AI-etik och ansvarsfull teknik

Why organisations work with Ashlea Atigolo She has co-built a generative AI product, Finley AI, that has been recognised on the WealthTech100 2024 list, so the advice she offers boards is grounded in shipped technology rather than commentary. She brings a regulated-industry lens. Her work spans wealth management, private equity and fintech, where the question is not whether to deploy AI but how to do it without breaking trust, compliance, or customer relationships. She is a credible voice on women in AI without leaning on the topic alone. The named recognition (TechRound Top 64 Women in Tech, Great British Businesswoman finalist, Fintech Powerlist) sits alongside the technical and commercial credentials. She is equally fluent as a keynote speaker, panel host and workshop facilitator, which makes her a flexible fit for AI summits, leadership offsites and investor-facing events. Biography highlights Co-founder of INATIGO, a generative AI venture builder. Co-founder of Finley AI, listed on the WealthTech100 2024. Managing Partner at Consult Venture Partners, advising executives on generative and agentic AI adoption. Former Co-Founder and Co-Managing Director of City Wharf Private Wealth, awarded Europe’s Most Innovative Wealth Management Model at the 2021 WealthBriefing European Awards. Listed on TechRound’s Top 64 Influential Women in UK Technology (2022) and named on the Fintech Powerlist. Speaker and host at Fintech Week London, Fintech Connect and Chatbot Africa AI Summit. Biography Most organisations have an AI strategy. A much smaller number have AI in production, talking to customers, sitting inside regulated workflows and answering to a compliance function. Ashlea Atigolo works at that second layer. As co-founder of INATIGO and its flagship product Finley AI, listed on the WealthTech100 2024, she has built generative AI systems for personal finance rather than written about them. Her route into AI was operational, not academic. Before INATIGO she co-founded City Wharf Private Wealth, where her co-leadership won Europe’s Most Innovative Wealth Management Model at the 2021 WealthBriefing European Awards. That background gives her advisory work a distinctive cast. She understands wealth, private equity and fintech as live operating environments, not case studies, and her current role as Managing Partner at Consult Venture Partners is built on that. Her independent recognition is dense and recent. She has been named on TechRound’s Top 64 Influential Women in UK Technology, included on the Fintech Powerlist, and shortlisted as a finalist for the Great British Businesswoman Awards in technology. She has advised Adobe directly and has been engaged through GLG, AlphaSense and GuidePoint by executives in fintech, private equity and financial services. On stage she is most useful to organisations that need a builder’s view of generative and agentic AI: what to deploy, what to delay, how to govern it, and where the human still has to sit inside the workflow. She hosts and keynotes at Fintech Week London, Fintech Connect and Chatbot Africa AI Summit, and is equally credible in a board workshop as on a main-stage panel. Key speaking topics Generative and agentic AI in financial services AI product strategy and deployment in regulated industries Conversational and empathetic AI design Responsible AI, trust and governance Fintech and wealth management innovation Women in AI and inclusive technology teams Leadership through technological disruption Ideal for Boards and executive committees in financial services, wealth management, private equity and fintech sizing up generative or agentic AI investments. CIO, CTO, CDO and Head of Innovation audiences moving from AI pilots into operating deployment. Fintech, AI and wealth-management conferences looking for an operator-speaker rather than a commentator. Internal AI summits, leadership offsites and women-in-tech programmes inside large enterprises. Audience outcomes A clearer picture of where generative and agentic AI is genuinely production-ready in regulated industries, and where it is not. A working vocabulary for governance conversations: agents, guardrails, oversight, human-in-the-loop. A view of how a builder, not a vendor, sequences AI adoption inside a regulated business. Named examples of fintech and wealth-management deployments that buyers can take into their own strategy conversations.

Why organisations work with Aubrey Blanche-Sarellano She built the Balanced Teams Diversity Assessment used inside the Atlassian Team Playbook, giving People teams a measurement framework they can run themselves rather than a workshop they have to repeat. She has held the senior internal seat twice, at Atlassian and Culture Amp, so her recommendations come from running the function at scale, not from observing it. Her work on AI ethics is grounded in current academic study at Cambridge’s Leverhulme Centre, which means the responsible-AI content is current with regulation rather than recycled from 2021 DEI decks. She treats equity as a product and operations problem. That makes her useful to CHROs, Heads of Product, and AI leads, not only to DEI specialists. She speaks credibly to the post-DEI-backlash context: how to keep inclusion outcomes when the political signalling has to come down. Biography highlights Founder and CEO of The Mathpath, advising on equitable operations, responsible AI, and ESG. Former Global Head of Equitable Design & Impact, Culture Amp. Former Global Head of Diversity & Belonging, Atlassian. Built the function from scratch. Inventor of the Balanced Teams approach and the Balanced Teams Diversity Assessment in the Atlassian Team Playbook. Master’s candidate in AI Ethics and Society, Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, University of Cambridge. Board director at Circle of Blue and the Culture Amp Foundation; limited partner at Operator Collective. Featured in Wired, Wall Street Journal, Australian Financial Review, and USA Today. Biography Diversity programmes were designed for a political environment that no longer exists. Budgets are smaller, scrutiny is sharper, and the language that worked five years ago now invites litigation in some markets and ridicule in others. The companies that still want inclusion outcomes have a problem: they need the results, but they cannot keep running the programme in its original form. Aubrey Blanche-Sarellano works on that problem from the operations side. She built Atlassian’s Diversity & Belonging function from scratch and scaled it across the company’s international expansion, then joined Culture Amp as the first Global Head of Equitable Design & Impact. The Balanced Teams Diversity Assessment she developed at Atlassian became part of the company’s public Team Playbook, which is why her frameworks are familiar to People teams who have never met her. Through The Mathpath, her consultancy, she now advises leaders on the same question at a higher altitude: how to embed equity into talent processes, product decisions, and AI deployment so that the outcomes survive without the political infrastructure. Her current academic work at Cambridge’s Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence sits behind the responsible-AI content, which has become a larger share of her client engagements. She is direct about what does not work. Unconscious bias training is not, in her reading, a solution. Equitable design is. Her audiences leave with a clearer view of where inequity is actually produced inside their organisation and which operating levers, talent process, product practice, AI tooling, will move it. Key speaking topics Equitable operations and organisational design Responsible AI and algorithmic bias Talent process redesign and ERG programmes Inclusion in a post-DEI-backlash context Equitable product development ESG and ethical business operations Ideal for CHROs and Heads of People rebuilding inclusion strategy under new constraints Heads of Product and AI leads embedding fairness into model deployment and product practice ERG sponsors and DEI leads under pressure to demonstrate operating impact, not activity Executive teams reviewing where to take DEI investment next Audience outcomes A clearer map of where inequity is produced inside your own talent and product systems A working definition of equitable design, with examples of where it replaces conventional DEI activity Specific guidance on evaluating AI tools for fairness risk before deployment A read on how to keep inclusion outcomes when the political signalling has to come down Language for talking about equity that holds up in front of a sceptical board

Why organisations work with Audrey Tang She has run the experiment that most boards are still debating: AI governance, digital deliberation, and disinformation defence deployed at national scale, with measurable outcomes during a pandemic and a presidential election. She offers a working alternative to the binary of techno-libertarianism and centralised AI control, set out in “Plurality” with E. Glen Weyl and tested inside Taiwan’s government. She built the civic infrastructure she talks about. g0v, the Mask Map, vTaiwan, and Join.gov.tw are operational systems, not concepts, and have been adopted in Japan, the EU, and the United States. Her authority is rare in this category: a TIME100 AI honoree and Foreign Policy Top 100 Global Thinker who has signed off on policy decisions, not just commented on them. Biography highlights First Minister of Digital Affairs of Taiwan, 2022 to 2024; Digital Minister from 2016. Co-author with E. Glen Weyl of “Plurality: The Future of Collaborative Technology and Democracy”. TIME100 Most Influential People in AI, 2023. Foreign Policy Top 100 Global Thinkers, 2019. Co-founder of g0v and architect of Taiwan’s open-data COVID-19 response, including the Mask Map. Ambassador-at-large, University of Oxford Accelerator Fellowship Programme. Biography Most governments responded to COVID-19 with top-down distribution and mandates. Taiwan ran an open-data Mask Map built with civic coders, a participatory platform called vTaiwan, and a disinformation playbook with a 20-minute response window. The minister responsible was Audrey Tang. Tang served as Taiwan’s first Digital Minister from 2016, and as the first Minister of Digital Affairs from 2022 to 2024. Before government, she was a Silicon Valley engineer and a core contributor to Perl and Haskell. She joined the g0v civic-tech community in its early years and helped shape the open-government practices that later became state policy. Her book with E. Glen Weyl, “Plurality: The Future of Collaborative Technology and Democracy”, argues that AI and digital tools can be designed to widen democratic participation rather than narrow it. The book was written openly on GitHub, translated by volunteers into more than a dozen languages, and released into the public domain. It draws directly on what Taiwan built and ran. She has been named to TIME100 AI, Foreign Policy’s Top 100 Global Thinkers, and serves as an ambassador-at-large in the University of Oxford’s Accelerator Fellowship Programme. For a senior audience weighing how to govern AI inside a regulated organisation, she offers something most speakers in this category cannot: a record of decisions made in office, with results visible in pandemic outcomes and election integrity. Key speaking topics Digital democracy and participatory governance AI ethics and trustworthy AI design Plurality and collaborative technology Disinformation defence and election integrity Open-source civic infrastructure Public trust in technology Cybersecurity as democratic resilience Ideal for Boards and executive committees setting AI governance and risk policy Chief Digital, Data, and AI Officers designing deployment frameworks Public-sector and regulated-industry leaders facing trust and legitimacy questions CISOs and risk leads responsible for disinformation, election, or platform integrity Audience outcomes A working mental model for AI governance grounded in a national case, not a thought experiment. A clear view of what participatory and open-source approaches add to organisational decision-making, and where they break. Specific tactics for disinformation response, drawn from Taiwan’s 2-2-2 playbook. A vocabulary for “Plurality” that gives leaders an alternative to the techno-libertarian and centralised-control framings of AI.

Why organisations work with Ayanna Howard Her lab produced the first peer-reviewed algorithms quantifying how robot mistakes erode human trust – including in emergency scenarios where people followed automated systems away from clearly marked exits. That finding reframes the AI governance question from “is our system accurate?” to “are our people dangerously deferring to it?” Her book Sex, Race, and Robots (2021) makes a specific, falsifiable argument: AI bias originates with the designer, not the data. That argument changes where leadership teams assign accountability – and what they need to do before deployment, not after. She holds board seats at Autodesk and Motorola Solutions while running one of the largest engineering schools in the US. She understands AI decisions from lab to boardroom, and she speaks to both with equal authority. Zyrobotics, the company she founded from her Georgia Tech research, has commercialised AI for children with motor and cognitive challenges – she has direct product experience of translating research into regulated, real-world applications. As the 2021–2022 ACM Athena Lecturer and a Fellow of IEEE, AAAI, AAAS, and the National Academy of Inventors, her credentials carry weight in technical due diligence conversations as well as executive ones. Biography highlights Dean of the College of Engineering, The Ohio State University – first woman in the role; manages a $360M annual budget, 12 departments, and 11,900+ students Senior Robotics Researcher and Deputy Manager, Office of the Chief Scientist, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory – contributed to Mars rover and arctic robotics programmes Named 2021–2022 ACM Athena Lecturer for fundamental contributions to accessible human-robotic systems and AI Author of Sex, Race, and Robots: How to Be Human in the Age of AI (Audible Studios/Brilliance Audio, 2021) Fellow of IEEE, AAAI, AAAS, and National Academy of Inventors; elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Independent director, Autodesk Inc. and Motorola Solutions Inc. boards Founder, Zyrobotics – Georgia Tech spin-off developing AI-powered educational and therapy products for children with special needs Named to Forbes America’s Top 50 Women in Tech and Business Insider’s 23 Most Powerful Women Engineers; featured in TIME, Vanity Fair, CNN, and NPR Biography When an AI system makes a flawed decision, most organisations blame the data. Ayanna Howard’s research makes a harder argument: bias in AI is a design failure, and it traces directly to who builds the system. Her audiobook Sex, Race, and Robots (2021) put that argument to a public audience. Her more than 250 peer-reviewed publications put it to the scientific record. Her experimental work sharpens the stakes. Howard’s Human-Automation Systems Lab produced the first algorithms to quantify how robot mistakes erode human trust – including in emergency scenarios, where research subjects followed an automated guide away from clearly marked exits. The implication is direct: humans are overtrusting AI systems in ways that matter for consequential decisions in healthcare, hiring, and security. Her authority on these questions reaches across three distinct domains. She spent twelve years at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory – as Senior Robotics Researcher and Deputy Manager in the Office of the Chief Scientist – developing autonomous systems for Mars and arctic terrain. She then led one of the US’s most productive human-robotics labs at Georgia Tech. She now serves as Dean of Engineering at The Ohio State University – its first female dean – overseeing twelve departments, a $360M budget, and more than 11,900 students. Howard also holds board seats at Autodesk and Motorola Solutions, and founded Zyrobotics, which translates her research into AI-powered educational and therapy products for children with special needs. She is a Fellow of IEEE, AAAI, AAAS, and the National Academy of Inventors, and the 2021–2022 ACM Athena Lecturer. For boards and leadership teams asking serious questions about AI governance, she offers peer-reviewed research, institutional scale, and direct commercial accountability – in the same person. Key speaking topics AI bias and responsible system design Human overtrust in automated systems Human-robot interaction and trust Assistive and healthcare robotics AI governance and ethics AI in business: risk and opportunity Engineering leadership and workforce diversity in STEM Ideal for Corporate boards and C-suite leaders with AI governance responsibility Chief Technology Officers and Chief Digital Officers overseeing AI deployment R&D and innovation leadership in technology, healthcare, and manufacturing organisations Engineering and technology leadership development programmes Audience outcomes A specific reframe of AI accountability: bias is a design responsibility, not a data problem – with implications for who in the organisation owns it Evidence-based understanding of how humans overtrust automated systems, and what that means for governance and deployment decisions Practical criteria for evaluating AI systems before they are placed in consequential roles Clearer understanding of where workforce diversity in technical teams changes AI outcomes – and how to make the case internally A more confident, evidence-grounded position for boards and leadership teams facing AI adoption decisions

Why organisations work with Ayesha Khanna Her named “pilot purgatory” diagnostic (the finding that over 88% of AI pilots never scale) gives leadership teams a precise frame for why their programmes stall, and a structured path to production. This is a field-tested argument with a clear strategic implication. She brings board-level fiduciary exposure most AI advisors do not hold: Johnson Controls (smart buildings), NEOM Tonomus (national smart city infrastructure in Saudi Arabia), Mercy Healthcare (US), and L’Oréal’s Scientific Advisory Board. She has governed AI strategy, not only advised on it. Her advisory work spans both national AI strategy: she helped shape Singapore’s SkillsFuture programme and served on the IMDA board. Organisations get a strategist who has worked both sides. Her previous board position on AVEVA and her current role at Johnson Controls give her direct insight into how AI and digital transformation are reshaping critical infrastructure, highly relevant to sectors where technology adoption has long tail consequences. As the author of the forthcoming Gamechanger, a practical business strategy guide to generative AI, she is building the intellectual framework for the current adoption challenge while it is happening, not retrospectively. Biography highlights Co-Founder and CEO, Addo AI; a global AI solutions firm whose clients have included Singtel, SMRT, Pfizer, Sompo Holdings, Habib Bank, and Smart Dubai Board director: Johnson Controls (NYSE: JCI); NEOM Tonomus, Saudi Arabia; previously AVEVA (FTSE100, prior to Schneider Electric acquisition) Scientific Advisory Board, L’Oréal; Consumer Committee, Mercy Healthcare; Singapore HTX (homeland security technology) Member, World Economic Forum Global Future Councils; formerly on Singapore IMDA board and Ministry of Education SkillsFuture steering committee Named one of Southeast Asia’s groundbreaking female entrepreneurs by Forbes; Edelman Top 50 AI Creators (2025); Salesforce 16 AI Influencers to Know (2024) Author of Straight Through Processing (2008) and co-author of Hybrid Reality (TED Books, 2012); forthcoming Gamechanger on generative AI business strategy Published and quoted in The New York Times, Harvard Business Review, Forbes, TIME, Foreign Policy, and Strategy+Business PhD, Information Systems (digital innovation in smart cities), London School of Economics; MS, Columbia University; BA (Honours), Harvard University Biography Ayesha Khanna has spent two decades at the point where AI strategy meets the decisions boards have to make. Her argument is specific: most organisations do not fail at AI because they lack ambition or budget. They fail because they build pilots without the business-outcome architecture to scale them, what she calls “pilot purgatory,” a state that traps over 88% of enterprise AI programmes. Ayesha works with large corporations and governments on the full adoption journey, from strategy through deployment, with clients that have included Singtel, SMRT, Pfizer, Sompo Holdings, Habib Bank, and Smart Dubai. Khanna has spent more than a decade on Wall Street developing large-scale trading, risk management, and data analytics systems. Her PhD from the London School of Economics focused on digital innovation in smart cities, grounding her practical work in a rigorous analytical framework. What sets Khanna apart from most AI strategists is the nature of her board exposure. She currently holds directorships at Johnson Controls (smart building technology, NYSE: JCI), NEOM Tonomus (the technology infrastructure body for Saudi Arabia’s $500 billion NEOM smart city project), and Mercy Healthcare, and sits on L’Oréal’s Scientific Advisory Board. She previously sat on the board of AVEVA when it was an FTSE100 company. These are not advisory relationships, they are governance roles in which she has been responsible for technology strategy at fiduciary level, across healthcare, infrastructure, and consumer science simultaneously. Her forthcoming book, Gamechanger, extends this practitioner perspective into a structured business playbook for generative AI. Her two earlier books, Straight Through Processing (2008) and the TED book Hybrid Reality (2012), co-authored with Parag Khanna, established her early argument that the human-technology relationship was shifting from coexistence to co-evolution. That argument has aged well. Khanna has been recognised by Forbes as one of Southeast Asia’s groundbreaking female entrepreneurs, named to Edelman’s Top 50 AI Creators in 2025, and quoted across The New York Times, Harvard Business Review, and Foreign Policy. Key speaking topics Generative AI strategy and enterprise adoption AI governance and risk frameworks Smart cities and urban technology infrastructure AI in financial services and healthcare Future of work in an AI-driven economy National AI strategy and public-private collaboration The Hybrid Age: human-technology co-evolution Ideal for CEOs and C-suite leadership teams building or scaling enterprise AI programmes Board directors and non-executive directors responsible for technology governance and digital risk oversight Government and public sector leaders developing national AI strategies or smart city initiatives Financial services, healthcare, and infrastructure sector organisations at advanced stages of AI deployment Audience outcomes A named diagnostic for why AI pilots stall before scaling, and a framework for building the business-outcome architecture needed to move from experimentation to production Practical understanding of what AI governance looks like at board level: what boards need to own, what they need to delegate, and what risks require a formal framework Sector-specific examples of organisations generating measurable revenue and operational impact through AI, drawn from a client base across telecoms, finance, healthcare, and infrastructure A structured perspective on the “Hybrid Age” – the shift in how humans and AI systems operate together – and what it means for workforce strategy and organisational design Criteria for prioritising AI investment by business outcome rather than technology capability, applicable across industries at different stages of digital maturity

Why organisations work with Belinda Parmar She created the Global Empathy Index, a quantitative framework published in the Harvard Business Review, that links corporate empathy directly to earnings, productivity, and retention. Most culture-change work lacks a measurement baseline; her work provides one. Her “Empathy-In-Residence” model, embedded at Barclays, Lloyds, and Centrica over extended engagements, means her frameworks have been tested at operational scale inside major institutions, not only delivered from a keynote stage. Work with AGL produced a 20.9% reduction in customer complaints and $1.7 million in cost savings, giving finance and operations leaders a commercial language for empathy that sits alongside a P&L, not just a people strategy. She has developed an AI-powered Empathy Index combining large language models with sentiment analysis, positioning organisations to measure their human culture in real time as AI transformation programmes change the surrounding landscape. As a Non-Executive Director at the UK Ministry of Defence, she brings board-level governance experience in a complex institutional environment, giving her work a credibility context that most leadership and culture speakers do not hold. Biography highlights Founder and CEO of The Empathy Business (formerly Lady Geek), a consultancy specialising in embedding empathy into organisational leadership, culture, and operations Creator of the Global Empathy Index, published in the Harvard Business Review: the first index to establish a quantitative correlation between corporate empathy and commercial performance Appointed OBE in the 2014 Birthday Honours for services to Women in Technology World Economic Forum Young Global Leader; keynote speaker at Davos (2019) Empathy-In-Residence at Barclays, Lloyds, and Centrica; established the first Empathy Hub in Europe’s largest bank Non-Executive Director, UK Ministry of Defence (appointed 2023) Author of Little Miss Geek and The Empathy Era: Women, Business and the New Pathway to Profit Featured in the Financial Times (2025); has written for The Guardian and the World Economic Forum Biography Organisations have spent a decade investing in AI while underinvesting in the human layer that AI cannot replace. Belinda Parmar’s work starts from a specific and uncomfortable question: if empathy is genuinely valuable to business performance, why can almost no organisation measure it? The Global Empathy Index, published in the Harvard Business Review, was built to answer that question. It ranks companies by empathy and connects those rankings directly to earnings, productivity, and retention. What makes her approach distinct is its operational depth. Through Empathy-In-Residence engagements at Barclays, Lloyds, and Centrica, she has deployed hundreds of evidence-based behavioural nudges: targeted interventions designed to shift culture from the inside rather than impose it from above. Work with AGL produced a 20.9% reduction in customer complaints, establishing empathy-led transformation as a driver of cost reduction, not only a people programme. AI has sharpened the question she has always asked. As generative AI absorbs more cognitive tasks, organisations face a practical leadership problem: how to identify, build, and retain the distinctly human capabilities that remain. Parmar has developed an AI-powered version of the Empathy Index, combining large language models with sentiment analysis, giving organisations a live measure of empathy in their culture as the technology landscape shifts around them. As a Non-Executive Director at the UK Ministry of Defence, she brings governance experience at an institutional level that most culture and leadership specialists do not access. She was appointed OBE for services to Women in Technology and named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. Her books – Little Miss Geek and The Empathy Era – sit alongside her HBR contributions as a published body of argument for the commercial case for empathy. Key speaking topics Human leadership in an AI world Empathy as a measurable leadership capability Behavioural science and organisational culture change Responsible AI and human-centred technology Customer experience transformation Inclusive cultures and belonging at scale Diversity and inclusion in technology Ideal for C-suite and senior leadership teams navigating AI transformation who need a human leadership framework alongside their technology strategy CHROs and People Directors seeking to connect culture change to measurable commercial outcomes Customer Experience and Operations leaders in consumer-facing industries where complaint reduction and loyalty are live performance metrics Board and governance audiences where responsible AI and organisational values are on the agenda Audience outcomes A practical understanding of the Global Empathy Index methodology and how empathy can be measured and tracked within their own organisation A working toolkit of “empathy nudges” – evidence-based behavioural interventions that can be deployed without a large-scale transformation programme A commercial language for empathy: specific case references linking culture change to cost reduction and measurable operational improvement Clarity on where AI enhances human connection rather than replaces it – and what that distinction requires of leaders A working definition of human leadership applicable to their own AI deployment context

Why organisations work with Ben Owen He has spent more than two decades on the operational side of intelligence, from sniper duties in Iraq to leading covert teams against counter-terrorism, counter-proliferation, and counter-espionage targets. Few cyber speakers can speak from that side of the line. He runs live OSINT demonstrations from the stage, exposing what an attacker can assemble about a named executive in minutes. Audiences leave with a visceral understanding of their own exposure, not a slide on the threat landscape. As co-founder of The OSINT Group and Co-Director EMEA for Fortalice Solutions, he advises corporates and high net worth principals on digital risk every week. The keynote content is drawn from current casework, not historical anecdote. His Hunted profile gives him cultural reach that board members already recognise, which lowers the resistance non-technical executives bring to cyber conversations. Biography highlights Co-founder, The OSINT Group, an intelligence-led cyber security consultancy. Co-Director, EMEA Region, Fortalice Solutions, the global cyber and intelligence firm founded by former White House CIO Theresa Payton. Former British intelligence officer, with operational experience in counter-terrorism, counter-proliferation, and counter-espionage. Former sniper in the British Forces, deployed to Cyprus, Kuwait, and Iraq. Lead hunter and Head of Intelligence across the UK, US, and Australian versions of Hunted (Channel 4, CBS, Channel 10). Quoted by The National and Transport + Energy on online fraud and EV charging cyber risk. Biography The attack surface that matters to senior leaders is no longer the corporate firewall. It is the LinkedIn post that confirms a travel date, the loyalty programme that leaks an address, the family member whose social profile fills in the gap. Adversaries assemble these fragments into a picture. Most boards have never been shown that picture. Ben Owen has spent his career on the other side of it. He served as a sniper in the British Forces in Cyprus, Kuwait, and Iraq, then moved into the British intelligence services, where he led covert teams running counter-terrorism, counter-proliferation, and counter-espionage operations. Twenty-five years of operational work sits behind the keynote. He now co-runs The OSINT Group, an intelligence-led cyber consultancy, and serves as Co-Director EMEA at Fortalice Solutions, the firm founded by former White House CIO Theresa Payton. Current client work, on high net worth principals, corporate executives, and institutional risk, supplies the material for his speaking. Television audiences know him as a recurring hunter across the UK, US, and Australian versions of Hunted; corporate audiences see the same skill set turned on their own organisation. On stage he runs live demonstrations. A volunteer’s name and employer are usually enough to build a profile in front of the room. The point is not theatre. It is to compress the gap between abstract cyber briefings and the operational reality a board now has to govern. Key speaking topics Cyber security as a board-level risk Open-source intelligence and digital footprint exposure The human element of modern cyber threats Executive and principal protection in a digital environment Counter-fraud and social engineering Operational leadership under pressure Surveillance, evasion, and the Hunted methodology Ideal for Boards, CISOs, and CROs commissioning a non-technical reset on cyber risk Executive offboarding, principal protection, and family office audiences Sales kick-offs and client events where a recognisable name needs to land a serious message Industry conferences on financial services, energy, transport, and professional services Audience outcomes A working picture of what a determined adversary can learn about a named executive from open sources alone Specific changes to personal digital hygiene that materially reduce exposure within a week A vocabulary for boards to interrogate their cyber and intelligence functions without retreating into IT jargon A sharper sense of where social engineering and OSINT meet, and why the human layer is now the primary breach vector

Why organisations work with Bernard Marr His frameworks for data strategy and AI adoption are grounded in peer-reviewed academic research from Cambridge and Cranfield – which means they hold up to internal scrutiny in ways that practitioner opinion rarely does. Business Trends in Practice, winner of the 2022 Business Book of the Year Award, gives executive audiences a shared, structured vocabulary for decisions that are otherwise made in fragmented, jargon-heavy conversations. His Forbes column reaches approximately one million readers a month – meaning his conceptual framing is often already in the room before he arrives, which accelerates rather than starts the conversation. He advises organisations across the full spectrum of sectors – from Google and Microsoft to the Bank of England, NATO and the NHS – which gives him a pattern-recognition advantage that single-sector specialists cannot replicate. Where most AI speakers address technology adoption as an IT problem, Marr consistently frames it as a governance and leadership problem – which is what boards and C-suites are actually wrestling with. Biography highlights Research Fellow, Cambridge Judge Business School; subsequently at Cranfield School of Management – before founding Bernard Marr & Co in 2006 Author of more than 20 books on AI, data strategy and digital transformation, published in over 20 languages Business Trends in Practice named Business Book of the Year 2022; additional awards include the CMI Management Book of the Year, Axiom Book Award and WHSmith Best Business Book Award Ranked by LinkedIn as one of the top 5 business influencers in the world Regular contributor to Forbes and the World Economic Forum; media presence includes BBC News, Sky News, the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal and HBR Advisory clients include Amazon, Google, Microsoft, the Bank of England, NATO, the NHS, Shell and the United Nations Biography Bernard Marr spent his early career as a research fellow at Cambridge Judge Business School and then at Cranfield School of Management, where his published work – cited more than 5,400 times – focused on business performance, intellectual capital and strategic measurement. In 2006 he left academia to found Bernard Marr & Co, taking that analytical infrastructure into advisory work with some of the world’s most complex organisations. His books – more than twenty of them, translated into over twenty languages – are not airport business books. Data Strategy, AI Strategy, Generative AI in Practice and Future Skills each address a specific executive decision: how to treat data as a governed asset, how to build an AI adoption roadmap, how to prepare a workforce for automation. Business Trends in Practice won the 2022 Business Book of the Year Award. His writing for Forbes, published at a rate of around three articles per week, gives those frameworks sustained reach into executive audiences between engagements. What makes Marr useful to a board is not that he explains technology well – many speakers do that. It is that he consistently reframes technology questions as governance questions: who owns the data strategy, how do we assess AI risk, what does leadership fluency in this area actually require? These are the questions that stall transformation programmes, and they sit above the pay grade of a CTO. His advisory work spans Google, Microsoft, Amazon, the Bank of England, NATO, the NHS, Shell and the United Nations – a range that gives him cross-sector pattern recognition that sector-specific specialists cannot replicate. The organisations that benefit most from his work are those where the executive team is technically literate enough to know they don’t know enough, and needs a structured way to close that gap. Key speaking topics AI strategy and adoption for executive leadership Data strategy and data governance Generative AI and its organisational implications Digital transformation and business performance Future of work and future skills Emerging technology trends and business impact Strategic performance management Ideal for C-suite and board-level audiences navigating AI and data investment decisions Chief Digital Officers, Chief Data Officers and technology transformation leads Senior leadership teams ahead of major digital transformation programmes Corporate and enterprise conference audiences requiring clarity on technology without technical fluency as a prerequisite Audience outcomes A working framework for evaluating AI and data investments – not just a description of what they are Clearer language for discussing technology strategy at board level, with less dependence on specialist intermediaries Understanding of which emerging technology trends carry genuine near-term organisational implications versus which are still speculative A more structured approach to data governance and the conditions under which data generates strategic advantage Insight into the skills and capabilities organisations will need to build – and which to acquire versus develop internally

Why organisations work with Brad Templeton He has sat inside the Google self-driving car program as a strategy and technology consultant since 2010, giving him a read on the robotaxi industry that armchair analysts cannot match. He holds 21 patents across self-driving cars and telephony, so claims about what is technically possible come from someone who has actually built in the space. As founder of ClariNet in 1989, the first company built to do commercial business on the internet, he has a forty-year pattern of calling commercial shifts before the market sees them. Twenty years on the board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, including a decade as Chairman, means he speaks credibly on the privacy, surveillance and civil-liberties consequences of AI and autonomy. He is a founding faculty member and Chair for Computing and Networks at Singularity University, where the brief is to frame exponential technology change for senior decision-makers. Biography highlights Founder and CEO of ClariNet Communications (1989), the first company established to conduct commercial activity over the internet. Chairman Emeritus of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Chairman from 2000 to 2010, board member since 1997. Founding faculty and Chair for Computing and Networks at Singularity University since 2009. Strategy and technology consultant on the Google self-driving car project, now Waymo, since 2010. Inventor on 21 patents in autonomous vehicles and telephony. Forbes contributor on robocars; publisher of Robocars.com and the long-running Brad Ideas blog. Board member of the Foresight Institute; plaintiff in Reno v. ACLU. Biography ClariNet went live in June 1989 and sold the first commercial subscription on the internet to Stanford University. The founder was Brad Templeton. That single contract is the practical birth of the dot-com economy, and it sets the pattern for the rest of his career: spotting the commercial shape of a technology before the market has language for it. Two decades later the same instinct took him into Google’s self-driving car program. Since 2010 he has consulted on strategy and technology for what is now Waymo, while also writing a reference column on the industry for Forbes and at Robocars.com. His 21 patents in autonomous vehicles and telephony make the commentary load-bearing; he is not narrating the robotaxi race from the outside. Alongside the commercial work, Templeton spent twenty years on the board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a decade of that as Chairman, and was a named plaintiff in Reno v. ACLU, the Supreme Court case that struck down the Communications Decency Act. That record is why boards bring him in when the question shifts from “does the AI work” to “what fights over privacy, surveillance and liability will shape who gets to deploy it.” At Singularity University, where he has been Chair for Computing and Networks since the founding faculty, the job is translating exponential technology curves for executives who need to plan against them. Few speakers combine an operator record in autonomous vehicles, a founder’s claim on the commercial internet, and two decades of civil-liberties advocacy in the same briefing. Key speaking topics Autonomous vehicles and the robotaxi industry Exponential technology and Moore’s Law thinking Artificial intelligence deployment and strategy Privacy, surveillance and civil liberties in a connected economy Internet history and the pattern of commercial technology shifts Future of mobility and urban transportation Cybersecurity and technology policy Ideal for Boards and executive teams sizing investment or partnership decisions in autonomous vehicles, mobility or AI. CTOs and chief innovation officers testing internal assumptions about exponential technology timelines. General counsel, chief privacy officers and policy leads working through AI and surveillance exposure. Automotive, insurance, logistics and urban-planning leadership teams preparing for autonomous deployment. Audience outcomes A sharper read on which autonomous-vehicle timelines are grounded and which are vendor marketing. A working mental model for exponential technology curves and what they mean for planning horizons. Specific case material from inside the Google and Waymo programs that is hard to source elsewhere. A clearer view of the privacy, liability and civil-liberties questions that will shape AI and autonomy regulation. Named examples drawn from forty years of commercial internet history, used to pressure-test current assumptions.

Why organisations work with Brett Johnson He built ShadowCrew, the forum widely credited as the template for modern darknet marketplaces, and can walk a security team through the attacker logic he once ran at scale. The U.S. Secret Service publicly named him “The Original Internet Godfather” and embedded him in Operation Anglerphish; that cooperation history gives his sessions a provenance no academic or vendor speaker can match. He translates criminal tradecraft into board-level language: why a particular control matters, which fraud type is about to spike, where identity verification actually breaks down. Named advisory and client work spans the FBI, Microsoft, Visa, LexisNexis, and AARP, which means his examples are not theoretical and his audience references are checkable. He is comfortable with the awkward part of his own story, which is what makes him credible to senior security and fraud leaders who have heard every generic “hacker keynote” already. Biography highlights Co-founder and administrator of ShadowCrew (2002-2004), widely cited as the precursor to modern darknet fraud marketplaces. Convicted of 39 felonies, placed on the US Most Wanted list, escaped federal custody, recaptured and served a federal sentence. U.S. Secret Service confidential informant under Operation Anglerphish, embedded on ScandinavianCarding and CardersMarket. Founder of Anglerphish Security, advising Fortune 500 financial services, retail, and technology firms on fraud and darknet intelligence. Host of The AnglerPhish Podcast on cybercrime, scams, and identity theft. Featured in Kevin Poulsen’s “Kingpin” and covered by The New York Times, NBC, CNN Money, Wired, and Vice. Biography ShadowCrew went live in August 2002 and ran for barely more than two years before the Secret Service shut it down. In that window it wrote the operating manual that darknet marketplaces still use. Brett Johnson, under the handle GOllumfun, was one of three co-founders and an administrator on the forum. After the 2004 takedown he avoided the first wave of arrests, was picked up in 2005 on separate charges, agreed to cooperate with the Secret Service, then continued committing tax fraud while working as an informant. He was placed on the US Most Wanted list, recaptured, sent to federal prison, escaped, recaptured again, and eventually served out a federal sentence. What separates him from the standard former-hacker speaker is the specificity of what he built. Modern identity theft, account takeover, card-not-present fraud, and organised tax-refund fraud all trace back through methods he helped industrialise. Security and fraud leaders at banks, payment networks, and retailers book him because he can describe, step by step, how an attacker selects a target and defeats controls the defenders thought were working. He now runs Anglerphish Security and advises named clients including the FBI, Microsoft, Visa, LexisNexis, AARP, and Neustar. His story has been told in Kevin Poulsen’s “Kingpin” and across The New York Times, NBC, CNN Money, Wired, and Vice, which is a useful external check for buyers who want to verify the biography before the contract. Key speaking topics Cybercrime and the modern fraud economy Identity theft and account takeover Social engineering and phishing Darknet marketplaces and threat intelligence Insider perspectives on financial crime Fraud prevention for banks, payment networks, and retail Ideal for CISOs, heads of fraud, and heads of financial crime at banks, card networks, and fintechs Retail, e-commerce, and payments leadership teams exposed to card-not-present and account takeover fraud Boards and audit committees seeking an unvarnished attacker-side briefing Government and public-sector programme leaders responsible for benefits, tax, or identity systems Audience outcomes A clear picture of how organised cybercriminals select targets, test defences, and cash out. Named examples of where existing fraud and identity controls tend to fail in practice. A sharper sense of which internal signals to take seriously and which to stop paying for. Concrete language to brief a board or executive committee on fraud exposure without resorting to vendor slides.

Why organisations work with Brian Brackeen He has run a face recognition company at commercial scale and publicly refused to sell that technology to law enforcement, which gives his arguments on AI governance a credibility most consultants cannot match. He can speak to algorithmic bias from inside the engineering stack, not from the outside as a critic, because he has shipped the models and seen where the failure modes sit. As General Partner of a $50M fund backing underrepresented founders, he brings a capital-allocation lens to questions of inclusion that boards typically hear framed only as workforce or culture issues. His 2018 TechCrunch op-ed against police use of facial recognition shaped industry debate ahead of formal regulation. Boards weighing AI policy get a practitioner who set a market precedent, not a commentator describing one. Biography highlights Founder and former CEO of Kairos, a face recognition AI company named to the Wall Street Journal’s Top 25 Startups list in 2013. General Partner at Lightship Capital, a $50M Cincinnati-based venture fund backing women, founders of colour, LGBTQ+ founders, and founders with disabilities. Author of a June 2018 TechCrunch op-ed arguing that commercial facial recognition should not be sold to government or police use. Returned to Kairos in 2021 as chair of the scientific advisory board, focused on eliminating racial bias in face recognition datasets. Earlier career: Senior Project Manager at Apple and Senior Managing Consultant at IBM. Co-founder of Lightship Foundation, which owns Black Tech Week. Biography Face recognition is one of the few AI categories where a founder has publicly walked away from a commercial market on principle. In June 2018, the CEO of Kairos published an op-ed in TechCrunch refusing to sell the company’s technology to law enforcement, citing the accuracy gap for people of colour and the consequences of misidentification. The argument landed before the broader regulatory conversation caught up. That founder is Brian Brackeen. He had built Kairos from 2012, with prior operating roles at Apple as a Senior Project Manager and at IBM as a Senior Managing Consultant. Under his leadership, Kairos was named to the Wall Street Journal’s Top 25 Startups list in 2013 and positioned alongside Microsoft and Face++ in the global face recognition market. A board dispute removed him as CEO in 2018; he returned in 2021 to chair the scientific advisory board, with a specific mandate on algorithmic bias. The work since has been about capital, not code. As General Partner at Lightship Capital, a $50M fund he runs with co-founder Candice Matthews Brackeen, Brackeen invests in underrepresented founders and in regions outside the coastal venture hubs. Lightship Foundation, the family’s parallel non-profit, owns Black Tech Week. The investing thesis treats inclusion as a market inefficiency, not a values exercise. For senior leaders, the value of his perspective is the combination of these two operating experiences. He can describe where bias enters an AI system at the dataset level, why a vendor might be the wrong place to outsource that judgement, and what the capital signal looks like when an entire founder population is being underwritten by the same narrow set of pattern-matching investors. Key speaking topics AI ethics and algorithmic bias Facial recognition and surveillance technology Responsible AI governance Venture capital and underrepresented founders Diversity in technology Entrepreneurship and scale-up leadership Ideal for Boards and executive teams setting AI governance policy CTOs, CDOs, and Chief AI Officers responsible for deployment decisions Investors, LPs, and corporate venture teams reviewing portfolio inclusion Innovation and DEI leaders working at the intersection of product and people Audience outcomes A practitioner’s account of where bias actually enters AI systems, and why surface-level audits miss it A defensible framework for deciding which AI use cases an organisation should refuse, not just constrain A clearer view of how capital allocation patterns shape which technologies get built and by whom Direct exposure to the trade-offs faced by founders deploying AI in regulated and sensitive contexts

Why organisations work with Bruno Giussani His book Our Minds Under Siege (2026) gives leadership teams a structured framework for understanding how AI systems reshape human judgment from within; a diagnosis of a risk that most governance frameworks do not yet address and that most AI ethics conversations skip entirely. Nearly twenty years as TED’s Global Curator, working with more than 1,000 speakers, including His Holiness Pope Francis (twice), Prince William, and UN Secretary-General António Guterres, gives him a practitioner’s map of how ideas move through organizations and societies, and what stops them. He operates at the intersection of AI, geopolitics, and economics rather than inside any single discipline, which allows him to frame cognitive risk as a question of power and governance, not a technology-management problem. His analytical position is explicitly non-alarmist: shaped by three decades of pragmatic, no-hype technology journalism across the New York Times, The Economist, and Wired UK. Organizations that have moved past the introductory AI conversation find this register useful. Biography highlights Former Global Curator and European Director, TED (2005–2024); curated more than 1,000 TED Talks, including two by His Holiness Pope Francis and one by Prince William Author, Our Minds Under Siege: How to Avoid Being Manipulated in the Age of AI (University of Chicago Press / Scheidegger & Spiess, 2026); also author of Roam: Making Sense of the Wireless Internet (Random House, 2001) Host, Deftech Podcast («La menace cognitive»), 2025 – six episodes on cognitive sovereignty and the threats posed by AI and neurotechnology JSK Fellow, Stanford University; Affiliated Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies Wired UK «Wired 100» (100 most influential Europeans): 2011, 2012, 2014, 2015; SwissAward Person of the Year 2015, Economy category Internet columnist, New York Times (1996–2000); contributor to The Economist, Wall Street Journal Europe, and Wired UK Biography The dominant AI conversation in most organizations is about automation, efficiency, and competitive disruption. The question of whether the same technology is simultaneously reshaping the judgment of the people making those decisions has largely been set aside. Bruno Giussani challenges that omission. Its argument: cognitive sovereignty – the capacity to think and decide independently – is the governance challenge organizations are not yet naming. Giussani was TED’s Global Curator and European Director for nearly twenty years, curating more than 1,000 talks, including two by His Holiness Pope Francis and one by Prince William, as well as leading figures in geopolitics, economics, and climate. That curatorial role, at the centre of the global ideas economy, built a practitioner’s understanding of how information environments shape what people believe and how they decide: not through force, but through design. Before TED, he wrote about technology for the New York Times (as its European internet columnist), The Economist, the Wall Street Journal Europe, and Wired UK. The consistent position across that work was pragmatic and non-alarmist; skeptical of both utopian and panic framings of technology. That editorial discipline anchors Our Minds Under Siege, which treats AI manipulation not as a consumer protection question but as a structural challenge to organizational thinking and governance. His Deftech Podcast (2025), produced in French, German, and Italian, explored cognitive threats from AI and neurotechnology before the book appeared in print. He advises public organizations and private companies and brings this analysis to boards and leadership teams where technology strategy, geopolitical risk, and organizational decision-making converge. Key speaking topics Cognitive sovereignty and AI manipulation The social and political impacts of algorithmic technologies How ideas spread in organizations and societies Technology, geopolitics, and the future of power AI governance beyond automation and compliance Curation and knowledge management in an era of information abundance The intersection of AI, neurotechnology, and human decision-making Ideal for Boards and senior leadership teams examining AI governance beyond operational and compliance risk CEOs, CSOs, and Chief AI Officers building strategic frameworks for AI’s cognitive and societal impacts Corporate affairs and communications leaders whose organizations operate in algorithmically shaped information environments Executive conferences and thought leadership forums requiring a moderator or host with demonstrated experience interviewing heads of state, Nobel laureates, and global institutional leaders Audience outcomes A clear framework for distinguishing operational AI risk (automation, disruption) from cognitive AI risk (the manipulation of judgment and belief) A working vocabulary for cognitive sovereignty; what it means at the organizational level, how it differs from AI ethics, and why it is becoming a governance issue Insight into how information environments are architecturally designed to shape attention and belief, drawn from twenty years of curating the world’s most-watched ideas platform A practitioner’s understanding of how consequential ideas are built, communicated, and adopted, and what makes organizations resistant or receptive to them A non-alarmist, analytically grounded perspective on AI’s social and political impacts, suited to senior teams that have already moved past the introductory conversation