Neil Sahota

Why organisations work with Neil Sahota

• He was an operator inside the IBM Watson Group when cognitive computing first met enterprise budgets, which gives him a deployment vocabulary most AI speakers lack.
• As co-founder of the UN’s AI for Good Initiative, he has helped scope and govern AI projects across the Sustainable Development Goals, giving boards a credible reference point on responsible deployment.
• His book “Own the A.I. Revolution,” named a Soundview Best Business Book of 2019 and published by McGraw Hill, sets out a buyer-side framework for AI investment that holds up in front of a commercial executive committee.
• He sits at the intersection of enterprise AI and capital allocation through Tech Coast Angels and advisory roles with Miramar and CerraCap, so he reads AI strategy through an investor lens as well as an engineer’s.
• As Chief Innovation Officer at UC Irvine’s Samueli School of Engineering, he keeps a continuous line into university research, which means his keynote content moves with the field, not behind it.

Biography highlights

• IBM Master Inventor and former World Wide Business Development Leader, IBM Watson Group
• United Nations Artificial Intelligence Advisor and co-founder of the UN’s AI for Good Initiative
• Chief Innovation Officer, Samueli School of Engineering, UC Irvine
• Author of “Own the A.I. Revolution” (McGraw Hill), Soundview Best Business Book of 2019
• Forbes contributor; featured in the Wall Street Journal, BBC, Wired, Fast Company and Business Insider
• CEO of ACSI Labs; member of Tech Coast Angels; advisor to Miramar Ventures and CerraCap Ventures
• Co-host of the “AI for All” podcast

Biography

Inside the IBM Watson Group, in the years between the Jeopardy! Grand Challenge and Watson’s first commercial healthcare deployments, a small group of business development leaders had to teach Fortune 500 buyers what cognitive computing was actually for. Neil Sahota was one of them. That experience, building enterprise AI cases when the category did not yet exist, is the foundation of everything he now offers a senior audience.

He carried that operator perspective into the United Nations as an AI Advisor and co-founder of the AI for Good Initiative, where the work shifted from selling AI capability to governing it. The Initiative now coordinates AI projects against the Sustainable Development Goals, and Sahota’s role gives him a working view of how AI behaves at scale, across jurisdictions, and under public scrutiny. Few keynote speakers in the AI category hold both an enterprise deployment credential and a multilateral governance seat.

His book “Own the A.I. Revolution,” published by McGraw Hill and named a Soundview Best Business Book of 2019, sets out an investment logic for AI that a commercial executive committee can actually use: where to play, how to assemble the team, how to evaluate vendors and partners. As Chief Innovation Officer at UC Irvine’s Samueli School of Engineering, and as a contributor to Forbes and a regular voice in the Wall Street Journal, BBC and Wired, he keeps that argument current as the technology and the regulatory perimeter both move.

The buyer test is simple. A leadership team that wants a serious conversation about turning AI ambition into operating advantage, with someone who has built it, governed it, and written the framework, gets one in the room.

Key speaking topics

• Enterprise AI strategy and deployment
• Responsible AI and governance
• Generative AI and the future of business
• AI for social impact and the UN Sustainable Development Goals
• Innovation, entrepreneurship and emerging technology
• The future of work in the age of AI

Ideal for

• Boards and executive committees setting AI investment priorities
• CIOs, CTOs and Chief AI Officers moving from pilot to production
• Heads of innovation and corporate venture leads scoping AI partnerships
• Public sector and multilateral audiences working on AI governance and public-good applications

Audience outcomes

• A clearer read on where AI investment produces commercial advantage and where it produces sunk cost
• A practical view of AI governance from someone who has helped shape it at the United Nations
• Specific reference cases drawn from IBM Watson-era enterprise deployments and current UN AI for Good projects
• A sharper internal language for AI strategy that a board, a finance committee and an engineering function can all use