Arbetets framtid speakers

Why organisations work with Naya Antoniou She brings dual training in organisational psychology and integrative psychotherapy to workplace mental health, which sharpens her work on burnout beyond surface-level wellbeing programmes. Her career-transition practice with vulnerable populations through Doctors of the World and ActionAid Hellas gives her direct evidence of how work loss, identity and recovery interact, which translates into how she advises corporate clients on restructuring with humanity. She works across the full multigenerational stack, from Gen Z entrants to senior leaders, and treats generational tension as a culture-design question, not a stereotype-management exercise. As a Lean In Greece Circle Leader and Women on Top mentor, she has a substantive track record on women in workplace mental health and HR, useful for organisations whose inclusion work has stalled at policy level. Biography highlights Postgraduate Degree in Organisational Psychology Postgraduate Degree in Career, Executive and Business Coaching MSc in International Relations, University of Piraeus Evidence-Based Coaching certification, Athens Coaching Institute Circle Leader, Lean In Greece Network (Mental Health and HR circle) Career coach with Doctors of the World and ActionAid Hellas career transition programmes Biography Burnout has stopped being an individual diagnosis. Organisations now carry it as an operating cost: turnover, presenteeism, project slippage, the quiet attrition of people who never quite leave. Naya Antoniou’s work sits inside that operating cost, with the tools of organisational psychology and evidence-based coaching applied directly to how teams are structured, led and supported. Her training combines a postgraduate degree in Organisational Psychology with a postgraduate qualification in Career, Executive and Business Coaching, anchored by an MSc in International Relations from the University of Piraeus. Ongoing postgraduate training in Integrative Psychotherapy gives her practice a clinical grounding that is unusual in corporate coaching. The applied work spans corporate culture transformation, leadership development, and career transition programmes. With Doctors of the World, she has coached women asylum seekers rebuilding work identities from zero. With ActionAid Hellas, she has run career transition programmes for vulnerable groups facing displacement from the labour market. That work shapes how she advises corporate clients on restructure, redeployment and the human side of workforce change. Within Greece, she leads the Mental Health and HR circle of Lean In Greece and mentors with Women on Top on workplace equality. The through-line across her practice is concrete: cultures hold people when they are designed to, and fall apart when wellbeing is treated as a benefit rather than a system. Her speaking work brings that argument into rooms where leaders are deciding which to choose. Key speaking topics Multigenerational teams and Gen Z engagement Burnout and workplace mental health Psychological safety as a leadership practice Culture change in high-performance organisations Future skills for emerging leaders Career transition and workforce change Women in mental health and HR Ideal for CHROs and heads of people redesigning engagement strategy across five generations Leadership teams managing burnout risk during restructure or rapid growth HR and DEI leads building culture programmes that move past policy statements Founders and senior leaders of mid-sized organisations in Southern Europe scaling their first formal people function Audience outcomes A clearer view of how generational expectations shape engagement, retention and management overhead Specific moves leaders can make to install psychological safety as a working condition, not an annual survey question A working diagnostic for burnout that distinguishes individual recovery from structural cause Practical reframing of culture change as a design problem with measurable inputs

Why organisations work with Neil Sahota He was an operator inside the IBM Watson Group when cognitive computing first met enterprise budgets, which gives him a deployment vocabulary most AI speakers lack. As co-founder of the UN’s AI for Good Initiative, he has helped scope and govern AI projects across the Sustainable Development Goals, giving boards a credible reference point on responsible deployment. His book “Own the A.I. Revolution,” named a Soundview Best Business Book of 2019 and published by McGraw Hill, sets out a buyer-side framework for AI investment that holds up in front of a commercial executive committee. He sits at the intersection of enterprise AI and capital allocation through Tech Coast Angels and advisory roles with Miramar and CerraCap, so he reads AI strategy through an investor lens as well as an engineer’s. As Chief Innovation Officer at UC Irvine’s Samueli School of Engineering, he keeps a continuous line into university research, which means his keynote content moves with the field, not behind it. Biography highlights IBM Master Inventor and former World Wide Business Development Leader, IBM Watson Group United Nations Artificial Intelligence Advisor and co-founder of the UN’s AI for Good Initiative Chief Innovation Officer, Samueli School of Engineering, UC Irvine Author of “Own the A.I. Revolution” (McGraw Hill), Soundview Best Business Book of 2019 Forbes contributor; featured in the Wall Street Journal, BBC, Wired, Fast Company and Business Insider CEO of ACSI Labs; member of Tech Coast Angels; advisor to Miramar Ventures and CerraCap Ventures Co-host of the “AI for All” podcast Biography Inside the IBM Watson Group, in the years between the Jeopardy! Grand Challenge and Watson’s first commercial healthcare deployments, a small group of business development leaders had to teach Fortune 500 buyers what cognitive computing was actually for. Neil Sahota was one of them. That experience, building enterprise AI cases when the category did not yet exist, is the foundation of everything he now offers a senior audience. He carried that operator perspective into the United Nations as an AI Advisor and co-founder of the AI for Good Initiative, where the work shifted from selling AI capability to governing it. The Initiative now coordinates AI projects against the Sustainable Development Goals, and Sahota’s role gives him a working view of how AI behaves at scale, across jurisdictions, and under public scrutiny. Few keynote speakers in the AI category hold both an enterprise deployment credential and a multilateral governance seat. His book “Own the A.I. Revolution,” published by McGraw Hill and named a Soundview Best Business Book of 2019, sets out an investment logic for AI that a commercial executive committee can actually use: where to play, how to assemble the team, how to evaluate vendors and partners. As Chief Innovation Officer at UC Irvine’s Samueli School of Engineering, and as a contributor to Forbes and a regular voice in the Wall Street Journal, BBC and Wired, he keeps that argument current as the technology and the regulatory perimeter both move. The buyer test is simple. A leadership team that wants a serious conversation about turning AI ambition into operating advantage, with someone who has built it, governed it, and written the framework, gets one in the room. Key speaking topics Enterprise AI strategy and deployment Responsible AI and governance Generative AI and the future of business AI for social impact and the UN Sustainable Development Goals Innovation, entrepreneurship and emerging technology The future of work in the age of AI Ideal for Boards and executive committees setting AI investment priorities CIOs, CTOs and Chief AI Officers moving from pilot to production Heads of innovation and corporate venture leads scoping AI partnerships Public sector and multilateral audiences working on AI governance and public-good applications Audience outcomes A clearer read on where AI investment produces commercial advantage and where it produces sunk cost A practical view of AI governance from someone who has helped shape it at the United Nations Specific reference cases drawn from IBM Watson-era enterprise deployments and current UN AI for Good projects A sharper internal language for AI strategy that a board, a finance committee and an engineering function can all use

Why organisations work with Nick Bostrom He authored Superintelligence, the text credited with bringing AI existential risk into mainstream policy, technology and boardroom discussion. The vocabulary leaders are now using to debate frontier AI traces back to this work. He led the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford for nineteen years, a research programme whose alumni now staff AI safety teams at the major frontier labs and policy units in Washington, London and Brussels. His simulation argument and work on anthropic reasoning have made him one of the few philosophers whose primary papers are read inside technical AI research, not just adjacent to it. Deep Utopia, his 2024 follow-up, addresses the strategic question most leadership teams have not yet started on: what an organisation is for in a world where AI systems can perform almost any cognitive task better than humans. He treats AI governance as a question about the shape of the future, not a compliance exercise, which is the register most senior leaders need but rarely get from technical or regulatory briefings. Biography highlights Founding Director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford, 2005 to 2024. Founder and Principal Researcher, Macrostrategy Research Initiative. Author of Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, New York Times bestseller, Oxford University Press. Author of Deep Utopia: Life and Meaning in a Solved World, Ideapress, 2024. Twice named on Foreign Policy’s Top 100 Global Thinkers. Recipient of the Eugene R. Gannon Award; ranked on Prospect magazine’s World Thinkers list as the highest-placed analytic philosopher. Biography Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies arrived in 2014 with a thesis few mainstream readers were ready for: that advanced AI systems would, on plausible development paths, present a control problem of civilisational importance. A decade later the book sits on the desks of frontier lab leadership, AI policy officials and the boards of companies whose products now depend on the technology it described. The work came out of the Future of Humanity Institute, which Bostrom founded at Oxford in 2005 and led until its closure in 2024. FHI built the early academic infrastructure for what is now a global field, training researchers who now sit inside OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind and the UK AI Safety Institute. His earlier paper on the simulation argument, published in The Philosophical Quarterly in 2003, became one of the few philosophical works to be taken seriously by technical AI researchers and physicists. His 2024 book, Deep Utopia, turns the lens around. The question is no longer whether humanity survives advanced AI, but what people and organisations do in a world where machines can perform almost any cognitive task. For executives whose strategic plans assume scarce human cognitive labour as their basic input, this is the next problem to think about, and very few credible voices have started. Bostrom is now Founder and Principal Researcher of the Macrostrategy Research Initiative, continuing the long-range work on technology, governance and the human future that began at Oxford. Foreign Policy has twice named him among its Top 100 Global Thinkers; Prospect ranked him as the highest-placed analytic philosopher on its World Thinkers list. Key speaking topics Frontier AI and existential risk AI governance and alignment under uncertainty Long-range technology strategy The simulation argument and the limits of knowledge Post-AGI economics and the meaning problem Anthropic reasoning and decision-making under deep uncertainty The future of human enhancement Ideal for Boards and executive teams setting AI strategy and risk posture for the next decade Heads of state, regulators and policy units shaping national AI governance Frontier technology leadership and corporate venture teams Investor and asset-allocator audiences thinking about exposure to AI-driven structural change Audience outcomes A working vocabulary for talking about AI risk, capability and alignment with the same precision used inside frontier labs A clearer view of which AI governance questions are tractable now and which require long-range thinking A grounded sense of how to plan for a post-instrumental economy where human cognitive labour is no longer the scarce input Recognition of how anthropic reasoning and scenario thinking apply to corporate decisions under deep uncertainty Familiarity with the arguments shaping how regulators, AI labs and national security communities are now framing frontier AI

Why organisations work with Nicklas Pyrdol He brings a working sport psychology background, including consulting to Olympians and world champions, into the language of corporate hiring and team performance, which most HR-stage speakers cannot. His operator track record is unusual for a speaker in this space: Executive HR Manager inside a tech company and partner in a tech startup, so the recommendations land for line leaders, not just HR. The client list is a credibility anchor on its own. LEGO Group, Maersk, Novo Nordisk, Orsted, Lundbeck, HubSpot, Dynatrace, SimCorp and Vivino have used him for the same recurring problem: serious hiring that holds up under scale. Through Beyond Talents and “The Recruitment Equation” podcast with Pil Byriel, he is in continuous dialogue with senior talent acquisition leaders, including Lundbeck’s Head of Global Talent Acquisition, which keeps the material current rather than recycled. He treats inclusion as a hiring quality issue, not a politics issue, which is the framing senior buyers want when DEI has become contested ground inside their own organisations. Biography highlights Founder of Beyond Talents, a Copenhagen-based talent acquisition advisory and speaking practice. Former sport psychology consultant to Olympians and world champions before moving into corporate HR leadership. Co-host of “The Recruitment Equation” podcast with Pil Byriel, featuring senior talent acquisition leaders from companies including Lundbeck. Co-author of a Danish book on motivation, “Motivation. Naa i maal med din traening”. Published academic work on talent development environments, including the Ajax Amsterdam academy, using the holistic ecological approach. Engaged as a keynote speaker by HubSpot, Dynatrace, SimCorp, Vivino, Maersk, LEGO Group, Lundbeck, Novo Nordisk and Orsted across Europe, Asia and the United States. Biography Hiring is where most organisations leak their strategy. Pipelines are narrow, interview panels reward familiarity, and the people who arrive cannot deliver what the plan assumed. Pyrdol’s career has been a long argument that this is fixable, and that the fix is mostly process and psychology rather than budget. His starting point was elite sport. Before moving into business, he worked as a sport psychology consultant with Olympians and world champions, and published research on talent development environments using the holistic ecological approach, including work on the Ajax Amsterdam academy. The premise from that period stayed with him: talent is a function of environment, not a fixed property of the individual. He then moved inside companies, first as an Executive HR Manager in a tech firm and then as a partner in a tech startup, before founding Beyond Talents in Copenhagen. From that base, he advises senior leaders at HubSpot, Dynatrace, SimCorp, Vivino, Maersk, LEGO Group, Lundbeck, Novo Nordisk and Orsted on recruitment, retention, inclusion and the everyday psychological safety that lets teams actually use the talent they hire. The current output runs across formats. He co-hosts “The Recruitment Equation” with Pil Byriel, where guests include Lundbeck’s Head of Global Talent Acquisition, Cassie Wu and Fairec’s Morten Gerner on AI and bias; he co-authored a Danish book on motivation; he writes regularly for HR audiences. The through-line is consistent. Recruitment, inclusion and engagement are operational disciplines, and senior leaders should hold them to operational standards. Key speaking topics Talent acquisition and inclusive recruitment Employee engagement and retention Psychological safety in teams Diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging Performance psychology in business Mindset during organisational transformation HR leadership capability Ideal for CHROs, talent acquisition leaders and heads of people are rebuilding hiring under pressure. Executive teams whose strategy depends on attracting and keeping scarce specialist talent. HR and recruitment functions reworking inclusion programmes for substance over signalling. Leadership audiences in scale-up tech and large enterprises managing distributed, multigenerational teams. Audience outcomes A sharper diagnosis of where their current hiring process is filtering out the talent they say they want. Concrete moves to widen the funnel and reduce bias without weakening the hiring bar. A working definition of psychological safety that distinguishes it from comfort, agreement or low standards. A view of engagement and retention as a continuous design problem owned by leaders, not a survey owned by HR. Language for talking to executives about inclusion in commercial terms when the political conversation has stalled.

Why organisations work with Nikki Greenberg Her Five Step Future Ready Framework gives leadership teams a structured, replicable methodology for taking AI and technology adoption from boardroom conversation to approved initiative: developed directly from leading digital transformation across a major institutional real estate portfolio, not from consulting at a remove. She reads the built environment, business strategy, and technology fluently and simultaneously: enabling her to assess AI’s implications for physical assets, long capital cycles, and operational infrastructure in ways that technology-only futurists cannot. As founder of Women in PropTech and three-term co-chair of the ULI New York Technology & Innovation Council, she has shaped industry consensus on built-world innovation rather than simply reported on it, which means audiences get a perspective that is ahead of the published analysis, not derived from it. Her client roster spans real estate, financial services, retail, hospitality, and the public sector, giving organisations outside property access to cross-industry pattern recognition on how physical-digital convergence is being handled at scale elsewhere. She translates demographic shifts, emerging technology, and long-range scenarios into specific decisions leaders can take today; not horizon-scanning for its own sake, but a structured pathway from trend to action. Biography highlights Former Head of Technology Strategy (Real Estate) at QIC, where she led the digital transformation of a $22 billion real estate portfolio within a global investment manager with $70 billion AUM Founder and Global Ambassador of Women in PropTech Former three-term co-chair, Urban Land Institute New York Technology & Innovation Council Speaker of the Year, Trends & Technologies category (2025); ULI Global Luminary (2022); MIPIM Global PropTech Awards Finalist (2019); CIO View’s 5 Most Influential Women in Real Estate to Watch Career spanning architecture, development, and technology strategy across Lendlease, Koichi Takada Architects, Greenland Australia, and Brown Harris Stevens Bachelor of Architecture (Hons), Master of Architecture, Master of International Business – all from UNSW, Sydney Conference and event engagements include Harvard Business School, Bank of America, Brookfield, UN-Habitat, Smart City Expo World Congress, MIPIM, and the National Association of Realtors Biography Nikki Greenberg began her career as an architect working on master-planned communities and mixed-use developments across Sydney, New York, and China. That background – designing places intended to serve the next generation of occupants – became the foundation for a career built around a single organising question: what do today’s decisions look like from twenty years out? At QIC, one of Australia’s largest investment managers, she led the digital transformation of a $22 billion real estate portfolio, translating technology strategy into decisions about operations, assets, and customer experience at institutional scale. It is this combination that makes her unusual: she has delivered the physical and the digital, not merely theorised about their convergence. Her Five Step Future Ready Framework, developed from that experience, gives leadership teams a structured methodology for moving from technology awareness to committed action; addressing the specific friction points of incentive misalignment, budget pressure, and multi-generational workforces that stall most transformation programmes. It is the practical core of her keynote work across industries as varied as financial services, retail, and urban planning. She is the founder of Women in PropTech and served three terms as co-chair of the Urban Land Institute’s New York Technology & Innovation Council; roles that positioned her at the centre of where policy, capital, and technology strategy converge in the built environment. Recognised as Speaker of the Year (Trends & Technologies, 2025) and a ULI Global Luminary, she holds a Master of Architecture, Master of International Business, and Bachelor of Architecture with honours from UNSW, Sydney, and is based in New York City. Key speaking topics AI and digital transformation in the built environment Future-readiness strategy and technology adoption frameworks The future of cities, real estate, and physical infrastructure AI and the future of work Technology strategy for asset-intensive industries Demographic change and long-range scenario planning PropTech, ConTech, and innovation in the property sector Ideal for C-suite and board-level leaders in real estate, construction, and asset management navigating technology strategy and digital transformation CIOs, CTOs, and Chief Transformation Officers in industries with significant physical infrastructure; financial services, retail, hospitality, public works Industry associations and sector conferences where audiences need technology insight grounded in commercial and operational reality, not pure speculation Leadership development programmes seeking a cross-industry perspective on AI adoption, future-of-work strategy, and long-range planning Audience outcomes A named, structured framework (Five Step Future Ready Framework) for moving technology and AI initiatives from aspiration to organisational buy-in and implementation Clearer understanding of how demographic shifts, AI, robotics, and automation will affect demand for physical space, workforce design, and capital allocation: framed in sector-specific terms Practical starting points for a digital transformation roadmap: including how to sequence early initiatives while building toward a long-term AI integration plan Greater confidence in communicating technology strategy across functions and seniority levels, including to boards and investors unfamiliar with the underlying technology A recalibrated sense of timeline: which technology trends require decisions now, and which can be monitored without near-term commitment

Why organisations work with Nilofer Merchant Her Onlyness framework offers a structural diagnosis for why innovation stalls inside organisations: not a confidence problem or a diversity problem, but a systemic filtering-out of unconventional ideas that the existing norms were built to do. Our Best Work (HarperBusiness, 2026) names 24 specific norms – including performance reviews, servant leadership, and “move fast and break things” – that actively undermine the conditions for great work, and provides a measurable, team-applicable alternative for each one. She holds a position few speakers occupy: genuine technology executive experience (Apple, Autodesk, Symantec; 100+ products; $18B in revenues) combined with management research that Thinkers50 cited as among the five ideas most likely to shape business for the next twenty years. She reframes the productivity and innovation conversation away from individual behaviour change – where most leadership speakers operate – and onto the systems and norms that leaders themselves control, which is a more actionable entry point for a board or senior team. Ranked by Thinkers50 as the “#1 person most likely to influence the future of management in both theory and practice,” her work carries both intellectual authority and practical application at the senior level. Biography highlights Author of four books on organisational performance and work design: The New How (O’Reilly, 2010), 11 Rules for Creating Value in the #SocialEra (Harvard Business Review, 2012), The Power of Onlyness (Viking, 2017), and Our Best Work (HarperBusiness, 2026) Thinkers50 “Future Thinker” Award, 2013; ranked #22 globally in 2017 ranking; Thinkers50 Top 50, 2021; The Power of Onlyness shortlisted for the Thinkers50 Breakthrough Idea Award TED mainstage speaker; “Sitting Is the Smoking of Our Generation” ranks in the top 10% of TED’s most-viewed talks Harvard Business Review contributor; media coverage includes Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Financial Times, Bloomberg, Fast Company, and CNN Former executive at Apple, Autodesk, and GoLive; personally launched more than 100 products generating $18 billion in revenue across 25 years in technology Teaches business strategy and collaborative management at Stanford University and Santa Clara University; MBA, Santa Clara University Founder, The Intangible Labs; top 10 HR thinker, HR Magazine Biography Nilofer Merchant starts from an observation that most organisations resist: the management tools that delivered performance in the twentieth century are actively limiting performance now. From her position as founder of The Intangible Labs and author of four books on work design, she has spent twenty-five years building an evidence base for that claim, and an alternative. Her Onlyness framework, developed in The Power of Onlyness (Viking, 2017) and cited by Thinkers50 as one of five ideas most likely to shape business for the next twenty years, holds that modern value creation flows not from hierarchy or title, but from the distinct perspective that only each individual can bring. When organisations filter out that perspective through deference, conformity, and outdated norms, they lose the one input that capital and process cannot replicate. Our Best Work (HarperBusiness, 2026) takes that argument into the operational detail boards and leadership teams can actually act on. It names 24 specific norms – from performance reviews to servant leadership to “move fast and break things” – that suppress contribution, trust, and innovation, and pairs each with a measurable alternative. The argument is structural: the problem is not the willingness of people to perform, but the systems they are asked to perform inside. Merchant’s authority on this is grounded in operating experience. A former executive at Apple, Autodesk, and Symantec, she personally launched more than 100 products generating $18 billion in revenue. She has contributed to Harvard Business Review, been ranked #22 among the world’s top management thinkers by Thinkers50, and teaches business strategy at Stanford University and Santa Clara University. Her TED talk “Sitting Is the Smoking of Our Generation” ranks in the top 10% of TED’s most-viewed talks. Key speaking topics Organisational norms and performance systems The Onlyness framework and value creation Intangible value in modern organisations Collaborative strategy and execution Innovation and idea suppression in hierarchical structures Future of work and work design Culture change as systems change Ideal for CHROs and People leaders designing or overhauling performance and culture systems CEOs and senior leadership teams asking why execution consistently falls short of strategy Chief Innovation Officers and transformation leads examining why new ideas fail to scale internally Boards and executive committees evaluating whether their management models are still fit for purpose Audience outcomes A named diagnostic framework (Onlyness) for identifying where organisational value is being systematically suppressed – and why Specific understanding of which widely adopted management practices are actively limiting innovation and contribution in their own organisations A practical model for replacing competition-based and hierarchy-based norms with trust and collaboration-based alternatives, drawn from Our Best Work‘s 24-indicator framework Language for the gap between what organisations currently measure and what actually creates value – useful for board-level and senior team conversations Concrete team-level practices applicable immediately post-session, drawn from the chapter-by-chapter practice model in Our Best Work

Why organisations work with Niluka Kavanagh She co-founded KPMG’s Behavioural Science Unit, giving her a practitioner’s understanding of how psychological insight can be embedded in organisational design: not cited in a presentation, but built into real structures inside a global firm. The KPMG FutureThinkers initiative she co-founded, convening speakers from the BBC, HSBC, and others, gives her direct insight into how large organisations signal innovation internally, and where those signals fall short. Through The Modern CEO, her leadership framework for organisations, she takes the multigenerational engagement debate out of HR theory and into the specifics of daily leadership communication, psychological safety, and behavioural design across teams. She has operated inside large organisations and built independent businesses, so she can speak to the intrapreneurship and autonomy conversation from both sides of the corporate boundary. Operating experience across fourteen countries, with a community of more than a thousand independent founders behind her, gives her a working understanding of what trust, engagement, and team performance look like when conventional structures of co-location and hierarchy do not apply. Biography highlights Opened the 2026 Learning Technologies conference programme on the human side of the future of work, at Europe’s largest workplace learning event Co-founded KPMG’s Behavioural Science Unit and the KPMG FutureThinkers initiative during nearly five years as a consultant and project lead at the firm Advised organisations including Mastercard, Tesco, the London Stock Exchange Group, and Lloyds Bank Published in The World Financial Review on the application of behavioural science to customer experience design, and featured in MSN’s “Top 10 Leading Speakers to Follow” (2025) Member of the UN Innovation Network (UNIN) Graduate of the University of Oxford (English, Somerville College) and an Alumni Ambassador for the college; has guest lectured at Trinity College Dublin and the University of Edinburgh Founder of ImagineThat, a global community for entrepreneurs with more than 1,000 members across multiple countries Biography Most organisations still use presence as a proxy for productivity and hierarchy as a proxy for trust. Neither assumption holds for the workforce that is now entering and increasingly leaving corporate life. Niluka Kavanagh’s work sits precisely at that fault line: the widening gap between how organisations are designed and what the people inside them now expect. Her grounding in this is practical. At KPMG, she spent nearly five years consulting for organisations including Mastercard, Tesco, and the London Stock Exchange Group, co-founding both the firm’s Behavioural Science Unit and its FutureThinkers initiative. Both projects were about the same thing: applying psychological and behavioural insight to how organisations lead change, design experiences, and engage the people doing the work. She now takes that thinking to the stage. In 2026 she opened the Learning Technologies conference, Europe’s largest workplace learning event, on the human side of the future of work, and she is a member of the UN Innovation Network. Her writing on behavioural science and customer experience has appeared in The World Financial Review. That work rests on an unusual operating base. Three businesses, fourteen countries of operating experience, and a community of more than a thousand independent founders gave her the empirical foundation for The Modern CEO, a leadership framework focused on engagement, communication, psychological safety, and intrapreneurship across multigenerational teams. She works with senior leaders to move organisations beyond outdated management models towards cultures built on clarity, trust, and sustainable performance. Key speaking topics Future of work and workforce transformation The Modern CEO framework for multigenerational leadership Behavioural science in organisational design Multigenerational leadership and team engagement Intrapreneurship and internal innovation Human-centric leadership and trust structures Leadership communication and psychological safety Ideal for CHROs and people leaders managing generational shifts in workforce expectation and culture CEOs and senior leadership teams seeking to align organisational structure with modern ways of working Transformation leads and change teams working on culture, engagement, and talent retention Professional services and entrepreneurial firms navigating the shift to more autonomous, distributed, or flexible operating models Audience outcomes A working understanding of how generational values are reshaping expectations around autonomy, leadership, and work design, and where the organisational cost is already showing up The Modern CEO framework as a practical model for engagement, intrapreneurship, communication, and psychological safety across multigenerational teams Concrete approaches to unlocking intrapreneurial thinking in teams, drawn from real experience building innovation initiatives inside a global consultancy A clearer sense of how behavioural science applies to culture and leadership challenges beyond the theoretical, grounded in organisational practice Practical questions to apply to their own organisation’s structure, communication norms, and talent strategy

Why organisations work with Noreena Hertz Sits on two Nasdaq-listed boards, Mattel and Warner Music Group, which means her counsel is shaped by live boardroom debates on governance, ESG and consumer strategy rather than from the outside. Has spent two decades arguing, in print and to governments, that political and economic risk are inseparable from corporate strategy; The Silent Takeover and IOU named structural risks that later became central to board agendas. Authored original research on a 13 to 20 year-old cohort she labels Generation K, giving consumer brands and employers a specific read on the workforce and customer base now entering organisations. Frames AI for senior audiences as a question of governance, labour and societal trust, not feature adoption, which is what most boards now need from the conversation. Writes for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times and The Guardian, which means she works in the same register and discipline as the publications a senior buyer reads on a Sunday. Biography highlights PhD in Economics and Business, King’s College, Cambridge; MBA, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Honorary Professor, UCL Institute for Global Prosperity, University College London. Director, Mattel (Nasdaq) and Warner Music Group (Nasdaq); also serves on the board of Workhuman. Author of five books including The Silent Takeover, IOU: The Debt Threat, Eyes Wide Open, Generation K and The Lonely Century, which was named Book of the Year by The Daily Telegraph, Wired and El Mundo. Opinion contributor to The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Financial Times and The Guardian. Hosted MegaHertz: London Calling on SiriusXM Insight as the network’s first foreign-based news and talk host. Biography The Silent Takeover, published in 2001, argued that global corporations were displacing the state as the primary political actor in citizens’ lives. Two decades later, that thesis reads less like provocation and more like the standing brief for any board navigating ESG, regulation and political pressure. Noreena Hertz wrote it as a Cambridge economist; the questions it raised have followed her into the boardrooms she now sits inside. Her work has consistently anticipated structural risks before they hit corporate agendas. IOU: The Debt Threat made the case for sovereign debt as a destabilising force years before the financial crisis. Generation K, based on her own survey research with thousands of 13 to 20 year-olds in the UK and US, identified anxiety, loneliness and institutional distrust as defining cohort traits, well before those words became standard in workforce and consumer strategy decks. The Lonely Century, published in 2020, treated loneliness as an economic and political variable, not a wellbeing issue. The credentials sit behind the argument rather than in front of it. A PhD from Cambridge and an MBA from Wharton. An Honorary Professorship at the UCL Institute for Global Prosperity. Directorships at Mattel and Warner Music Group, both Nasdaq-listed, and at Workhuman. Opinion pieces in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times. The work has been recognised by The Daily Telegraph, Wired and El Mundo, which each named The Lonely Century a Book of the Year. What makes the perspective unusual is the combination of seats. Few economists who write at this register also vote on remuneration, audit and governance matters at major listed companies. That is why the boards and leadership teams who book her tend to be working on the same questions she is: how to govern through geopolitical fracture, how to integrate AI without losing institutional trust, and how to lead a workforce and customer base that has stopped giving incumbents the benefit of the doubt. Key speaking topics Geopolitical and political risk for business AI, governance and societal trust Generation K and the post-millennial workforce and consumer Loneliness as an economic and political variable Global capitalism, debt and the state ESG and corporate governance in contested terrain Decision-making under uncertainty Ideal for Board directors and chairs working on governance, ESG and political risk CEOs and executive committees setting strategy under geopolitical and AI uncertainty CHROs and CMOs whose workforce and customer base is now defined by Gen Z and post-millennial behaviour Investor and asset-management leadership audiences focused on macro and policy risk Audience outcomes A sharper read on where geopolitical and policy risk meets corporate strategy A specific picture of how a younger workforce and consumer base behaves, and why incumbent assumptions are failing A framework for treating AI as a governance and trust question, not only a technology one Argument-ready material for board-level debate on ESG, capitalism and the state A clearer view of loneliness and disconnection as commercial and political forces, not soft issues

Why organisations work with Oliver Burkeman His «efficiency trap» argument; that pursuing greater efficiency increases the demands made on time rather than reducing them, gives leaders a named, evidence-based explanation for why their productivity programmes are making things worse. This is not a motivational reframe; it is a structural diagnosis. Four Thousand Weeks and Meditations for Mortals are already in the hands of senior leaders and knowledge workers. A session with Burkeman builds on a shared conceptual vocabulary rather than introducing one from scratch, which shortens the distance from insight to action. His «imperfectionism» framework, developed in Meditations for Mortals, gives teams a practical operating principle: that meaningful action does not require ideal conditions, and that waiting for control is itself the performance problem. He approaches this as a journalist with fourteen years of empirical investigation into the psychology of time and attention, not as a consultant with a methodology to sell. His arguments are critical rather than prescriptive, which gives them greater durability in boardroom and executive conversations. Two national bestsellers, two TEDx talks, and a decade-long BBC Radio 4 presenting record mean his material has been tested across audiences, formats, and cultures without dilution. Biography highlights Author of Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (2021, Farrar, Straus and Giroux), New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller; named one of the best books of 2021 by the Financial Times, The Times, The Observer, Audible, Time, and Barnes & Noble Author of Meditations for Mortals (2024, Farrar, Straus and Giroux) – national bestseller; introduces his operational philosophy of «imperfectionism» Former staff writer and weekly columnist at The Guardian; «This Column Will Change Your Life» ran for fourteen years (2006–2020) Writing has appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Psychologies, and New Philosopher Winner, Foreign Press Association Young Journalist of the Year Award (2002); shortlisted, Orwell Prize (2006); FPA science story of the year (2015) Educated at Christ’s College, Cambridge (BA Social and Political Sciences) Presenter of BBC Radio 4 series including «Oliver Burkeman is Busy» and «Living with the News» TEDx talks: «How to stop fighting against time» (TEDxUniversityofNicosia) and «Why patience is a superpower» (TEDxManchester) Biography Most senior leaders know their organisations are overloaded. Fewer can explain why every investment in productivity appears to make it worse. Oliver Burkeman spent fourteen years as a columnist and journalist at The Guardian investigating exactly this tension, and his conclusion was not a better system, but a structural critique of the system itself. His 2021 New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals names this «the efficiency trap»: the more capacity organisations and individuals create, the more demands expand to fill it. The book argues that the premise of eventually getting on top of everything is not a problem to be solved with better methods, but a structural illusion that drives the overload it promises to end. For leaders navigating performance culture debates, it provides intellectual grounding that goes well beyond the self-help category. His 2024 follow-up, Meditations for Mortals, develops a named operational philosophy, «imperfectionism» as a practical alternative. The argument is not that people should do less, but that taking meaningful action requires abandoning the precondition that conditions be ideal first. This gives teams and their leaders a durable, non-sentimental vocabulary for moving from awareness of overload to genuinely different behaviour. Burkeman trained at Christ’s College, Cambridge, reported from London, Washington, and New York, and was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and New Philosopher, and he presents BBC Radio 4 series alongside his newsletter, The Imperfectionist, which has built a substantial professional following. Key speaking topics Productivity culture and the efficiency trap Time, attention, and human finitude Imperfectionism as an organisational operating philosophy Burnout, overload, and performance culture Meaningful work and prioritisation under constraint The psychology of distraction and focus Patience as a strategic capability Ideal for CHROs and People directors addressing burnout, overload, and performance culture Senior leadership teams reviewing the assumptions underlying their productivity and ways-of-working programmes Conference audiences in knowledge-intensive sectors where attention, prioritisation, and sustainable output are live strategic concerns Boards and executive teams examining the relationship between culture, wellbeing, and long-term organisational performance Audience outcomes A named framework (the efficiency trap) for explaining why productivity investment can increase rather than reduce overload, applicable immediately in leadership conversations Clearer language for the tension between performance expectations and human limits, reducing the vagueness that makes wellbeing conversations difficult to act on Familiarity with «imperfectionism» as a practical operating principle for individuals and teams working under conditions of permanent overload A reframing of prioritisation: not as a time management technique, but as the fundamental capability that determines organisational focus Greater confidence in decisions to stop, delay, or deprioritise – backed by a rigorous philosophical and psychological argument rather than sentiment

Why organisations work with Oliver Heath He authored the Human Spaces report with Interface, the first global study quantifying the impact of biophilic design on workplace wellbeing and productivity, and brings that evidence base directly into the room. His design practice has delivered biophilic workplace projects for Apple, Bloomberg, Booking.com, Deutsche Bank and Knight Frank Investment Management, so the talk is grounded in live commercial fit-outs, not theory. He works at the intersection of design and research through projects like the BRE Biophilic Office, giving leaders post-occupancy data on what design changes actually shift staff behaviour and outcomes. He translates complex environmental psychology into specific actions a property, HR or facilities team can brief their architects on the next morning. Biography highlights Founder and Director of Oliver Heath Design, an architecture and interior design practice focused on health, wellbeing and biophilic design in the built environment. Trained at Oxford Brookes and The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL (Postgraduate Architectural Studies, with distinction). Winner of the BBC Young Designer of the Year, 1998. Author of “Design a Healthy Home” (Dorling Kindersley, 2021) and “Urban Eco Chic” (Quadrille). Lead author and presenter of the Human Spaces global report on biophilic design in the workplace, in partnership with Interface. Television credits include BBC’s Changing Rooms, DIY SOS and Home Front, and a TEDxUCL talk titled “Biophilic Design: Supporting People and Planet”. Biography The argument for designing offices around human wellbeing used to sit on the soft side of a property brief. The Human Spaces report, written with Interface and based on data from sixteen countries, quantified what designers had been claiming for years: workplaces that bring in natural light, planting and views report measurable lifts in employee wellbeing and productivity. Oliver Heath was the lead voice behind that study. His Brighton-based practice, Oliver Heath Design, has applied the same principles to live workplace projects for Apple, Bloomberg, Booking.com, Deutsche Bank and Knight Frank Investment Management. The work pairs design with measurement; the Knight Frank project, for example, was followed by a post-occupancy staff survey to evidence the shift in how the space supported its people. He also sits on the research side. Oliver Heath Design has worked with the BRE on the Biophilic Office project, a long-running study of what specific design interventions do to occupant behaviour over time. That combination of practising studio and research collaborator is what allows him to brief a board on biophilic design without slipping into either jargon or hype. His training is architectural: Oxford Brookes, then a postgraduate at The Bartlett, UCL, with distinction. He won BBC Young Designer of the Year in 1998 and has remained a public-facing voice on sustainable and healthy interiors since, through his books “Design a Healthy Home” and “Urban Eco Chic”, a TEDxUCL talk on biophilic design, and television work for the BBC. Key speaking topics Biophilic design in the workplace Healthy buildings and occupant wellbeing Sustainable and regenerative interior design Workplace productivity and design strategy Post-occupancy evaluation and design evidence ESG and the built environment Healthy homes and residential wellbeing Ideal for Heads of corporate real estate, workplace and facilities planning a major office redesign or relocation CHROs and people leaders linking wellbeing, engagement and physical environment Sustainability and ESG leads embedding human-centred design into net zero programmes Architects, interior designers and developers commissioning research-led briefs Audience outcomes A clear definition of biophilic design and the specific patterns that have measurable wellbeing and productivity effects Quantified evidence from the Human Spaces report and BRE Biophilic Office on what design changes shift outcomes Named workplace examples, from Apple to Knight Frank, showing how biophilic design is actually delivered at scale A practical brief that property, HR and sustainability teams can take back to their architects and project managers A sharper view of how building design connects to wellbeing strategy, ESG reporting and talent retention

Why organisations work with Oliver Leisse A live trend-research operation behind every keynote. SEE MORE runs ethnographic fieldwork across more than 50 global cities, so the material is observed evidence, not desk-research speculation. A specific point of view on the AI agent shift. His 2024 book “The Age of Agents” with Tim Cortinovis sets out what changes when software stops waiting for prompts and starts acting on goals. A named framework leadership teams can use after the room empties. The Four Metatrends (Commitment, Convenience, Creativity, Connection) and the Consumer Trend Circle give clients a reusable structure for trend triage. Two decades of strategy work for brands including Deutsche Bank, TUI, Henkel, Microsoft, Google, REWE and Deutsche Post. The frame of reference is commercial planning, not academic forecasting. Bilingual delivery in English and German for European audiences who want substance in either language. Biography highlights Founder of SEE MORE, Future Research and Development, Hamburg (2008). Founder of EARSandEYES GmbH (1997), an early online market and trend research institute. Former strategy consultant at DDB, TBWA, BBDO and Springer & Jacoby. Author of “Be prepared” (Haufe Verlag, 2012; 2nd ed. 2014), “So geht Zukunft” (Edel, 2020), “The Age of Agents” (2024), and “Die Zukunft der Gastro” (Deutscher Fachverlag, 2024). Named clients include Deutsche Bank, TUI, Henkel, Microsoft, Google, Deutsche Post, REWE, Burda and AON. SEE MORE conducts qualitative ethnographic research across more than 50 global metropolitan markets. Biography Most futurist content arrives at boards as desk research dressed up in graphics. The signal-to-noise ratio is poor, and the planning horizon is rarely operational. SEE MORE was built to produce something different: ethnographic field observation across more than 50 global cities, fed back into commercial strategy work for organisations that need a defensible view of the next three to five years. The institute’s founder spent the first part of his career as a strategy consultant inside DDB, TBWA, BBDO and Springer & Jacoby. In 1997 he set up EARSandEYES, one of the early online market and trend research firms. SEE MORE followed in 2008. Clients have included Deutsche Bank, TUI, Henkel, Microsoft, Google, Deutsche Post, REWE and Burda. The current centre of gravity is AI agents and what they mean for operating models. The 2024 book “The Age of Agents”, co-written with Tim Cortinovis, argues that the shift from prompted assistants to goal-directed agents changes how work is structured, not just how it is automated. That argument runs through his current keynote material on automation, customer evolution and the future of work. What separates this work from the broader futurist field is the discipline of the underlying method. The Four Metatrends framework (Commitment, Convenience, Creativity, Connection) and the Consumer Trend Circle give leadership teams a reusable structure for triaging weak signals. Both are anchored to observed behaviour in named markets, which is what makes them usable in a planning conversation. Key speaking topics Artificial intelligence and AI agents Future of work and leadership Customer evolution and consumer behaviour Automation and the operating model Trend research and strategic foresight Generation Z and changing workforce expectations Retail and customer experience disruption Ideal for Boards and executive committees setting three-to-five year strategy under AI and automation pressure CMOs and customer experience leads tracking consumer behaviour shifts across European and global markets HR and transformation leads redesigning work around AI-agent capability Innovation and strategy teams looking for a structured trend-triage method Audience outcomes A clearer read on which AI and consumer-behaviour signals matter for the next planning cycle, and which can be deprioritised. A working understanding of the Four Metatrends framework and how to apply it to a specific business unit. A specific point of view on AI agents as an operating model question, not a tooling question. Named examples from observed consumer behaviour in global metropolitan markets, drawn from SEE MORE field research.

Why organisations work with Patrick Kramer Few European voices speak from inside the technology they describe. Kramer carries multiple working implants and has implanted chips publicly on stage, which gives boards a concrete reference point for a debate that usually stays theoretical. Founder and CEO of Digiwell, one of Europe’s most visible commercial biohacking platforms, and founding member of VivoKey Technologies alongside Amal Graafstra. That puts him at the operating end of subdermal identity, not on the commentary side. Twenty years in IT and consulting, including IBM, gives him fluency in enterprise digital transformation language. The cyborg material lands in vocabulary boards already use. Sustained press presence in WIRED, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and PCWorld on under-the-skin technology, which signals he can carry a serious conversation with both technical and general audiences. Biography highlights Founder and CEO, Digiwell – Upgrading Humans, founded 2014, Hamburg. Founding member, VivoKey Technologies, a subdermal identity and authentication platform. Twenty-plus years in international IT and consulting, including IBM. TEDxBucharest speaker, “Super-humans: interconnected cyborgs.” Featured in WIRED, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Computerworld, PCWorld, and Red Bull Media. Professional member of the German Speakers Association and the Global Speakers Federation. Biography Most enterprise debates about human augmentation never leave the slide deck. Patrick Kramer carries the technology under his skin and runs a company that fits it to other people. Through Digiwell, the Hamburg-based platform he founded in 2014, he has built one of Europe’s most visible commercial operations in subdermal NFC and RFID implants used for access, payment, identity, and medical data. The work sits at the edge of mainstream digital transformation, but it grew out of it. Twenty years in international IT and consulting, including a long period at IBM, gave him the enterprise vocabulary that most biohacking voices lack. As a founding member of VivoKey Technologies, the cryptographic identity platform launched with Amal Graafstra, he is also embedded in the engineering side of the field rather than only its public-facing narrative. His TEDxBucharest talk, “Super-humans: interconnected cyborgs,” set out the argument that has since been picked up by WIRED, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and PCWorld. Technology that started on the desk, then on the wrist, is now moving under the skin, and the implications for security, HR, healthcare, and product design are practical rather than speculative. For senior audiences, the value is in the translation. Kramer takes a category that boards tend to dismiss as fringe and connects it back to questions they already own: identity, authentication, employee health data, and the long arc of digital transformation as it stops being external to the human body. Key speaking topics Human augmentation and biohacking Subdermal identity and authentication Digital transformation and the Internet of Things Future of human-machine integration Longevity and performance enhancement Smart cities and connected environments Ethics of under-the-skin technology Ideal for Boards and executive teams setting digital identity, security, and authentication strategy CIOs, CTOs, and CDOs running enterprise digital transformation programmes HR and benefits leaders evaluating health, wellbeing, and workforce technology Innovation, R&D, and product teams in healthcare, financial services, and consumer technology Audience outcomes A working mental model for where biohacking and human augmentation fit inside an enterprise digital transformation roadmap A concrete view of subdermal identity and what it changes for authentication, payments, and access control Sharper vocabulary for the ethical, legal, and HR questions that arise when technology moves from the device to the body Specific examples from Digiwell and VivoKey of what is already operational, separated from what is still speculative