Mo Gawdat
Organisations are racing to deploy AI without an equivalent investment in the ethical or human frameworks needed to govern it. The competitive pressure to adopt is overriding the slower, harder work of deciding what values to encode into systems that will operate well beyond any individual leadership team’s tenure. The decisions being made now are difficult to reverse – and most boards do not yet have the reference points to make them well.
Mo Gawdat – former Chief Business Officer of Google [X] and author of the Sunday Times Business Book of the Year Scary Smart – helps organisations understand the ethical stakes of AI adoption from the perspective of someone who built these systems at the frontier, and equips leaders and their teams with the human frameworks needed to navigate what follows.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Mo Gawdat
- His central AI thesis – that these systems reflect the values humans encode into them, and that organisations still have a window to act – was published in 2021 and validated by the subsequent speed of AI deployment. Boards are not getting speculation; they are getting a forecast with a track record.
- Scary Smart gives senior leadership a specific accountability framework, not a risk briefing: the argument is that the question is not whether AI will be powerful, but what the organisation is actively doing to shape its values now.
- The Solve for Happy happiness model is a named, reproducible framework developed through the same engineering logic Gawdat applied throughout his technology career – not a wellbeing programme, but a systematic methodology for building psychological stability under pressure.
- He addresses the external disruption (AI’s structural impact on work and value) and the internal response (the human psychology of navigating it) as a single argument – which is why his sessions land differently in a strategy forum than a conventional AI speaker or a conventional wellbeing speaker would.
- Seven years inside Google [X] at the point when self-driving cars, Project Loon, and Google Life Sciences were being built and commercialised gives him a credibility baseline that no amount of research or commentary can replicate.
Biography highlights
- Former Chief Business Officer, Google [X] (2013-2018), overseeing commercial strategy for Google’s moonshot innovation division
- 30-year career in technology spanning IBM, NCR, Microsoft, and Google, including senior roles across emerging markets globally
- Author of Solve for Happy (Macmillan, 2017), Scary Smart (Macmillan, 2021), That Little Voice in Your Head (Macmillan, 2022), and Unstressable (2024, co-authored with psychologist Alice Law)
- Scary Smart named a Sunday Times Business Book of the Year (2021)
- Chief AI Officer at Flight Story, the digital marketing company co-founded by Steven Bartlett
- Founder of One Billion Happy, a global initiative to share structured approaches to happiness and wellbeing
- Host of Slo Mo, one of the leading mental health podcasts globally
Biography
When Scary Smart was published in 2021, its central argument read as speculative: AI would become superintelligent, its real danger lay not in the technology itself but in the values humans encode into it, and organisations still had a narrow window to shape the outcome. Within a year, the release of ChatGPT had reframed the argument as a warning that had arrived early. Mo Gawdat had been inside Google [X] when these systems were being built.
Gawdat joined Google in 2007 and served as Chief Business Officer of Google [X] from 2013, overseeing commercial strategy for the moonshot division behind self-driving cars, Project Loon, and Google Life Sciences. His seven years there gave him direct exposure to both the capability and the accountability gaps at the frontier of AI development. He left in 2018 and now serves as Chief AI Officer at Flight Story, the digital marketing company co-founded by Steven Bartlett.
The parallel body of work on happiness was not a departure from his technology career. It emerged from the same engineering mindset applied to personal crisis. Following the death of his son Ali in 2014, Gawdat developed the framework at the centre of Solve for Happy: a systematic, reproducible model for well-being grounded in cognitive science. The book became an international bestseller. His thesis is that the two bodies of work are not separate. An organisation that understands the human psychology of its people is better positioned to navigate the disruption AI will accelerate.
Unstressable, co-authored with psychologist Alice Law and published in 2024, extends that logic into a practical stress-management framework built around four human systems. He hosts Slo Mo, one of the leading mental health podcasts globally, and his earlier books – That Little Voice in Your Head (2022) and Scary Smart, a Sunday Times Business Book of the Year – continue to reach executive audiences grappling with AI governance and personal resilience across a 30-year technology career.
Key speaking topics
- AI ethics and governance
- Responsible AI adoption
- The human impact of AI disruption
- Happiness science and the engineering of well-being
- Stress management frameworks
- Technology leadership and strategic foresight
- Human values in AI development
Ideal for
- Boards and executive leadership teams making AI governance and adoption decisions
- Chief People Officers and Chief Technology Officers managing workforce responses to AI disruption
- Strategy, transformation, and future of work forums where AI risk and human resilience intersect
- Technology, financial services, and marketing organisations with significant and growing AI exposure
Audience outcomes
- A coherent framework for evaluating AI’s ethical and human risks, grounded in direct experience of building these systems rather than external commentary
- Clarity on what values organisations need to embed in AI systems now, and why the window to do so meaningfully is narrowing
- Practical tools from the Solve for Happy model for building psychological stability and resilience under conditions of sustained uncertainty
- A more calibrated understanding of the timeline and direction of AI development, distinct from both catastrophism and uncritical optimism
- Practical techniques from Unstressable for identifying and reducing sources of stress at individual and team level
Talks
An executive-level perspective on AI, innovation, and business leadership, drawing on Gawdat’s experience as former Chief Business Officer of Google [X], current Chief AI Officer of Flight Story, and author of Scary Smart.
Key takeaways:
- The risks of unregulated AI and their specific implications for organisations and society
- How organisations can take proactive, values-led steps in response to rapid AI development
- Strategic considerations for innovation leadership in an AI-driven landscape
A structured exploration of happiness and resilience based on the principles developed following the loss of his son and presented in Solve for Happy and That Little Voice in Your Head.
Key takeaways:
- A reproducible framework for understanding and improving personal and organisational well-being
- Practical approaches to resilience applicable across personal and professional contexts
- Tools for managing internal dialogue and building a more stable emotional baseline
An evidence-informed approach to reducing stress in personal and workplace settings, developed through the Slo Mo podcast and the Unstressable framework co-created with psychologist Alice Law.
Key takeaways:
- Practical tools for identifying and addressing the root sources of stress
- A four-system framework for predicting, preventing, and managing overwhelm
- Approaches applicable at individual, team, and organisational level