Rory Cellan-Jones
Boards are being asked to commit capital and credibility to AI before anyone has a settled view of what the technology will and will not do. The reflex is either to over-promise or to wait. Both positions are expensive, and neither produces the judgment a senior team needs to set policy on adoption, risk, and public trust.
Rory Cellan-Jones is the BBC’s former Technology Correspondent of fourteen years and an author whose work helps senior teams interpret each new wave of technology against the record of the last four decades.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Rory Cellan-Jones
- He has reported on every significant technology cycle from the dot.com bust to generative AI, which gives senior teams a working baseline for how this wave will and will not behave.
- His book Always On argues that the smartphone is the Model T Ford of the 21st century and traces the loss of public trust from the 2012 Olympics opening ceremony to Cambridge Analytica. That argument frames a board conversation on AI legitimacy in language buyers can use.
- He brings the institutional memory of the BBC technology desk into the room, including direct interviews with the founders and chief executives now setting the AI agenda.
- His OBE for services to journalism, honorary fellowship at the National Museum of Computing, and current advisory roles at FTI Consulting and Brands2Life signal a credibility that survives the move from press gallery to boardroom.
- He hosts and moderates with the discipline of a live broadcaster, which makes him a strong choice when the brief is a serious panel rather than a single keynote.
Biography highlights
- BBC Technology Correspondent, 2007 to 2021, with prior roles on The Money Programme, Newsnight, and the Today Programme.
- Appointed OBE in the 2024 Birthday Honours for services to journalism.
- Author of Always On: Hope and Fear in the Social Smartphone Era (Bloomsbury), Dot.Bomb, the memoir Ruskin Park, and Sophie From Romania.
- Co-host of the Movers and Shakers podcast on Parkinson’s disease, launched 2023.
- Senior Advisor, FTI Consulting; Senior Media and Strategy Consultant, Brands2Life.
- Honorary Fellow, National Museum of Computing; honorary degree, University of York.
Biography
The dot.com bust ran straight through Cellan-Jones’s first stint as a technology reporter. He had just been appointed BBC Internet Correspondent when the bubble broke, and the book he wrote about it, Dot.Bomb, set the pattern for a career spent reporting on technology as something that has to survive contact with markets, regulators and the public.
That long memory is what senior teams now use him for. Across fourteen years as BBC Technology Correspondent, from January 2007, he covered the rise of the iPhone, the social media platforms, the cryptocurrency cycles, and the early arguments about AI safety. His book Always On reads that period as a single arc, with the 2012 Olympics opening ceremony as the high water mark of techno-optimism and the Cambridge Analytica revelations as the moment public trust broke.
He left the BBC in 2021 and has since taken senior advisory roles at FTI Consulting and Brands2Life, which keep him close to the corporate side of the same questions he reported on as a journalist. He was appointed OBE in the 2024 Birthday Honours.
The current AI debate is where the back catalogue earns its keep. Boards are being asked to make commitments at a pace that exceeds the evidence, and the reflex to copy whichever competitor moves first is exactly the pattern he watched go wrong in 2000, again in 2008, and again in 2017. Few speakers can frame that lesson with the same authority.
Key speaking topics
- Artificial intelligence and the public trust problem
- The smartphone era and the social contract of technology
- Disruptive innovation and the corporate response
- Technology regulation and the limits of self-governance
- Cybersecurity in consumer and corporate life
- Long-run lessons from forty years of technology cycles
- Health, technology and the patient experience
Ideal for
- Boards setting AI adoption policy and accountability
- CIO, CTO and CDO leadership offsites looking for an outsider perspective on the current cycle
- Communications, public affairs and policy teams managing technology reputation risk
- Conferences requiring a moderator or host with deep subject knowledge
Audience outcomes
- A clearer read on which parts of the current AI narrative match historical patterns and which are genuinely new
- A working framework for thinking about public trust as a corporate input, not an externality
- A sense of the regulatory direction in the UK, EU and US and what that implies for product and policy decisions
- Questions a board should be asking its own technology and risk leadership in the next twelve months