Mark Esposito

Why organisations work with Mark Esposito

• He brings a named foresight framework, DRIVE, that gives leadership teams a shared vocabulary for the five megatrends shaping their markets, rather than a generic “future of” briefing.
• His positions sit on both sides of the AI conversation. He advises the World Economic Forum’s Global AI Alliance on policy while working as Chief Economist at micro1, a Silicon Valley AI lab, so the board hears how regulation and deployment actually meet.
• He has built the institutional access most academic speakers cannot. Harvard Kennedy School, Northeastern, Cambridge Judge, Georgetown, and government advisory roles across the GCC and Eurasia.
• The work is current and published. Fourteen books, two Amazon bestsellers, The Great Remobilization with MIT Press, and forthcoming titles with Routledge and Penguin Random House give a senior buyer a reading list to brief their team from.

Biography highlights

• Professor of Strategy and Technology Policy at Northeastern University’s D’Amore-McKim School of Business, with Harvard affiliations at the Kennedy School’s Center for International Development, the Institute for Quantitative Social Science, and Harvard Law School’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society
• Chief Economist at micro1, a Silicon Valley AI lab, and co-founder of Nexus FrontierTech, the AI Native Foundation, the Circular Economy Alliance, and The Chart ThinkTank
• Co-developer of the DRIVE megatrends framework with Terence Tse
• Author or co-author of 14 books and over 150 publications, including two Amazon bestsellers, plus The Great Remobilization (MIT Press, 2023) and Digitizing the Emerging Economies (Cambridge University Press, 2024)
• Named to the Thinkers50 Radar of 30 thinkers most likely to shape the future; recognised by MIT Technology Review and Thinkers360 for AI influence
• Member of the World Economic Forum’s Global AI Alliance and policy advisor to governments across the GCC and Eurasia

Biography

The hard part of governing AI is not writing the principles. It is keeping a strategy coherent while the technology, the regulation, and the workforce implications all change inside the same planning cycle. That is the gap Mark Esposito’s work has occupied for the past decade, first through strategic foresight, now through applied AI policy and deployment.

The intellectual anchor is DRIVE, the megatrends framework he developed with Terence Tse and laid out in Understanding How the Future Unfolds. DRIVE gives leadership teams five named forces, from demographic change through enterprising dynamics, that organise the noise of long-range planning into something a board can actually use. The framework underpins his teaching as Professor of Strategy and Technology Policy at Northeastern University, and his research affiliations at Harvard Kennedy School, the Institute for Quantitative Social Science, and the Berkman Klein Center.

He pairs that academic base with an operator’s vantage point. As Chief Economist at micro1, a Silicon Valley AI lab, he works inside the commercial reality of building and deploying AI at scale. The AI Native Foundation, which he co-founded, extends that into capability building for institutions trying to become genuinely AI-native rather than AI-curious. His seat on the World Economic Forum’s Global AI Alliance connects both sides to the policy conversation.

The body of work is now substantial. Fourteen books and over 150 publications, two Amazon bestsellers, The Great Remobilization with MIT Press, and forthcoming titles with Routledge and Penguin Random House. Thinkers50 named him to its Radar of thinkers most likely to shape the future; MIT Technology Review and Thinkers360 have recognised his AI influence. For boards trying to make defensible decisions on AI while the ground moves under them, that combination of foresight discipline, policy access, and a frontier-AI operating role is rare in a single voice.

Key speaking topics

• AI strategy and AI-native organisations
• Strategic foresight and megatrends
• The DRIVE framework
• AI policy and governance
• Fourth Industrial Revolution and emerging economies
• Circular economy and resource strategy
• Geopolitics of technology

Ideal for

• Boards and executive committees setting AI strategy and governance posture
• CSOs, transformation leads, and chief strategy officers running long-range planning under technological uncertainty
• Government and public sector leaders shaping AI policy and industrial strategy
• Senior leadership teams in emerging markets navigating the Fourth Industrial Revolution

Audience outcomes

• A shared, named vocabulary (DRIVE) for the five megatrends reshaping their sector
• A clearer view of where their AI agenda is running ahead of, or behind, their operating model
• Specific examples of how governments and large enterprises are translating AI policy into deployment
• A reading map across his published work for follow-up briefing inside the organisation