Zahaan Bharmal
Leadership teams now have to make consequential AI decisions faster than their evidence base allows. The pressure is not understanding the technology in the abstract. It is judging which signals to trust, which bets to make, and how to hold composure when the underlying physics of the system keeps changing.
Zahaan Bharmal is a Senior Director at Google and author of The Art of Physics who helps leadership teams make better decisions about AI, science and uncertainty by translating frontier ideas into operating judgement.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Zahaan Bharmal
- He sits inside Google at senior level, shaping how the company communicates AI to enterprise and policy audiences across EMEA. Boards get an insider’s read on where AI is actually heading, not a consultant’s deck.
- His book The Art of Physics gives him a developed framework for using ideas like uncertainty, entropy and chaos to interrogate strategic decisions. Audiences leave with a vocabulary for thinking, not a slide of takeaways.
- He founded YouTube Space Lab, the international science competition run with NASA, ESA and JAXA, and holds NASA’s Exceptional Public Achievement Medal. That is a credential almost no other corporate keynote speaker carries.
- He moves between physics, AI, government and frontier industry, advising the commercial space station company Vast. The result is a speaker who can talk to a board about AI strategy and to a STEM audience about scientific curiosity without changing register.
Biography highlights
- Senior Director at Google, London, with seventeen years at the company across strategy, marketing and communications, including work with Google DeepMind.
- Author of The Art of Physics: Eight Elegant Ideas to Make Sense of Almost Everything (2024), published in the UK by Hodder and in North America by Greystone Books.
- Founder of YouTube Space Lab, run with NASA, ESA, JAXA and Lenovo, reaching students in over eighty countries.
- Recipient of NASA’s Exceptional Public Achievement Medal.
- Physics graduate of the University of Oxford and Fulbright Scholar with an MBA from Stanford University.
- Regular contributor on physics and space to The Guardian; advisor to commercial space station company Vast.
Biography
Frontier AI is being deployed inside organisations faster than most boards can build the judgement to govern it. The hard question is not what the technology can do. It is how to make defensible decisions when the underlying system is changing every quarter and the available evidence keeps shifting.
That is the territory Zahaan Bharmal works in. As a Senior Director at Google with seventeen years at the company, he has led strategy and communications across marketing, operations and Google DeepMind, focused on how AI is understood and adopted by enterprise and policy audiences in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. He brings boards an insider’s view of how a frontier AI organisation actually thinks about deployment, risk and credibility.
His book The Art of Physics, published in 2024 by Hodder in the UK and Greystone in North America, sets out eight ideas from physics, including uncertainty, entropy and chaos theory, and uses them to interrogate everyday decision-making. The argument carries weight because of where he sits: a physicist by training who has spent a career inside one of the companies building the systems that now sit on every executive agenda.
Before Google, Zahaan studied Physics at Oxford, worked as a management consultant and then as a UK Government policy adviser, before winning a Fulbright Scholarship to Stanford for an MBA. He founded YouTube Space Lab with NASA, ESA and JAXA, the largest international school space science competition, for which he received NASA’s Exceptional Public Achievement Medal. He writes on science for The Guardian and advises Vast, the private company building commercial space stations.
Key speaking topics
- Artificial intelligence and the practical limits of corporate decision-making
- Ideas from physics applied to leadership under uncertainty
- Science communication and public trust in AI
- Curiosity, complexity and innovation
- Resilience and composure in fast-moving systems
- The future of space and frontier industries
Ideal for
- Board and executive committee sessions on AI strategy and responsible adoption
- Senior leadership audiences in regulated industries grappling with frontier technology decisions
- CHRO, CSO and transformation leads working on decision quality under uncertainty
- Innovation, R&D and STEM audiences inside scientific and engineering organisations
Audience outcomes
- A clearer mental model for making decisions when the evidence base is moving
- Specific physics-derived heuristics for thinking about uncertainty, entropy and chaos in commercial contexts
- An insider’s view of how AI is being built, deployed and communicated inside a frontier technology company
- Renewed appetite for scientific curiosity as a leadership trait, not a soft skill
Talks
A keynote that uses eight ideas from physics to reframe how leaders think about decision-making, uncertainty and complexity.
Key takeaways:
- A working vocabulary drawn from quantum mechanics, thermodynamics and chaos theory for strategic problems
- Specific heuristics for breaking chaotic problems into manageable patterns
- A reframing of resilience as the physics of systems under stress, not personal grit
A session on how scientific thinking sharpens judgement when leaders face incomplete information and high stakes.
Key takeaways:
- Where intuition reliably fails leaders and where it does not
- How to test the quality of a decision before its outcome is known
- Practical methods for stripping complex problems back to first principles
A keynote drawn from his Google work on building public and enterprise understanding of frontier technology.
Key takeaways:
- Why technical accuracy without narrative is rejected by senior audiences
- How AI organisations are building trust with regulators and the public
- Approaches to communicating uncertainty without losing credibility