Purna Virji
Most AI investments stall after the demo. The model works, the pilot impresses, but customer behaviour does not change and the board sees no return. The hard problem is not building the capability. It is closing the distance between what the technology can do and what a market will actually adopt, trust, and pay for.
Purna Virji helps organisations turn AI capability into adoption, trust, and measurable business impact, drawing on more than a decade in AI commercialization and go-to-market strategy at Microsoft and LinkedIn.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Purna Virji
- At Microsoft and LinkedIn she worked the commercialization layer for emerging AI, shaping the strategy and market narratives that decide whether a new capability reaches and convinces a market. She speaks to the gap between what a product can do and what customers adopt from direct operating experience, not observation.
- She gives executive teams a way to measure AI by business outcomes rather than activity, replacing “time saved” and tokens used with quality lift, scope growth, and capability unlock, the language finance and boards will fund.
- Her Agent-Led Growth work maps a shift most leaders have not yet priced in: customers delegating discovery and purchase decisions to AI agents, and what that does to how brands get found and trusted.
- She wrote the award-winning High-Impact Content Marketing (Kogan Page), recognised as a Choice Outstanding Academic Title, which grounds her credibility in published, peer-recognised work rather than conference reputation alone.
Biography highlights
- More than a decade across Microsoft and LinkedIn in AI commercialization, go-to-market, and customer engagement, including Senior Manager of Global Engagement at Microsoft and Principal Consultant, Content Solutions at LinkedIn.
- Author of High-Impact Content Marketing (Kogan Page, 2023), a Choice Reviews Outstanding Academic Title (2024) and Goody Business Book Award winner.
- Creator of the Agent-Led Growth newsletter, publishing original frameworks on agentic commerce, AI adoption, and trust as a ranking factor.
- Named the #1 Most Influential PPC Expert in the World (PPC Hero, 2016), an Adweek Young Influential (2018), and Search Personality of the Year (US Search Awards).
- Honoured Listee, Marquis Who’s Who in America (2023).
- Has keynoted in more than 20 countries; work featured in Adweek, The Drum, TNW, Search Engine Land, and Search Engine Journal.
Biography
Most AI initiatives do not fail in the lab. They fail in the gap between a working model and a customer who changes nothing about how they work. Purna Virji has spent her career inside that gap, at the point where AI commercialization, go-to-market strategy, and customer behaviour meet.
That vantage point is unusual. She spent more than a decade at Microsoft and LinkedIn in commercialization and go-to-market work, latterly focused on emerging AI, where she shaped the strategy and market narratives that decide whether a new capability earns trust and gets adopted. She has seen the failure modes up close, from unclear value to a customer journey that asks too much too soon.
Her published work carries the same argument. High-Impact Content Marketing (Kogan Page) was named a Choice Reviews Outstanding Academic Title, and her Agent-Led Growth newsletter tracks the next shift: customers handing discovery, comparison, and purchase decisions to AI agents acting on their behalf. The implication for brands is direct. Influence moves from catching a person’s eye to earning an agent’s confidence.
What she brings to a leadership audience is a way to argue about AI in board language. She reframes success away from time saved and tasks completed toward quality lift, scope growth, and capability unlock, the outcomes that survive a finance review. Her Agent-Led Growth research names the real blocker directly: the Delegation Gap, the distance between what AI can technically do and what people are ready to hand over. For executives funding AI and seeing experimentation rather than impact, closing that gap is the work.
Key speaking topics
- AI commercialization and adoption
- Agentic commerce and AI-led customer journeys
- Measuring AI business impact and ROI
- Go-to-market strategy for AI products
- Trust, discovery, and brand visibility in the AI era
- AI-driven sameness and competitive differentiation
Ideal for
- Executive teams and boards funding AI initiatives and asking what return they are getting
- AI transformation leads, CTOs, and product leaders moving from pilot to deployment
- CMOs and revenue leaders facing the shift to agent-led discovery and commerce
- Enterprise B2B and SaaS organisations whose growth depends on AI adoption by customers
Audience outcomes
- A framework for tying AI initiatives to outcomes a board will fund: quality lift, scope growth, capability unlock, rather than activity metrics.
- A clear picture of how agent-led customer journeys change discovery, trust, and where buying influence sits.
- A diagnosis of why specific AI initiatives stall at the pilot stage, and where the product-to-market handoff breaks.
- A way to spot where AI-driven sameness enters content and customer experience, and how to design for differentiation from the start.
Talks
Examines why strong AI capability so often stops short of real adoption, and how leaders close the distance between what a product can do and what a market will embrace.
Key takeaways:
- The failure modes that stall AI initiatives: unclear value, weak narratives, low trust, poor product-to-GTM handoff
- A practical framework for moving from capability to customer adoption
- How to avoid overpromising while still driving behaviour change
Introduces a framework for connecting AI to business value through three lenses: Quality Lift, Scope Growth, and Capability Unlock. Delivered as the opening keynote at SMX Advanced 2026.
Key takeaways:
- Why “time saved” and output volume fail to convince executives who fund outcomes
- Tying AI to adoption, speed to market, revenue, and risk reduction
- Telling the impact story in language finance and leadership can act on
Explores what happens when AI agents take on the research, filtering, and comparison that once sat with the buyer, and what that means for how brands are found and trusted.
Key takeaways:
- The behavioural shift from searching for yourself to delegating to systems
- What changes across content, GTM, and customer experience in agent-led journeys
- Where trust and influence actually happen when an agent makes the choice
Explores why AI makes it as easy to scale average experiences as great ones, and how to treat inclusion, accessibility, and differentiation as system design decisions.
Key takeaways:
- How AI scales the assumptions already embedded in data, prompts, and workflows
- Why differentiation and inclusion are design choices, not final-stage reviews
- How to build customer experiences that are both scalable and distinctive
An interactive working session that helps leaders measure AI through business outcomes rather than efficiency metrics, built on the Quality Lift, Scope Growth, and Capability Unlock framework.
Key takeaways:
- Why efficiency metrics like time saved and tokens used fail to convince the people who fund AI
- How to score your own AI initiatives on quality lift, scope growth, and capability unlock
- How to build an AI impact story that survives a finance review
A hands-on working session built on her Friction, Fit, Role, Flow, Fail-Safe, Test framework, where leaders map a live AI opportunity from first friction point to safe deployment.
Key takeaways:
- A mapped AI opportunity and workflow design for one real use case
- Governance controls built into the workflow rather than added afterwards
- A practical 30-day implementation plan to take back to the team