Mike Walsh

Why organisations work with Mike Walsh

• He works on the operating-model question inside AI: who decides, on what data, with which machine systems, and what that does to org design.
• The Algorithmic Leader (Page Two, 2019) sets out ten principles for leading in the algorithmic age, built from his interviews with business leaders and AI researchers, and has been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Korean, German, Polish and Russian.
• His next book gives boards a reference point on hybrid human and machine workforces. Abundant Intelligence: How Digital Labor Will Rewrite the Rules of Business, written with Deloitte’s global AI leader Nitin Mittal, is published by Harvard Business Review Press on 12 January 2027.
• Through Tomorrow he advises CEOs and senior teams at multinationals including the BBC, HSBC, Philips, Fujifilm, Richemont, and Televisa.
• He publishes before he presents. The Harvard Business Review column and the HBR Press book mean a buyer can read the argument before booking it.

Biography highlights

• CEO of Tomorrow, a global consultancy on designing companies for the 21st century.
• Co-author, with Deloitte’s global AI leader Nitin Mittal, of Abundant Intelligence: How Digital Labor Will Rewrite the Rules of Business, published by Harvard Business Review Press on 12 January 2027.
• Author of The Algorithmic Leader (Page Two, 2019), ten principles for the algorithmic age, translated into six languages, and of Futuretainment (Phaidon, 2009), winner of an Art Directors Club design award in New York.
• Regular Harvard Business Review columnist, with bylines in Inc., BusinessWeek, Forbes, and the Wall Street Journal, and author of the Substack briefing The Future Is Elsewhere.
• Creator of The Future Is Elsewhere, a series of short films on AI and emerging technology shot in Tokyo, Seoul, Istanbul, and Mexico City, and host of the Between Worlds podcast, 192 episodes between 2015 and 2025.
• Speaker at the NDTV World Summit 2026 in New Delhi and named visionary speaker across Cloudera’s EVOLVE26 conference series.

Biography

Boards now buy AI tools faster than they redesign the organisations using them. The Algorithmic Leader, published by Page Two in 2019, was an early attempt to put that mismatch into a framework senior leaders could use, with ten principles for working in an environment where machine systems share the decision load. The book has since been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Korean, German, Polish and Russian.

The work sits inside a longer career arc. Tomorrow, the consultancy Walsh founded in Hong Kong, advises CEOs and executive teams of multinationals including the BBC, HSBC, Philips, Fujifilm, Richemont and Televisa on reinvention in the algorithmic age. Earlier roles include running Jupiter Research’s Australia and New Zealand business, where he relaunched the brand into the paid search and online classifieds market, and group strategy at News Limited, News Corporation’s Australian arm.

Publishing has been the spine of the practice. Futuretainment, published by Phaidon in 2009, won an Art Directors Club design award in New York. The Dictionary of Dangerous Ideas followed in 2014. As a regular Harvard Business Review columnist, with bylines in Inc., BusinessWeek, Forbes and the Wall Street Journal, Walsh writes for the same audience he advises and speaks to.

The next book sharpens the operating-model question. Abundant Intelligence: How Digital Labor Will Rewrite the Rules of Business, written with Deloitte’s global AI leader Nitin Mittal and published by Harvard Business Review Press on 12 January 2027, starts from an assumption built into the way most companies are run: that there is only so much expertise to go round, and that it is expensive. The argument is that AI agents change the price of thinking, and that the harder executive skill becomes deciding where to aim it. He took that argument to the NDTV World Summit in New Delhi in October 2026, where he put it that AI agents will come to outnumber people, and that India’s global capability centres and technical workforce place it early in the shift, and to Cloudera’s EVOLVE26 series.

Key speaking topics

• Abundant intelligence and the economics of cheap cognition
• AI agents and digital labour
• Algorithmic leadership and decision-making
• Designing organisations for the 21st century
• Digital ethics in machine-led decisions
• The future of work in an AI-driven economy
• Strategic foresight for senior leaders

Ideal for

• Boards and executive committees setting AI strategy beyond pilots
• CEOs, COOs and Chief Strategy Officers redesigning operating models
• Chief AI Officers, Chief Digital Officers and transformation leads
• Leadership and learning programmes preparing senior cohorts for AI-era decision-making

Audience outcomes

• A clearer language for the leadership question inside AI investment, not just the technology question
• A framework, drawn from The Algorithmic Leader, for ten shifts in how senior teams decide and operate
• Named cases of how multinationals are restructuring around hybrid human-and-machine work
• A sharper view of which executive habits, hiring patterns and decision rights age badly in an AI-driven business
• A working definition of digital labour and what it changes for org design, talent and accountability