Digital transformation

Why organisations work with Duena Blomstrom She names a specific, measurable liability most boards do not currently track. Human Debt sits underneath stalled transformations and lets a leadership team see why their roadmap keeps slipping for non-technical reasons. Her argument lands with engineering and product audiences who tune out conventional wellbeing language. Framing safety as a debt that compounds against velocity gives operators a vocabulary they will actually use. She built the diagnostic, not just the theory. PeopleNotTech turns the framework into measurement, which means a keynote can connect to real follow-on team data rather than ending at inspiration. Three books across Palgrave Macmillan, Bloomsbury Business, and Kogan Page give her argument continuity from FinTech culture (Emotional Banking) through team safety (People Before Tech) to enterprise transformation (Tech-Led Culture). She speaks publicly as a neurodivergent founder, which gives substance to inclusion conversations that are otherwise abstract for senior audiences. Biography highlights Author of Emotional Banking (Palgrave Macmillan), People Before Tech (Bloomsbury Business), and Tech-Led Culture (Kogan Page). CEO and co-founder of PeopleNotTech, a psychological safety measurement platform. Originator of the Human Debt concept and the Emotional Banking framework. LinkedIn Top Voice on leadership and psychological safety with a large newsletter readership. Former Forbes contributor; host of the “people AND tech” and “Tales from the FinTech Crypt” podcasts. Background spanning C-level roles in startups and major technology companies before founding PeopleNotTech. Biography Most digital transformation programmes do not fail on the technology. They fail on whether the team running them can disagree, recover from a bad decision, and tell the truth about a slipping deadline. That is the territory Duena Blomstrom has spent the last decade making operational. Her central concept, Human Debt, reframes psychological safety as a balance sheet item. Teams accrue interest every time a candid conversation is avoided, every time a senior leader rewards optics over honesty, every time fatigue is left unaddressed. Tech debt gets the spreadsheet. Human Debt rarely does, and the cost shows up in stalled roadmaps, attrition, and AI rollouts that never reach production. She built three books out of this argument. Emotional Banking (Palgrave Macmillan) treated culture as the missing variable in retail banking transformation. People Before Tech (Bloomsbury Business) made the case for safety as a precondition of high performance. Tech-Led Culture (Kogan Page) extended the work into enterprise change. Alongside the writing, she co-founded PeopleNotTech to turn the diagnosis into measurement, so the conversation about team health does not stop at the keynote. Audiences also get a founder who writes openly about being neurodivergent and what that means for leadership in practice. That makes inclusion a substantive thread in her work rather than a section header. Key speaking topics Psychological safety as a measurable team capability Human Debt and the hidden cost of low-trust teams Culture inside digital and AI transformation FinTech, retail banking, and Emotional Banking Neurodiversity and inclusive leadership Future of work and agile team practice Ideal for CHROs, chief people officers, and heads of organisational development running culture or engagement programmes alongside major technology change. CIOs, CTOs, and transformation leads whose roadmaps depend on team behaviour, not just delivery capacity. Banking, FinTech, and financial services leadership teams working through digital and AI rollouts. Boards and ExCos commissioning a serious conversation about why transformation programmes are underperforming. Audience outcomes A working definition of Human Debt that a leadership team can apply to its own organisation the next morning. A clearer line between team-level psychological safety and the commercial outcomes a board cares about. A vocabulary that lands with technical audiences who normally resist culture conversations. Specific signals to look for in teams where transformation, AI adoption, or restructuring is in flight. A frank account of what gets lost when neurodivergent leaders are managed for compliance rather than contribution.

Why organisations work with Scott Galloway A working framework for how platform economics, network effects, and data accumulation concentrate value, drawn from a tenured marketing academic who has also built and sold technology companies inside the same system he analyses. Annual, falsifiable predictions on consumer, technology, and business trends that boards can stress-test against their own capital allocation, rather than abstract futurism. Direct reads on the AI cycle, including where investment is overpriced relative to operating value and where it is not, from a faculty member teaching brand and digital strategy at MBA level. A founder track record across nine companies, including the sale of L2 to Gartner, that grounds the strategic argument in commercial reality rather than commentary. Reach across The Prof G Pod, Pivot with Kara Swisher, and the No Mercy / No Malice newsletter that signals a leader who already shapes how senior audiences think about Big Tech. Biography highlights Professor of Marketing, NYU Stern School of Business; teaches Brand Strategy and Digital Marketing to second-year MBAs. Founder of nine companies including Prophet, RedEnvelope, L2 (sold to Gartner), and Section. New York Times bestselling author of The Four, The Algebra of Happiness, Post Corona, Adrift, and The Algebra of Wealth; books translated into 28 languages. Host of The Prof G Pod and co-host of Pivot with Kara Swisher; publisher of the No Mercy / No Malice newsletter. Board service: The New York Times Company, Urban Outfitters, Panera Bread, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, Ledger. Named one of the world’s best business school professors by Poets & Quants; multiple Webby Award winner. Biography A small number of companies now capture a disproportionate share of consumer attention, transaction data, and equity value. The Four set out the mechanics of how Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Google did it, and the argument has only sharpened as AI consolidates around the same incumbents. Galloway treats this as a question of structural economics, not corporate behaviour, and that is the lens he brings to a boardroom. At NYU Stern, he holds a chair in marketing and teaches Brand Strategy and Digital Marketing to second-year MBAs. Poets & Quants has ranked him among the world’s best business professors. The academic position matters because it disciplines the work, but the operating experience is what makes the analysis useful to executives: nine companies founded, including Prophet, RedEnvelope, and L2, the digital intelligence firm acquired by Gartner in 2017. The published record runs from platform economics in The Four to capital and career frameworks in The Algebra of Wealth, with Post Corona and Adrift sitting between as reads on the post-2020 economy and the structural condition of the United States. Across The Prof G Pod, Pivot with Kara Swisher, and No Mercy / No Malice, he makes annual, data-led predictions on consumer, tech, and macro trends that leadership teams can test against their own planning. What distinguishes him in a room of senior buyers is the combination of categories he occupies at once: faculty member, founder, board director at The New York Times Company and Panera, and a public commentator with reach. That stack means the argument is not theoretical, not detached from operating reality, and not delivered with the hedging that usually accompanies academic input. Key speaking topics Big Tech and platform economics Artificial intelligence and the next concentration of value Brand strategy in a digital, winner-take-most economy Consumer and technology trend forecasting Entrepreneurship and company building Higher education and the future of work Capital, careers, and personal financial strategy Ideal for Boards and executive teams setting strategy in sectors exposed to platform incumbents CMOs, CSOs, and digital leaders rebuilding commercial models for a data-concentrated market Investor and capital allocation audiences seeking a structural read on tech and AI cycles Annual leadership offsites looking for a falsifiable trend forecast rather than generic futurism Audience outcomes A clearer view of where platform economics concentrate value and where they do not, applied to the audience’s own sector. Specific reads on the AI cycle, including which categories are overpriced and which are operationally credible. A set of annual predictions that can be stress-tested against the organisation’s planning assumptions. A sharper sense of what brand and customer strategy now have to do to remain defensible.

Why organisations work with Shameen Prashantham Owns a defined intellectual territory, corporate-and-startup partnering, that almost no other senior strategy academic has built a 15-year body of fieldwork around. Wrote the practitioner book on the subject. Gorillas Can Dance (Wiley, 2021) sets out a tested framework of synergy, interface and exemplar drawn from work with Microsoft, SAP, Bayer, Bosch, BMW, Cisco, Ford, IBM, Intel, Unilever, Walmart and others. Brings genuinely first-hand China and emerging-market perspective to Western boards. Based at CEIBS in Shanghai, with active fieldwork across Bangalore, Lagos, Nairobi, Accra, Tel Aviv and Silicon Valley, he can discuss what Chinese firms actually do, not what Western analysts assume. Writes for the audience he speaks to. Recent contributions to Harvard Business Review, including a June 2024 piece on safe engagement with China, give a buyer confidence the keynote will land at board level rather than in academic register. As CEIBS Associate Dean (Africa) and former MBA Director, he is one of a small group of strategy academics with substantive operating insight into both China and Africa, the two markets large corporations most often handle badly. Biography highlights Professor of International Business and Strategy, China Europe International Business School (CEIBS), Shanghai. Associate Dean (Africa), CEIBS. Previously Associate Dean and MBA Director, 2020 to 2024. Author of Gorillas Can Dance: Lessons from Microsoft and Other Corporations on Partnering with Startups (Wiley, 2021). Author of Born Globals, Networks, and the Large Multinational Enterprise (Routledge). Research published in Journal of International Business Studies, Journal of Business Venturing, Journal of Management Studies, Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, and Organization Studies. Contributor to Harvard Business Review, Financial Times and the Brightline-Thinkers50 volume Strategy@Work. Biography Microsoft, SAP, Bayer, BMW, Walmart and Unilever have all built programmes to partner with startups. Few of those programmes work as designed. The reason is rarely strategy. It is the operating asymmetry between a $200 billion balance sheet and a 30-person company, and almost no one has studied that asymmetry as carefully or for as long as the author of Gorillas Can Dance. Based at CEIBS in Shanghai, Shameen Prashantham has spent more than fifteen years inside this question. His fieldwork runs across Silicon Valley, Bangalore, Tel Aviv, Beijing, Berlin, Lagos, Nairobi and Accra. The book sets out three pillars, synergy, interface and exemplar, that distinguish corporate partnership programmes that produce real innovation from those that produce press releases. His academic credibility is straightforward. PhD from the University of Strathclyde. Research in the Journal of International Business Studies, the Journal of Business Venturing, the Journal of Management Studies, Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, and Organization Studies. The work translates into Harvard Business Review, where his June 2024 piece on safe engagement with China ran in the print edition. What buyers tend to value most is the geography. He sits in Shanghai, runs CEIBS engagement in Africa, and has serious working knowledge of Indian and Israeli innovation ecosystems. For a Western board trying to decide whether and how to partner in or from emerging markets, that combination is rare and expensive to replicate. Key speaking topics Corporate-startup partnerships Innovation strategy in large corporations Doing business in and with China Emerging-market growth strategy Africa as a strategic market Corporate entrepreneurship Sustainable Development Goals partnerships Ideal for CEOs, chief strategy officers and chief innovation officers running corporate venturing or startup-engagement programmes. Boards reassessing China exposure or considering operating commitments in Africa or India. Heads of M&A, partnerships and corporate development designing the next phase of inorganic growth. Executive audiences inside multinationals where emerging-market strategy is on the agenda. Audience outcomes A clear test for whether an existing corporate-startup partnership programme is structurally set up to produce results. Three operating levers, synergy, interface and exemplar, to apply to live partnership decisions. A grounded read on what is actually happening inside Chinese firms and Chinese innovation, beyond Western commentary. A working frame for sequencing entry, partnership and growth decisions in emerging markets. Concrete examples drawn from named programmes at Microsoft, SAP, Bayer, Unilever, Walmart and others.

Why organisations work with Inma Martinez She chairs the Multi-Stakeholder Expert Group at the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence, the G7/OECD body whose work fed directly into Japan’s Hiroshima Process for AI Safety. That gives her a line of sight into the regulation boards will actually have to live with. She built mobile AI recommendation systems with Cambridge University and Trinity College Dublin teams in the early 2000s, before recommender systems were a category. The technical fluency is real, not borrowed. She moves credibly between Goldman Sachs alumni networks, Nokia-era telecoms, the European Commission, UNESCO, the Spanish AI Council, and Imperial College Business School. Few AI voices are taken seriously in all of those rooms. Two published books, including The Fifth Industrial Revolution, give her a coherent thesis on where digital and space economies converge, rather than a list of trends. Biography highlights Chair, Multi-Stakeholder Expert Group, and Co-Chair, Steering Committee, Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence (G7/OECD). Member, AI Council Advisory Board, State Secretariat for AI, Spanish Ministry of Economic Affairs and Digital Transformation. Expert advisor to the European Commission on Big Data and AI since 2001; collaborator with UNIDO, UNESCO, and the European Space Agency. Guest lecturer, Imperial College Business School; Director, Master in Artificial Intelligence, Loyola University, Spain. Author of The Fifth Industrial Revolution (Deusto/Planeta) and The Future of the Automotive Industry. Career across Goldman Sachs, Cable & Wireless, and mobile-internet ventures Escape Velocity and Visual Radio (acquired by Nokia); regularly cited by the Financial Times, The Economist, Bloomberg, Fortune, and Time. Biography The hard problem in AI right now is not the model. It is the distance between what a board has committed to publicly and what the operating business can actually deploy, govern, and defend. Inma Martinez has spent the last decade working that gap from both ends. At the policy end, she chairs the Multi-Stakeholder Expert Group at the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence, the G7/OECD body that shapes the rules large enterprises will eventually have to operate inside. The work she led on Responsible AI, AI Innovation, and the Future of Work fed into the Hiroshima Process for AI Safety. She also sits on Spain’s AI Council Advisory Board and has advised the European Commission on Big Data and AI since 2001. At the operating end, her credentials are not theoretical. She built mobile AI recommendation systems with Cambridge University and Trinity College Dublin teams when the category did not yet exist, after a finance career at Goldman Sachs and a global director role at Cable & Wireless. Her mobile-internet ventures Escape Velocity and Visual Radio were acquired by Nokia. She has worked inside the innovation labs of IBM, HP, LG, and Apple. That combined vantage point is what makes her useful to senior leadership: she can speak to a CTO about deployment, to a chief risk officer about governance exposure, and to a CEO about what the next five years of AI regulation will do to capital allocation. Her two books, The Fifth Industrial Revolution and The Future of the Automotive Industry, set out the same thesis in long form. Named outlets including the Financial Times, The Economist, Bloomberg, Fortune, and Time turn to her when an editorial line on AI needs a serious voice. Key speaking topics Applied AI and competitive advantage AI governance, safety, and the G7/OECD policy landscape The future of work in an AI-automated economy Digital transformation for established enterprises and SMEs The Fifth Industrial Revolution and the space economy Connected mobility and the automotive industry’s digital reinvention 5G, edge and cloud computing, and the Internet of Everything Ideal for Boards and executive committees setting AI strategy and AI-governance posture CTOs, CIOs, and chief data officers moving AI from pilot into production Chief risk officers and general counsel scoping AI regulatory exposure Industry forums in financial services, automotive, telecoms, and the space economy Audience outcomes A clear read on where global AI regulation is heading, from someone shaping it A working distinction between AI as marketing narrative and AI as operating capability Specific examples of where applied AI is producing measurable advantage, and where it is failing A defensible position on the workforce implications of AI automation A sharper view of how the digital and space economies will reshape industrial strategy

Why organisations work with Adrian Joseph He has run an AI and data function of roughly 1,600 people inside a FTSE 100 company, so his advice to boards reflects what it takes to deliver at that scale, not what a strategy deck suggests. He sits on the boards of Direct Line, Allwyn and Great Ormond Street Hospital, giving him a current view of how AI lands in insurance, gaming and healthcare rather than a single-sector perspective. As an Expert Member of the UK AI Council he contributed to the National AI Strategy, so he reads regulation and policy as someone who has been inside the room, not as an outside observer. He holds an OBE for services to equality and diversity in business and was named the UK’s most influential minority ethnic technology leader by the Financial Times and Inclusive Boards, which sharpens his credibility on the workforce side of AI transformation. His career path through Google, EY and BT gives audiences a rare triangulation: the hyperscaler view of what the technology can do, the consulting view of how to sell change internally, and the operator view of what actually breaks. Biography highlights Former Chief Data and AI Officer, BT Group, leading approximately 1,600 data and AI professionals. Former Senior Partner and Head of UK Data and Analytics for Financial Services at EY. Over ten years in senior leadership roles at Google across cloud, digital and data science. Non-Executive Director at Direct Line Insurance Group, Allwyn UK and Great Ormond Street Hospital NHS Foundation Trust. Expert Member of the UK Government’s AI Council and former Non-Executive Director at the Home Office. OBE for services to equality and diversity in business; named the UK’s most influential BAME technology leader by the Financial Times and Inclusive Boards. Biography Running an AI and data function of 1,600 people inside BT Group taught Adrian Joseph OBE what most board conversations about AI miss. The commercial case is not won in the model. It is won in the operating model, the talent pipeline and the patience of the leadership team to let value compound. That operator’s view is what he brings into the room. Before BT, he spent over a decade at Google in senior cloud, digital and data science roles, then led the UK Data and Analytics practice for Financial Services at EY as a Senior Partner. The path gives him three lenses on the same problem. Hyperscalers built the infrastructure. Consultancies sold the transformation story. Incumbents have to actually run the thing in production under regulatory scrutiny. He currently holds non-executive director roles at Direct Line Insurance Group, Allwyn UK, the National Lottery operator, and Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children NHS Foundation Trust, and sits on the Technology Advisory Board at NatWest Group. As an Expert Member of the UK Government’s AI Council he contributed to the National AI Strategy, and served as a Non-Executive Director at the Home Office from 2015 to 2020. He was awarded an OBE in the 2019 New Year’s Honours for services to equality and diversity in business, and the Financial Times and Inclusive Boards named him the UK’s most influential Black, Asian and ethnic minority technology leader. That recognition is not decoration on the CV. It sharpens his argument that the AI advantage large organisations seek is inseparable from who they let build and govern the systems. Key speaking topics Enterprise AI strategy and commercial return Responsible AI and governance Data and AI operating models at scale Digital and cloud transformation in regulated industries AI policy and the National AI Strategy Diversity and inclusion in technology leadership Board-level oversight of AI risk Ideal for CEOs, CFOs and boards under pressure to show commercial return from AI and data spend Chief Data Officers, CIOs and CTOs building or restructuring AI and data functions Financial services, insurance, healthcare and public sector leaders navigating AI in regulated environments CHROs and transformation leads addressing the talent and inclusion dimension of AI adoption Audience outcomes A sharper line between AI activity that produces commercial return and AI activity that produces slides A realistic view of what an AI and data operating model looks like at enterprise scale, from someone who ran one Current reading of UK AI policy and regulation from inside the AI Council and National AI Strategy work Practical signals for boards on where to probe AI risk, governance and delivery maturity Language for connecting AI capability to workforce, talent and inclusion strategy

Why organisations work with Jennifer Vessels The P.E.A.C.E. Framework gives transformation a structured language and methodology: not abstract change theory, but a tested roadmap built from live engagements inside organisations including Adobe, Cisco, and Novartis She brings Silicon Valley operational experience applied globally. Having led transformation programmes across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, she translates insider knowledge of how the world’s most innovation-intensive organisations actually work into practical approaches for complex, multinational businesses She is an active CEO running transformation programmes concurrently with her speaking engagements, meaning her insights reflect current deployments, not retrospective case studies Her work on generational integration, aligning Gen Z talent, AI capability, and experienced human capital, addresses a workforce tension that most change and transformation speakers do not tackle with equivalent specificity Through the Executive Growth Alliance (EGA), she connects audiences to a live community of F100 leaders navigating the same challenges, giving organisations access to a peer learning network beyond the event itself Biography highlights CEO of Next Step, Silicon Valley consulting firm leading business transformation for global enterprises since 2006 Founder, Executive Growth Alliance: a global peer community of Fortune 100 leaders focused on future-of-work and AI adoption Creator of the P.E.A.C.E. Framework (Purpose, Exploration, Action, Collaboration, Empowerment), deployed across organisations including Adobe, Cisco, Google, IKEA, Microsoft, Novartis, and Schneider Electric Awarded “Best Technology Speaker ’24” (IOFM, Diversified Communications) Author of No Clue, No Fear: Navigating Storms of Change; new book Emergence: How Leaders Break Free from Outdated Thinking (Wiley, October 2026) Featured by EFMD, the World Economic Forum, the Institute of Directors, the San Jose Mercury News, and The New York Times MBA, San Jose State University; MS Occupational Psychology, University of London; INSEAD board governance certification Early career: international business development at Tandberg (acquired by Cisco); Director of Global Sales Operations at Tandem Computers Biography Leadership thinking built for the Industrial Age is not built for what organisations are experiencing now. Most change programmes assume that if the strategy is sound and the technology is right, transformation will follow. It does not. The missing variable is almost always how leaders are thinking, and what they are willing to let go of. Jennifer Vessels has spent two decades inside that gap, working as CEO of Next Step across Silicon Valley, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Her client list includes Adobe, Cisco, Google, IKEA, Microsoft, Novartis, and Schneider Electric: organisations navigating business model change, AI adoption, and leadership redesign at scale. From that operational experience, she developed the P.E.A.C.E. Framework: a structured methodology giving leaders a repeatable roadmap through disruptive change rather than a case for why change is necessary. What distinguishes her position is its currency. She is not drawing on past engagements. As an active CEO running transformation programmes alongside her speaking work, the examples she brings to audiences reflect live challenges rather than archived successes. She also founded the Executive Growth Alliance, a community of F100 leaders using collaborative challenge-resolution as a vehicle for building future-readiness collectively. Her book Emergence: How Leaders Break Free from Outdated Thinking (Wiley, October 2026), endorsed by Thinkers50 co-founder Stuart Crainer, extends the framework into a broader argument about the leadership models that are no longer fit for purpose, and what replaces them. Key speaking topics AI Adoption and Human-Centred Integration Change Leadership and Organisational Transformation Future of Work and Generational Integration The P.E.A.C.E. Framework for Leading Through Change Silicon Valley Innovation Applied to Global Business Business Model Redesign in an AI Era Ideal for CEOs and senior leadership teams navigating business model transformation or AI adoption programmes Boards and executive committees seeking a working practitioner’s perspective on AI-era leadership CHROs and people leaders managing generational integration, workforce redesign, and future-of-work strategy Transformation leads and change management functions inside large multinational organisations Audience outcomes A structured, repeatable framework (P.E.A.C.E.) that gives teams shared language for leading through uncertainty, usable Monday morning A clear diagnosis of why AI adoption and transformation programmes stall at the leadership level, with specific approaches to address it Practical tools for integrating generational diversity, particularly Gen Z talent alongside experienced human capital and AI capability A first-hand view of how organisations including Adobe, Google, Microsoft, and Nvidia are integrating people with advanced technology, applied to the audience’s own market A mindset shift from defending what is crumbling to building what is emerging, positioning disruption as a source of competitive advantage

Why organisations work with Maria Santacaterina A published Wiley thesis (Adaptive Resilience) that gives boards a structured way to integrate AI and frontier technology without dismantling the human capability the enterprise still runs on. A formal AI ethics and risk role at ForHumanity, which means her view on governance is grounded in audit standards, not opinion. A humanities-and-international-relations frame that translates directly into how regulators, customers, and employees actually experience AI decisions, useful in rooms where the technology team cannot read the political weather. Recognised in Computer Weekly’s Most Influential Women in UK Tech longlist, with a profile across HBR-adjacent and AI research podcasts (MLST, Love & Philosophy) that signals credibility to technical audiences as well as commercial ones. Working language fluency in English, French, Italian, and Spanish, which matters for European boards running AI programmes across jurisdictions with diverging regulatory regimes. Biography highlights Author of Adaptive Resilience: How to Thrive in a Digital Era, Wiley, 2023. ForHumanity Fellow, Ethics and Risk, contributing to AI audit and governance standards. Founder and CEO of Santacaterina, a UK board advisory firm focused on strategic leadership and digital transformation. Named in Computer Weekly’s Most Influential Women in UK Tech longlist. Featured on Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST) and Love & Philosophy on the human-AI relationship. M.A. in International Relations, with prior study in modern languages, philosophy, and political sociology. Biography AI deployment has run ahead of AI governance. Boards have signed off on programmes whose failure modes, regulatory exposure, and human consequences they would struggle to articulate under questioning. Santacaterina’s argument starts there: technology is a means, the operating model is the constraint, and human judgement is the asset most easily eroded in the rush to automate. Her book Adaptive Resilience: How to Thrive in a Digital Era (Wiley, 2023) sets out how to integrate frontier technology into the enterprise without hollowing out the people, ethics, and oversight that make it defensible. The argument draws on her humanities training, an M.A. in International Relations, and twenty-five years advising senior leaders through digital transformation programmes. That position is reinforced institutionally. As a ForHumanity Fellow in Ethics and Risk, she works on the audit standards that AI systems are now being assessed against. As founder and CEO of Santacaterina, she advises boards on strategy, transformation, and the governance posture that follows. Computer Weekly has named her among the most influential women in UK tech. What she brings into a room is the connection most AI conversations miss: between the technical decision, the governance frame, and the human cost of getting either wrong. She has been a featured voice on Machine Learning Street Talk, where the audience is technical, and on board-facing platforms, where it is not. The same argument holds in both rooms. Key speaking topics AI strategy, ethics, and board oversight Adaptive resilience in the digital enterprise Human-AI complementarity and the future of work Responsible innovation and AI governance frameworks Digital transformation and operating-model redesign Sustainable value creation in a frontier-technology era Ideal for Boards and audit committees commissioning AI governance and assurance CEOs and CTOs moving AI from pilot to operational deployment CHROs and transformation leads redesigning the workforce around AI capability Risk, ethics, and compliance leaders building defensible AI policy Audience outcomes A board-level vocabulary for governing AI decisions that stand up to regulatory and stakeholder scrutiny A clearer view of where human judgement remains the binding constraint on AI deployment, and where it does not Specific reference points from Adaptive Resilience for stress-testing the organisation’s digital strategy A grounded sense of how European AI regulation and ethics standards translate into operating choices

Why organisations work with Dror Gill Coaches leadership teams through the practical decisions of generative AI adoption: tool selection across ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, and Claude, prompt design, hallucination control, and workflow redesign for real business processes. Brings engineering credibility most generative AI speakers cannot match: 37 granted patents, a 2021 Technology and Engineering Emmy for perceptual video encoding at Beamr, and three decades inside companies shipping production technology. Runs hands-on workshops, not lecture sets. Executives leave with prompts, chatbots, and analyses they built themselves during the session. Demonstrates what is possible at the frontier with live builds, including a signature session in which he creates a startup from scratch using ChatGPT alone, covering ideation, business model, investor deck, and go-to-market. Updates his material continuously. The pace of model and tooling change makes most static keynote decks stale within months; he rebuilds against the current state of the field. Biography highlights 2021 Technology and Engineering Emmy Award (National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences) for content-adaptive video encoding at Beamr. Co-inventor on 37 granted patents in video and image processing. First employee and long-serving CTO, VP Product, and VP Marketing at Beamr (NASDAQ: BMR). IBM Research Lab in the mid-1990s, pioneering media streaming and voice-over-IP, including collaboration with Sun Microsystems on the Java Media Framework. Founder of Gamdala, a generative AI consultancy advising executives on adoption, prompt engineering, and workflow integration. B.Sc. Electrical Engineering, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. Speaking engagements at DLD Munich, AI Global Summit Italy, IBM, Samsung, Microsoft for Startups, and Amdocs. Biography The current generative AI conversation inside most companies sits between two failure modes. Either the technology is treated as a productivity gimmick to be tolerated, or it is over-promised as a strategy in itself. Neither produces operating advantage. The work of turning general-purpose models into specific, repeatable improvements in how a business actually functions sits in between. That work needs someone fluent in both the underlying technology and the practical question of what executives can do on Monday. Dror Gill is that profile. He spent three decades inside companies shipping production technology, most recently as the long-serving CTO of Beamr (NASDAQ: BMR), where he led the development of the perceptual video encoding technology that won the 2021 Technology and Engineering Emmy. He is a co-inventor on 37 granted patents. Earlier, he was at IBM Research in the mid-1990s pioneering streaming over IP and voice-over-IP, and at Emblaze Semiconductor chairing the Wireless Multimedia Forum. Today he runs Gamdala, a generative AI consultancy. The shift is consistent: he is again working at the frontier of a general-purpose technology, only now the audience is executives rather than engineers. His sessions are workshop-led. Participants leave having built prompts, chatbots, and analyses themselves. His signature live build creates a startup from scratch using ChatGPT alone, covering ideation, business model, investor deck, and go-to-market inside a single session. What makes his keynote work uncommon is the engineering pedigree behind the executive coaching. He has shipped the kind of technology he now teaches leaders to deploy. The Technion degree, the Emmy, and the patent record are not credentials worn for show. They are the reason the operating advice translates. Key speaking topics Generative AI adoption for executives Prompt engineering and hallucination control ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, and Claude in business workflows Generative AI for product, marketing, and operations AI in education and corporate learning Live demonstrations of generative AI for business creation Workflow redesign around large language models Ideal for CEOs, COOs, and executive committees seeking to move generative AI from pilots to operating use. CHROs and learning and development leaders designing AI fluency programmes for senior managers. Product and engineering leadership teams evaluating where to embed generative AI in customer-facing and internal workflows. Founders, investors, and innovation teams who want a working understanding of the current state of the tools, not last year’s. Audience outcomes A clearer view of which generative AI tools fit which business problems, and where each one breaks. Practical prompt patterns participants use in their own work the same week. A working sense of how to control hallucination, including chain-of-thought prompting and verification techniques. Awareness of what is now possible end-to-end with generative AI, demonstrated live rather than described in slides. Confidence to lead an organisational conversation on generative AI adoption without needing a translator.

Why organisations work with Hubertus Porschen He speaks to mid-market boards from inside the same world. As the elected federal chairman of Die Jungen Unternehmer from 2015 to 2018, he represented Germany’s young Mittelstand owners directly to policymakers and to ASU/Die Familienunternehmer. He has built and run digital businesses, not just advised on them. App-Arena and iConsultants give him a working vocabulary for what actually breaks when a traditional company tries to digitise a business model. His book Digitaler Suizid frames digital inertia as an existential risk to German firms, an argument that lands with audiences who have heard the optimistic version too often. He works in German and English with equal credibility, which matters for groups whose senior leadership sits across DACH and the wider European market. Biography highlights Federal Chairman, Die Jungen Unternehmer (BJU), 2015 to 2018, the young-entrepreneurs body within the ASU/Die Familienunternehmer association. Doctorate in economics, University of Marburg, with a dissertation on the academic entrepreneur. Author of Digitaler Suizid, on the digitalisation gap in the German economy. Founder and operator of multiple digital ventures including App-Arena GmbH; partner at iConsultants GmbH. Lecturer at Niederrhein University of Applied Sciences and the University of Cologne. Listed in Top 100 Speakers Excellence 2026 by Speakers Excellence. Biography The German Mittelstand is one of the most successful industrial structures in Europe. It is also one of the slowest to absorb new technology. That tension defines the working subject matter of Hubertus Porschen. He spent three years, from 2015 to 2018, as federal chairman of Die Jungen Unternehmer, the young-entrepreneurs wing of the ASU/Die Familienunternehmer association. The role put him in regular contact with policymakers in Berlin and with several thousand owner-managers running mid-sized German firms. The work that followed, as a speaker and as a founder, builds directly on that constituency. His operating experience is the second pillar. App-Arena, an online marketplace for social media applications, and iConsultants, a digital advisory practice, gave him direct exposure to the gap between digital strategy decks and the messy reality of changing how a 150-person company actually works. His book Digitaler Suizid develops the argument: German firms that treat digitisation as a marketing project rather than an operating one are quietly removing themselves from their own future. Today his keynote work concentrates on artificial intelligence: specifically the question of how a board moves from “AI-interested” to “AI-ready” without paralysing the operating business in the process. He lectures at Niederrhein University of Applied Sciences and the University of Cologne, holds a doctorate from the University of Marburg, and is listed in Speakers Excellence’s Top 100 for 2026. Key speaking topics Artificial intelligence in mid-market operations Digital transformation in family-owned and Mittelstand businesses Entrepreneurship and founder leadership Innovation and disruption in traditional industries Change management across generational workforces Digital business model design Ideal for Boards and executive teams of family-owned and Mittelstand firms in DACH CEOs, COOs and digital leaders confronting an AI adoption gap Industry associations and chambers of commerce convening member firms Founder networks and entrepreneurship programmes in German-speaking markets Audience outcomes A clearer sense of where their organisation sits on the line between AI-interested and AI-ready A working argument for why digital inertia is a strategic, not operational, risk Specific examples of how German mid-market companies have moved digital initiatives out of pilot Vocabulary to talk to a sceptical board about AI without leaning on vendor language

Why organisations work with Ian Khan He gives executive teams a diagnostic rather than a forecast. The Future Readiness Score, built from his research across hundreds of organisations, turns “are we ready for AI” into a scored view across seven operating pillars. His writing carries commercial weight. Undisrupted won the Bronze Medal at the 2025 North American Book Awards and the Non-Fiction category at the Goody Business Book Awards 2025; Metaverse For Dummies is a Wiley title. He reports on the future as a working journalist, not only a consultant. As executive producer and host of The Futurist on Amazon Prime Video, he has interviewed hundreds of global leaders on the record, which keeps his keynote content closer to evidence than to speculation. He separates AI hype from AI advantage in front of technical and non-technical rooms. His AIRS assessment gives boards a common language for where they sit on vision, use cases, data, governance, and adoption. Biography highlights USA Today bestselling author of Undisrupted, which introduces the Future Readiness Score across seven organisational pillars. Author of Metaverse For Dummies, published by Wiley. Executive producer and host of The Futurist, a streaming series on Amazon Prime Video across more than 45 regions. Director of the documentary Blockchain City and producer of additional films on AI and the future of work. Thinkers50 Future Readiness Award finalist and Thinkers360 Distinguished honoree. Media contributor and on-record commentator featured by CNN and Forbes. Biography Most AI strategy conversations stall at the same point. The executive team agrees the technology matters. Nobody can agree on what to do on Monday. Khan’s contribution is a working answer to that problem, built from research across hundreds of organisations and codified in his book Undisrupted and the Future Readiness Score that sits inside it. The Score moves the question from opinion to diagnostic. It measures an organisation across seven pillars, including engagement, learning, collaboration, culture, innovation, and execution, and returns a prioritised picture of where readiness is thin. His AIRS framework does the equivalent for AI specifically, covering vision, use cases, data, governance, and adoption. Boards use both as a shared map before they approve the next investment. Khan works across the commercial and editorial sides of technology. He is the author of Metaverse For Dummies, published by Wiley, and of additional titles on prompt engineering and value creation. As executive producer and host of The Futurist on Amazon Prime Video, he has interviewed hundreds of founders, scientists, and policy leaders on the record. Commentary work with CNN and Forbes sits alongside that. His keynote practice reflects that dual background. Audiences get a filmmaker’s feel for narrative and a consultant’s insistence on instrumentation, applied to the decisions leadership teams are actually trying to make about AI, automation, and emerging technology. Key speaking topics Artificial intelligence and generative AI strategy Future readiness and organisational diagnostics Digital transformation and enterprise technology adoption Emerging technology and disruption AI governance and responsible deployment Leadership in an AI-driven operating environment Ideal for CEOs, CIOs, and CTOs sponsoring AI strategy across business units Boards and executive committees setting technology investment priorities Transformation and digital leaders responsible for moving pilots into production Government and public-sector leaders assessing AI readiness and governance Audience outcomes A shared vocabulary for assessing where the organisation actually stands on AI and digital readiness. A prioritised view of which technology bets are worth compounding and which to retire. Sharper criteria for AI governance decisions, from data to adoption. Concrete patterns drawn from hundreds of documented executive interviews, not abstract predictions.

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 Tyler Cohen Wood She brings the threat picture a board actually needs: thirteen years inside the Department of Defense, including roles as Deputy Cyber Division Chief at the DIA and the Directorate’s named Cyber Subject Matter Expert, translated into language a non-technical executive can act on. She has run cyber risk at commercial scale. As Director of Cyber Risk Management at AT&T she built defences across one of the largest customer bases in the world, so her advice maps onto P&L decisions, not just policy. She is operator, not pundit. As co-founder of Dark Cryptonite (patent-pending zero-trust encryption) and CEO of MyConnectedHealth (AI in clinical diagnostics), she is currently building in the two domains she speaks on. Her work on social engineering and deepfakes draws on a digital forensics career at NASA’s Office of Inspector General and the DoD Cyber Crime Center, where she investigated major crimes and intrusions. That gives the deepfake material specific case grounding rather than headline commentary. She holds multiple US provisional patents for cyber capabilities and is a regular expert voice on Good Morning America, CNN, The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg, so she lands in front of executive audiences who recognise her from crisis coverage. Biography highlights Former Senior Intelligence Officer and Deputy Cyber Division Chief, Special Communications Division, US Defense Intelligence Agency. Former Director of Cyber Risk Management, AT&T. Co-founder, Dark Cryptonite (patent-pending zero-trust encryption); Founder and CEO, MyConnectedHealth Inc. Author of Catching the Catfishers (Career Press); co-author of Alternate Data Storage Forensics (Syngress). Holder of multiple US provisional patents for cyber capabilities. Regular commentator for Good Morning America, CNN, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and GovInfoSecurity. Biography The cyber threat picture has changed shape. Adversaries now use generative AI to scale phishing, clone executive voices and produce convincing video. The defensive vocabulary that worked in 2018, perimeter, patch, password, no longer covers the surface area a modern board is responsible for. Tyler Cohen Wood spent thirteen years inside the US Department of Defense working on exactly that surface area. At the Defense Intelligence Agency she served as Senior Intelligence Officer and Deputy Cyber Division Chief in the Special Communications Division, and was designated the Cyber Subject Matter Expert for the DIA Science and Technologies Directorate. Her remit covered the White House, the DoD, federal law enforcement and the wider intelligence community. Before that, as a digital forensic examiner at NASA’s Office of Inspector General and the DoD Cyber Crime Center, she worked intrusion and major-crimes cases at evidentiary level. She then took that fluency into the commercial world as Director of Cyber Risk Management at AT&T, where the question shifts from intelligence reporting to defending revenue, customers and brand at scale. She now co-leads Dark Cryptonite, a venture building patent-pending zero-trust encryption for governments and enterprises, and is founder and CEO of MyConnectedHealth, an AI platform for clinical diagnosis. She holds multiple US provisional patents in cyber. What that combination gives an executive audience is a speaker who is currently building the technology she discusses, has carried the threat picture at state level, and has owned commercial cyber accountability inside a Fortune 10 business. Her writing reflects the same range: Catching the Catfishers on social engineering and online identity, and the co-authored Alternate Data Storage Forensics textbook used inside the forensics community. Key speaking topics Cybersecurity as a board-level risk AI and deepfake-driven social engineering Emerging technology strategy for executives Digital transformation and cyber risk management The innovation mindset for technical and non-technical leaders AI in healthcare and connected health Women in technology and senior leadership Ideal for Boards and executive committees treating cyber as a strategic, not IT, agenda item CISOs, CIOs and CTOs briefing non-technical leadership on AI-era threat posture Risk, audit and compliance leaders preparing for AI-driven fraud and identity attacks Industry conferences in financial services, healthcare, defence and critical infrastructure Audience outcomes A clearer board-level model for where cyber risk now sits in the operating model Specific examples of how AI is changing social engineering, deepfakes and intrusion tactics A grounded view of what zero-trust and encryption actually mean for procurement and architecture decisions A working understanding of how AI is being deployed in regulated environments such as healthcare Confidence to ask sharper questions of internal security leaders and external vendors