.
- The Four Laws of Digital Body Language: a practical model for trust, visibility and collaboration across distance and AI.
A working method for reading and writing the cues that now carry meaning across hybrid teams.
Key takeaways:
- How to decode tone, urgency and intent across email, chat and video.
- Practical rules for clear, trust-building communication across generations and cultures.
- A framework for diagnosing where hybrid miscommunication is costing the organisation.
How leaders combine networks, knowledge and ambition to drive breakthrough outcomes across silos.
Key takeaways:
- The five qualities of leaders who consistently get big things done in complex organisations.
- How to mobilise networks inside and outside the company toward a shared goal.
- Methods for accelerating innovation through purposeful, cross-silo collaboration.