Julie Holmes

Why organisations work with Julie Holmes

• She has built and sold technology, not just studied it. Two innovation companies under her belt and products in over 60 countries give her keynotes the texture of an operator, not an analyst.
• The UPGRADE Framework gives audiences a seven-step structure they can apply on Monday morning, rather than a high-level provocation about AI’s importance.
• The AI Strategy Playbook, co-authored with Mary Kelly, addresses the gap most leadership teams admit privately: they do not yet have a written organisational AI strategy.
• PSA-UKI Hall of Fame status puts her among 33 speakers recognised for sustained craft on stage, useful when the brief is a high-stakes leadership audience.
• She lectures on innovation and AI at Yale, Birkbeck, and the American University of Beirut, which keeps the material tested against students and faculty as well as paying clients.

Biography highlights

• Hall of Fame Speaker, PSA-UKI, one of 33 to hold the honour
• Author of Little Big Bangs for Leaders and co-author of The AI Strategy Playbook with Mary Kelly, PhD
• Founder of two innovation companies with products distributed in over 60 countries
• Clients include Oracle, Expedia, American Express, JetBlue, Nestle, EY, VMware, US Bank, and LinkedIn
• Guest lecturer at Yale, Birkbeck (University of London), and the American University of Beirut
• Creator of the UPGRADE Framework for AI adoption inside teams

Biography

Less than one in five companies has a written AI policy, let alone a strategy. That gap is what Julie Holmes works inside. She helps boards and leadership teams move from scattered AI pilots to a documented playbook the rest of the organisation can actually use.

Her credibility comes from building, not commenting. Holmes founded two innovation companies and shipped products into more than 60 countries before the current AI cycle. That operator history shapes how she talks to senior audiences. The diagnosis is practical, the language is plain, and the deliverable is a structure leaders can apply.

The UPGRADE Framework, her seven-step approach to embedding AI in team workflows, anchors most of her keynotes. The AI Strategy Playbook, co-authored with Mary Kelly, extends the same logic to the strategy layer. Earlier work, Little Big Bangs for Leaders, set out her broader thesis on incremental innovation as a leadership discipline.

Holmes is a Hall of Fame Speaker with PSA-UKI, one of 33 to hold the honour, and a guest lecturer at Yale, Birkbeck, and the American University of Beirut. Brands including Oracle, Expedia, JetBlue, Nestle, EY, and LinkedIn have brought her in to do the same job: take AI off the slide deck and into the operating model.

Key speaking topics

• AI strategy and adoption
• Enterprise AI playbooks
• AI-empowered teams and workflows
• Innovation as a leadership discipline
• Sales and customer experience under AI
• Future of work and AI capability building

Ideal for

• CEOs, COOs, and CTOs setting an enterprise AI direction
• Heads of transformation and innovation responsible for AI deployment
• Sales and customer-experience leaders integrating AI into commercial workflows
• Boards seeking a credible operator perspective on AI strategy

Audience outcomes

• A working seven-step structure (UPGRADE) for embedding AI into team operations
• A clearer view of what an AI strategy playbook contains and how to draft one
• Concrete examples of where AI changes sales and customer experience, with named tools
• Language for talking to non-technical employees about AI capability without inducing fear
• A sharper sense of which AI use cases are worth piloting and which are noise