Timandra Harkness
Boards and executive teams now make decisions about AI, data, and digital infrastructure that touch every part of the business. The technical case is well rehearsed. The harder questions, what these systems do to customer trust, to employee agency, to the meaning of the work, get pushed to ethics committees or deferred indefinitely. Leaders need a way to think clearly about technology that is neither uncritical adoption nor reflexive fear.
Timandra Harkness is a writer, broadcaster and statistician who helps organisations think clearly about data, AI and the human consequences of the technology they deploy.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Timandra Harkness
- A working statistician on the Council of Trustees of the Royal Statistical Society who can speak fluently to technical and non-technical audiences in the same room.
- Author of two books that bracket the AI conversation: Big Data: Does Size Matter? on what data actually does and does not tell us, and Technology Is Not the Problem on why our cultural anxieties about tech are misdirected.
- A mainstream BBC Radio 4 presenter on FutureProofing, How To Disagree and Steelmanning, which means she handles complex, contested material on air for general audiences and brings that craft to a corporate room.
- Speaks regularly at institutions that take rigour seriously, including the Royal Society, the Alan Turing Institute, and the Royal Academy of Engineering, so the substance survives scrutiny from technical buyers.
- Comfortable as keynote speaker, panel moderator, or event host, which makes her useful across the full shape of a leadership offsite or technology summit.
Biography highlights
- Author, Big Data: Does Size Matter? (Bloomsbury Sigma, 2016) and Technology Is Not the Problem (HarperCollins, 2024).
- Council of Trustees, Royal Statistical Society; chair of the editorial board, Significance journal.
- Writer and presenter, BBC Radio 4 series including FutureProofing, How To Disagree, Steelmanning, and Political School.
- Resident reporter across eight series of BBC Radio 4’s The Human Zoo.
- Speaker and lecturer at the Royal Society, Alan Turing Institute, Royal Academy of Engineering, RSA, Cheltenham Science Festival, and the Abel Prize for Mathematics.
- Contributor to the Telegraph, Guardian, Sunday Times, WIRED, New Statesman, UnHerd and BBC Focus.
Biography
Most arguments about technology in the boardroom are arguments about something else. Trust. Identity. What kind of company we want to be. Timandra Harkness, a statistician and broadcaster whose work spans both BBC Radio 4 and the Royal Statistical Society, is unusually well placed to name what is actually being discussed.
Her first book, Big Data: Does Size Matter?, published by Bloomsbury Sigma in 2016, took the data revolution seriously without inflating it. Her second, Technology Is Not the Problem, published by HarperCollins in 2024, makes the harder case: that our anxieties about AI and social media are anxieties about ourselves, and that locating the problem in the technology is what stops us from acting on it.
She presents BBC Radio 4’s FutureProofing, How To Disagree, and Steelmanning, programmes that work because they take competing arguments seriously rather than flattening them. That habit transfers. In a leadership room, she is the speaker who can hold a senior team’s attention on the awkward middle of an AI question, where the technical position and the cultural position have to be reconciled.
She sits on the Royal Statistical Society’s Council of Trustees and chairs the editorial board of Significance, the Society’s journal. She has spoken at the Royal Society, the Alan Turing Institute, and the Royal Academy of Engineering. The technical rigour is real, and it is what stops the cultural argument from drifting into commentary.
Key speaking topics
- Big data and what it does and does not reveal
- The cultural and ethical questions raised by AI
- Statistics, evidence and decision-making
- Human agency in an automated environment
- Identity, recognition and the social media question
- Technology and trust
- Disagreement and constructive argument inside organisations
Ideal for
- Boards and executive teams making AI, data, and digital infrastructure decisions
- Technology and innovation summits seeking a credible non-vendor voice
- Leadership offsites where the AI conversation has to bridge technical and cultural ground
- CDO, CTO, and CHRO audiences working through the human consequences of new systems
Audience outcomes
- A sharper sense of what data and AI systems can and cannot do, written by someone who works with statisticians
- A clearer language for the cultural and ethical questions executive teams keep deferring
- A defensible way to think about agency, recognition and trust as the technology landscape shifts
- Better-quality internal disagreement on contested technology decisions