Paul Gibbons
AI Adoption Expert and Culture Change Thought Leader—Author of Adopting AI, Hailed as ‘The AI Book of the Year’
Hedge fund executive, Linus Caldwell, has called Paul’s new book, Adopting AI, “the AI book of the year.” He speaks to thousands of executives yearly helping them navigate the challenges of AI Adoption. Paul is the author of eight books, including the culture change best-seller, The Science of Organizational Change. In 2020, Global Gurus ranked Paul #3 in the world on culture transformation. Paul has spent 35 years helping clients navigate the human side of technology: as IBM’s top-ranked Talent thought-leader on the future of work, and digital transformation, helping CEOs and their teams navigate the human side of transformational change, teaching leadership and business ethics as a business school professor, and as the CEO of a culture change consulting firm.
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Paul Gibbons's 2025 biography
Meet Paul Gibbons
Paul is the author of Adopting AI, called the 2025 AI book of the year. “Few books so artfully blend the optimism of Kurzweil with the caution of Bostrom with the pragmatism of Mollick.” — (Linus Caldwell, Alphaverse Capital) He has a global reputation as a scholar on the human side of technology—leadership, culture, digital transformation, and talent. Technology adoption, says Paul, isn’t a technology problem, it is a human problem – even more so with artificial intelligence.
He has helped household names such as Microsoft, Comcast, Zappos, Shell, BP, HSBC, Barclays, PwC, KPMG, and Kaiser Permanente navigate their trickiest human capital challenges and has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, and The Financial Times.
Paul brings clients real solutions, not management myths and pseudoscience. He challenges leaders to go beyond orthodoxy, received wisdom, and feel-good statements such as “change is the only constant” or “embrace change”—inviting them to look deeply at their own leadership capabilities.
In the 2000s, Paul’s leadership consulting firm, Future Considerations, was ranked the top leadership boutique by Leadership Excellence magazine. In 2020, Paul polled at #3 in a ranking of the most influential speakers on organizational culture; in 2007, he was ranked the #2 CEO coach in the UK by CEO Magazine. In 2017, Paul was named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in the UK.
Paul has degrees Organizational Psychology, Philosophy, and Molecular Biology, and graduate study in Economics and Neuroscience. He has taught leadership, sociology, business ethics, and organizational change as an adjunct professor at several business schools in the US and UK.
Though European, Paul lives in Colorado with his two sons and competes at the highest level internationally at in bridge and poker.
Paul Gibbons's 2025 talks & topics
“Artificial Ignorance” or a “PhD in Your Pocket”?
How smart is AI? Some well-respected thinkers view AI as essentially stupid – a word-prediction game that makes a lot of mistakes.
On the other hand, scientists and researchers rave about its ability to generate novel hypotheses and insights. Businesses are investing trillions.
Whom to believe?
This 60-minute keynote arms leaders with the answers to that question and others such as:
- How close are we to AGI and Superintelligence?
- What are the seven best case utopian scenarios, and what are the seven scenarios when things go terribly wrong?
- What are we learning about human intelligence from studying machine intelligence?
- Is AI killing art, entertainment, and education?
- How dangerous is advanced AI, is it ever deceitful or deliberately harmful?
Utopia versus Dystopia: Doomers versus Accelerationists
“More profound than fire and electricity” said Sundar Pichai, fueling the start of the AI-hype cycle. But was he right? What, in the most optimistic circumstances could AI do for humankind. And what happened to the letter signed by 100 prominent scientists saying AI development should be paused until we better understand its existential risks?
In this sixty-minute keynote, Paul helps mid- and senior-level leaders make sense of those civilization-sized questions, then moves beyond to:
- What are the seven scenarios, best and worst case, for AI in the next decade?
- What are the five ethical issues that AI governance needs to address?
- How are leading companies organizing their governance functions?
- Why are companies struggling with adoption today?
- What makes AI adoption different than (say) Salesforce or SAP?
Adaptive Adoption and Agentic AI
CIO magazine says “playtime is over” for AI – time to focus on adoption and ROI. Technological change is blisteringly quick – new “chain of thought” models and multi-modal, and multi-model AI is with us.
But humans move more slowly – much more slowly. That makes human adaptation ever more critical.
The essential questions for this one-day workshop, or 90-minute keynote are:
- Why won’t the standard use-case approaches to AI strategy work?
- Are traditional adoption approaches going to work for AI? (No, but what is better.)
- How can businesses meet the workforce challenges, including upskilling?
- What are the critical skills for AI-powered workforces?
- Which ethical concerns should leaders keep front of mind as they deploy AI?