Artificial Intelligence & Generative AI

Why organisations work with Dr Helena Boschi She brings neuroscience into the room with the credibility of someone who has sat on the executive side of HR. Senior roles at Shire Pharmaceuticals and Serono SA mean she speaks to leadership problems from inside, not from a lab. Her book Why We Do What We Do (Wiley, 2020) gives leadership teams a shared vocabulary for why people behave as they do under pressure, which lasts beyond the event. She works at the intersection of chronic stress and cognitive performance, an area most leadership speakers skim and few treat as a board-level risk. She is a member of the British Psychological Society and has built Chequered Leopard Ltd since 2004 specifically to translate peer-reviewed research into operational practice, not keynote theatre. She is unusually sharp on the behavioural cost of hybrid working: trust erosion, risk attitudes, attention, empathy. Useful for any leadership team still making assumptions about what remote does to a workforce. Biography highlights Founder of Chequered Leopard Ltd (since 2004), a consultancy applying neuroscience to leadership, change and workplace behaviour. Author of Why We Do What We Do: Understanding Our Brain to Get the Best Out of Ourselves and Others (Wiley, 2020). Former Vice President of Talent Management at Shire Pharmaceuticals. Former Corporate Director and Head of Global Organisation Development at Serono SA (now part of Merck KGaA). Member of the British Psychological Society. Research interests include the impact of chronic, work-induced stress on cognitive ability in the workplace. Biography Most change programmes fail on the same fault line. Leaders model behaviour as a matter of willingness, when the brain is actually running on threat detection, bias and habit. Helena Boschi has built a twenty-year practice around closing that gap, translating applied neuroscience into the decisions senior teams actually have to make. Her consultancy, Chequered Leopard Ltd, was founded in 2004 after senior corporate roles inside Shire Pharmaceuticals, where she was Vice President of Talent Management, and Serono SA, where she led global organisation development. That sequence matters. She is not a researcher who later discovered business. She ran the people function at scale in listed multinationals and turned to neuroscience because the tools available to her were not explaining what she was seeing. Her book Why We Do What We Do, published by Wiley in 2020, sets out how the brain communicates, remembers, attends, leads and decides, and what organisations can do to stop working against it. The work that sits beneath it, including her interest in chronic work-induced stress and cognitive function, informs keynotes on change, cognitive bias, psychological safety, hybrid working and innovation. She is a member of the British Psychological Society. The argument she leaves in the room is specific. Most of what organisations call a culture problem is a biology problem being asked to behave. Once leaders see that, the interventions change. Key speaking topics Applied neuroscience at work The neuroscience of change Cognitive bias and decision-making Psychological safety and fear at work Trust, risk and hybrid working The neuroscience of innovation Chronic stress and cognitive performance Neuroplasticity and cognitive agility in an AI-driven world Ideal for CEOs, executive teams and boards working through sustained change or transformation programmes. CHROs, CPOs and senior HR, talent and organisation development leaders. Leadership development and learning teams designing programmes for senior cohorts. Cross-cultural and international leadership groups operating in hybrid conditions. Audience outcomes A clearer picture of why people resist, withdraw or underperform during change, grounded in how the brain responds to uncertainty. Named cognitive biases leaders can spot in their own decisions and in the decisions their teams make for them. A practical read on what hybrid working is doing to trust, empathy and risk appetite inside their organisation. Specific behavioural levers for psychological safety, rather than slogans. Language and evidence leaders can take back into their own teams without needing to cite academic research.

Why organisations work with Collin Croome Thirty years of operator experience spanning the first websites in 1994 through generative AI and Apple Vision Pro rollouts, which lets him pressure test a digital strategy against what actually ships. Direct Apple lineage: over a decade as multimedia evangelist and trainer for Apple Germany, including co-developing the first German multimedia seminar for Apple in 1992. Founder and long-time owner of coma2 e-branding, where he delivered digital projects for premium international brands including Audi, Hugo Boss, Microsoft, Deutsche Telekom, Nespresso and Triumph. Author of two GABAL Verlag titles on the metaverse (Praxisbuch Metaverse, 30 Minuten Metaverse) and a regular on-air digital expert for ProSiebenSat.1 and RTL. Bilingual delivery in English and German with deep DACH market fluency, useful for organisations briefing European leadership audiences. Biography highlights Co-founder and long-time owner of coma2 e-branding, Munich, delivering 800 plus digital projects for international brands over 22 plus years. Multimedia evangelist and trainer for Apple Germany from 1991, co-developer of the first German Apple multimedia seminar in 1992. Author of Praxisbuch Metaverse (GABAL Verlag, 2023) and 30 Minuten Metaverse (GABAL Verlag, 2022). Certified Professional Speaker and Professional Member of the German Speakers Association (GSA). Recurring digital expert on ProSiebenSat.1 and RTL covering AI, metaverse and platform economics. Client list includes Audi, Hugo Boss, Microsoft, Siemens, Deutsche Telekom, TUI, Nespresso, KPMG and Triumph. Biography The first wave of corporate digital work in Germany ran through a small group of practitioners who knew both the technology and the brands that had to use it. Collin Croome was one of them. From 1991 he worked inside Apple Germany as multimedia evangelist and trainer, co-developing the country’s first Apple multimedia seminar in 1992 and spending more than a decade translating new hardware into tools that marketing and communications teams could actually run. In 1997 he co-founded coma2 e-branding in Munich and built it into a long-running digital agency for premium international brands. Over 22 plus years the agency delivered work for Audi, Hugo Boss, Microsoft, Deutsche Telekom, Nespresso, Triumph and TUI, covering the full arc from early websites to social platforms, e-commerce and immersive formats. That operator history is the spine of his credibility on stage. Since 2021 his keynote work has concentrated on generative AI, the metaverse and Apple Vision Pro as commercial tools, not as futurology. He has written two GABAL Verlag books on the metaverse, appears regularly as a digital expert on ProSiebenSat.1 and RTL, and holds Certified Professional Speaker status with the German Speakers Association. The consistent thread across three decades is the same question he puts to boards now: which of the digital tools on the table will move revenue, customer experience or brand equity inside the next year, and what has to change in the organisation to make that happen. Key speaking topics Generative AI and ChatGPT in the enterprise Apple Vision Pro and immersive business applications Metaverse and Web3 strategy Digital transformation and megatrends Platform economics and the power of the internet giants Digital marketing and brand in an AI world Ideal for C-suite and board audiences making capital allocation decisions on AI, immersive and digital platform bets. CMOs, brand and customer experience leads translating AI and immersive tools into campaigns and products. DACH-market leadership groups that need a bilingual keynote in English or German. Premium consumer and lifestyle brands looking at AR, VR and platform-native commerce. Audience outcomes A clearer read on which AI and metaverse initiatives are ready for commercial use and which are still hype. A practical view of Apple Vision Pro and adjacent immersive tools as enterprise assets, grounded in early-adopter use. Reference points from named brand work (Audi, Hugo Boss, Microsoft, Deutsche Telekom) that leaders can map to their own organisation. Sharper questions to put to internal teams and external agencies on digital and AI roadmaps.

Why organisations work with Roger Dooley A 20-year published track record applying neuromarketing to commercial problems, not a recent rebrand into the topic. Friction gives commercial leaders a single operational lens for finding the small frictions that quietly suppress revenue, conversion, and loyalty. Brainfluence translates academic behavioural research into 100 specific tactics marketing and CX teams can deploy, which is why the book has been translated into eleven languages. The Persuasion Engine (Wiley, 2026) gives buyers a published account of how AI is moving neuromarketing tools out of Fortune 500 research budgets and into reach of ordinary commercial teams, a shift most CX functions have not yet built a working view of. Forbes column and 400-plus episodes of the Brainfluence podcast keep him in active dialogue with the field’s leading researchers, from Robert Cialdini to Dan Ariely. Biography highlights Author of Brainfluence (Wiley, 2011), translated into eleven languages. Author of Friction (McGraw Hill, 2019), named a Top 3 Management Book and Best Business Book of 2019 by PwC’s strategy+business. Author of The Persuasion Engine (Wiley, 2026), on AI applied to behavioural science and neuromarketing. Forbes contributor on neuromarketing, customer experience and behavioural science. Host of the Brainfluence podcast, with guests including Robert Cialdini, Dan Ariely, Dan Pink, Tom Peters, Rory Sutherland, Nir Eyal and BJ Fogg. Named a Top 50 Global Thought Leader and Influencer on Customer Loyalty by Thinkers360. Biography Most marketing plans assume customers behave rationally. They do not. The gap between what a brand believes its customers are doing and what their brains are actually doing is where Roger Dooley has built his work for two decades. His 2019 book Friction (McGraw Hill) argues that the small unnecessary frictions inside a buying journey, an employee process, or a product experience are usually more powerful than the bigger strategic levers leaders prefer to discuss. PwC’s strategy+business named it a Top 3 Management Book and Best Business Book of 2019. The earlier Brainfluence (Wiley, 2011) compresses academic behavioural research into 100 marketing-grade tactics, and has been translated into eleven languages. That commercial frame is what separates Dooley from purely academic behavioural-economics voices. The Neuromarketing blog he started in 2005, his Forbes column, and 400-plus episodes of the Brainfluence podcast keep him in continuous dialogue with Robert Cialdini, Dan Ariely, Rory Sutherland, BJ Fogg and Nir Eyal, then translated for marketing, CX, and growth teams who need to ship decisions on Monday. The Persuasion Engine (Wiley, 2026) turns to AI: how language models and behavioural analytics are pushing tools once held inside Fortune 500 research budgets into the hands of much smaller commercial teams, and the governance and customer-trust questions that follow. Key speaking topics Neuromarketing and consumer neuroscience Friction in customer experience and operations Behavioural economics applied to marketing and sales AI-enabled behavioural science and persuasion Customer loyalty and brand trust Persuasion and decision architecture Ideal for CMOs and marketing leadership teams redesigning customer journeys Heads of customer experience and digital product leaders working on conversion and retention Sales leaders rebuilding playbooks around buyer psychology Growth and innovation teams testing AI-enabled behavioural tools Audience outcomes A working definition of where friction is suppressing revenue inside their own customer and employee journeys A vocabulary of behavioural mechanisms drawn from named research, not generic persuasion tropes A current read on how AI is changing the cost and access economics of behavioural research Specific, testable changes to marketing, sales or CX practice they can run inside their teams

Why organisations work with John Ridding He ran the playbook the rest of the news industry copied. The FT moved to a paywall in 2002, a metered model in 2007, and trial-led subscriptions in 2015, reaching one million subscribers in 2019 and 2.9 million paying users by 2023. He brings the inside view of a cross-border acquisition that worked. The 2015 sale of the FT from Pearson to Nikkei is one of the cleanest examples of a Japanese parent acquiring a Western media asset without breaking it. He has signed the first UK national publisher licensing deal with OpenAI, which gives him a current operator perspective on how content businesses negotiate with foundation model companies, not a commentator’s view. He spent 35 years inside one institution and ran it for almost 20. That tenure is unusual at his level and gives him a coherent argument about long-horizon transformation rather than a sequence of quarterly bets. Biography highlights Chief Executive Officer of the FT Group, May 2006 to June 2025. Special Executive Director of Nikkei, parent company of the Financial Times since 2015. Honorary Chairman of the Financial Times following his transition from CEO. Previously Publisher of FT Asia and Chairman of Pearson Asia, 2003 to 2006. Foreign correspondent for the FT in Seoul, Paris and Hong Kong, with reporting from China, Japan, India and Indonesia. First-class honours degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, Oxford University. Biography The reader-revenue model now treated as orthodoxy across global news media did not exist as a serious commercial strategy when the Financial Times began charging for online journalism in 2002. The decision was contested inside the building and dismissed outside it. Two decades later, it is the model the New York Times, the Washington Post and most of the European broadsheets have adopted in some form. John Ridding ran that experiment to scale. As CEO of the FT Group from 2006 to 2025, he took the paper from print-led economics to a paying audience of 2.9 million and revenues of GBP 500m, with more than two-thirds of revenue from digital subscriptions. The headline numbers matter, but the operating choices behind them are what executives in other sectors find useful: how to price confidently when the market expects free, how to redesign the product around habit rather than transactions, how to build a direct data relationship with a reader. He also managed two structural events most CEOs never face. The 2015 sale of the FT from Pearson to Nikkei moved a British editorial institution into Japanese ownership without disturbing the journalism. In April 2024 the FT became the first UK national publisher to license its content to OpenAI, an early test of how content owners negotiate with foundation model companies on terms rather than waiting to be scraped. Before running the business he reported from it. Postings in Seoul, Paris and Hong Kong covered the Asian financial crisis, the rise of China as a commercial power, and the early years of the Eurozone. That reporter background is the throughline. He talks about the digital subscription business the way a foreign correspondent talks about a country, in specifics, not abstractions. Key speaking topics Subscription and reader-revenue business models Digital transformation of legacy businesses AI and the future of content, media and intellectual property Cross-border M&A and post-acquisition integration Global business through the lens of news and capital flows Leadership of long-horizon transformation The economics of trust in a fragmented information market Ideal for CEOs and CFOs of subscription, media, publishing and content businesses Boards of legacy companies designing direct customer-revenue strategies Chief Strategy and Chief Commercial Officers wrestling with pricing in commoditising markets Senior teams negotiating content, IP or data licensing terms with AI platforms Audience outcomes A clear account of how a legacy business shifted from advertising to direct customer revenue, with the sequencing decisions that made it work A framework for thinking about pricing, product and data as one operating system rather than three departments An informed read on what content owners are actually negotiating with foundation model companies, beyond the headlines A view on cross-border integration that treats culture and editorial autonomy as commercial assets, not soft factors

Why organisations work with Monica Verma Operational CISO experience that informs every recommendation. Three CISO appointments, including Orange Business Cloud Services and the Norwegian Directorate of Health, mean her advice on AI risk comes from someone who has actually run the response. A hacker’s view of AI threats paired with a CISO’s view of governance. She started in offensive security finding web application vulnerabilities. She now advises boards on AI trust and accountability. Both perspectives in the same conversation. A proprietary maturity model. Her Cybersecurity Adoption Lifecycle Model, introduced in 2020, gives executive teams a way to locate themselves on the cyber and AI maturity curve. Credibility with technical and commercial audiences. Booked by FT Live in Luxembourg, the ACFE Fraud Conference Europe, and WCM 2025 in Brazil for an audience of 2,000 leaders. A clear point of view on the most contested question in the boardroom right now: how to adopt AI without breaking trust and governance. She has built her current keynote portfolio around it. Biography highlights Three-time Chief Information Security Officer with prior CISO appointments at Orange Business Cloud Services and the Norwegian Directorate of Health (Helsedirektoratet, Helfo, POBO). Director, International Cybersecurity & Resilience at Booz Allen Hamilton (2024). Recognised as Top #3 CISO in EMEA (2023), Top 50 Women in Tech (2022), and Outstanding Security Advisor at Norway’s Outstanding Security Performance Awards (2019). Board-certified Qualified Technology Expert (QTE) and former board member of Cloud Security Alliance Norway and Women in Cybersecurity Norway. Founder and CEO of Monica Talks Cyber and Cyber Foyer. Host of The Monica Talks Cyber Show podcast and author of The Predictability Factor newsletter. Contributor to Dark Reading. Featured speaker at FT Live, the ACFE Fraud Conference Europe, WCM Brazil, Cyber Root Malta, and the Norwegian Tax Authority’s IT Tech conference. Biography AI is now in the boardroom and in the threat model at the same time. Most leadership teams have someone who can speak credibly about one or the other. Few have someone with three CISO appointments behind them and an active AI advisory practice on top. Monica Verma’s career has run through both. The starting point was offensive security, finding vulnerabilities in web applications and cloud environments before attackers could. Three CISO appointments followed, including Orange Business Cloud Services and the Norwegian Directorate of Health. By 2024 she was Director of International Cybersecurity and Resilience at Booz Allen Hamilton. Her published work bridges the same divide. The Cybersecurity Adoption Lifecycle Model, which she introduced in 2020, adapts the technology adoption curve to give executive teams a usable map of their cyber maturity. Her current keynote portfolio takes that lens into the AI era: Innovating with AI Without Breaking Trust and Governing AI Before It Hacks You. The credentials track. Top #3 CISO in EMEA in 2023, Top 50 Women in Tech in 2022, Outstanding Security Advisor at Norway’s OSPAs in 2019. The booking pattern says more. FT Live brought her in for the European fund management industry in Luxembourg. The ACFE chose her to open its 2025 Fraud Conference Europe to ca. 500 anti-fraud executives. WCM Brazil put her in front of 2,000 leaders at one of the world’s largest strategy and leadership conferences. Key speaking topics AI security and governance Cyber resilience in the AI era AI risk and trust for the enterprise Cybersecurity leadership at board level The evolution of cybercrime AI-enabled fraud and threat response Ideal for Boards and executive committees making AI adoption decisions where governance and security are not yet aligned. CISOs, CIOs and CTOs whose teams are being asked to defend against AI-enabled threats while adopting AI internally. Financial services, healthcare and public sector organisations facing high regulatory exposure on both AI and cybersecurity. Audience outcomes Specific examples of how AI is currently breaking enterprise trust in regulated industries. A maturity check against the Cybersecurity Adoption Lifecycle Model that locates where the organisation sits. The questions a board needs to ask before approving its next major AI initiative. A view of how attackers are using AI today and which enterprise defences are still holding.

Why organisations work with Jacqueline Carter Four named books from Harvard Business Review Press and Palgrave (One Second Ahead, The Mind of the Leader, Compassionate Leadership, More Human) that give a board or executive team a shared language for the human side of leadership. One of the few people answering “how do I lead people in the age of AI?” from a leadership-science lens rather than a technology one. Her 2025 book More Human treats people and AI as complementary forces, and shows leaders where to deploy the technology and where the decision has to stay human. A research base built from interviews with more than a hundred CEOs and 360-degree surveys of leaders worldwide, conducted through Potential Project. Her arguments come with evidence, not anecdote. A framework, “wise compassion”, that gives leaders a usable answer to the empathy-versus-results tension most senior teams are stuck on. Twenty years of consulting at Deloitte and Potential Project with named clients including Cisco, Disney, Accenture, IKEA, and Royal Bank of Canada, so she speaks to executives in the language of operational reality, not theory. Biography highlights Senior Partner and North America Director, Potential Project. Co-author, More Human: How the Power of AI Can Transform the Way You Lead (Harvard Business Review Press, 2025). Co-author, Compassionate Leadership (HBR Press, 2022) and The Mind of the Leader (HBR Press, 2018). Co-author, One Second Ahead (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). MSc in Organizational Behaviour; former leader in Deloitte Consulting’s Change Leadership practice. Regular contributor to Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Fast Company, and Business Insider. Biography The most senior leaders in large organisations are being asked to do contradictory things at once: cut hard, care visibly, deploy AI fast, and keep the workforce engaged through the disruption it causes. Most leadership advice picks one side of that tension and ignores the other. Jacqueline Carter’s work, built over two decades at Potential Project and Deloitte before that, is about holding both. Her four books with Harvard Business Review Press and Palgrave map the same argument across different terrain. The Mind of the Leader (2018) sets out the foundation: mindfulness, selflessness, and compassion as practical leadership disciplines. Compassionate Leadership (2022) names the operating problem most senior leaders run into when they try to lead with empathy, namely that empathy alone makes them indecisive, and proposes “wise compassion” as the working alternative. More Human (2025) turns the same lens on AI, arguing that the technology amplifies whichever leadership instinct is already there. The research base is unusual for a leadership speaker. Potential Project’s work draws on interviews with more than a hundred CEOs and 360-degree surveys of leaders and employees across industries. That gives Carter the evidence to make specific claims about what produces trust, candour, and performance in senior teams, rather than the generic motivational frame most leadership keynotes default to. She writes regularly for Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Fast Company, and Business Insider, and has worked with executive teams at Cisco, Disney, Accenture, IKEA, Kimberly-Clark, and Royal Bank of Canada. The thread running through all of it is a single argument senior buyers will recognise immediately: the human qualities most leaders treat as soft are the ones that actually scale under pressure. Key speaking topics Compassionate leadership and the empathy-versus-results tension Human leadership in the age of AI Leading through change, restructure, and uncertainty Self-leadership and resilience for senior executives Hybrid and virtual team leadership Difficult conversations and leadership candour Mindfulness and attention as leadership disciplines Ideal for CEOs and executive committees rebuilding leadership culture after restructure or rapid growth. CHROs and CLOs designing senior leadership development programmes. Boards and senior teams working out how to deploy AI without losing the workforce. Partner groups and senior leaders in professional services managing client and team pressure simultaneously. Audience outcomes A working definition of “wise compassion” that senior leaders can use the next day in difficult conversations. A clearer view of where their own leadership defaults toward avoidance, false toughness, or performative care. A practical frame for using AI to extend leadership capacity rather than substitute for it. Specific language for the trade-offs between speed, candour, and care that most executive teams struggle to name. A research-backed counter to the assumption that human-centred leadership is incompatible with hard performance.

Why organisations work with Rasmus Hougaard He runs one of the largest applied research programmes on senior leadership behaviour, with data on more than 75,000 leaders in over 100 countries through Potential Project, which gives his content a defensibility most leadership speakers cannot match. Three Harvard Business Review Press books form a single argument, mindfulness, compassion, and AI-augmented leadership, which means a client can build a multi-year leadership curriculum around one coherent thesis rather than a single talk. His “compassionate leadership” framework gives executives a usable language for difficult conversations, restructures, and performance decisions, which is exactly the territory where senior people most often damage their credibility. Potential Project has long-running operating relationships with Microsoft, Accenture, IKEA, Cisco, Nike, Roche, and others, so the content has been pressure-tested inside large complex organisations, not just on the conference circuit. Thinkers50 shortlisting for the Leadership Award places him in the small set of leadership thinkers whose work is taken seriously by senior HR and people-development functions globally. Biography highlights Founder and Managing Director of Potential Project, a global leadership development and research firm working with Microsoft, Accenture, IKEA, Cisco, Nike, Roche, Google, and Sony among others. Co-author of three Harvard Business Review Press books: “The Mind of the Leader”, “Compassionate Leadership”, and “More Human: How the Power of AI Can Transform the Way You Lead”. Shortlisted for the Thinkers50 Leadership Award and named by Thinkers50 among the most important emerging leadership thinkers. Regular contributor to Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Fortune, and Business Insider. Research base of more than 75,000 leaders across 100+ countries underpins his frameworks and talks. Has delivered more than 1,500 keynotes and workshops to senior leadership audiences globally. Biography Most leadership development goes wrong at the same point. It treats the hard part of leadership, the decision that will upset someone, the conversation the leader has been avoiding, the moment of public pressure, as a communications problem. Potential Project, the firm Rasmus Hougaard founded and runs as Managing Director, has spent more than a decade arguing that it is an inner-discipline problem, and producing the research to show it. The argument runs through three Harvard Business Review Press books written with Jacqueline Carter. “The Mind of the Leader” drew on data from around 35,000 senior leaders to identify the mental qualities that distinguish those whose organisations actually follow them. “Compassionate Leadership” reframed the executive’s most uncomfortable moments, performance conversations, redundancies, restructure announcements, as a question of how to be honest without becoming cold. “More Human”, published by HBR Press in 2025, takes the same lens to AI and asks what leaders should do more of, not less, as machines take on more of the work. Potential Project’s client list, Microsoft, Accenture, IKEA, Cisco, Nike, Roche, Google, Sony, and others, gives the work an operating substance that pure-academic leadership thinkers rarely match. The firm’s research spans more than 75,000 leaders across 100 countries. Thinkers50 has shortlisted him for its Leadership Award and listed him among the most important emerging leadership thinkers globally, and he contributes regularly to Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Fortune, and Business Insider. For a senior people function under pressure to make leadership development do real work in a fatigued organisation, the value is in the through-line. One firm, one body of evidence, one argument about what serious leadership requires in 2026, and a deep enough catalogue to anchor a multi-year programme rather than a single keynote. Key speaking topics Compassionate leadership and difficult conversations AI-augmented leadership Mindful leadership and executive composure Senior leadership development at scale Leading hybrid and distributed teams Culture and trust inside large organisations Ideal for CHROs and chief people officers redesigning senior leadership programmes Executive committees facing restructure, redundancy, or post-acquisition integration Boards and CEOs sponsoring AI rollouts where leadership behaviour, not technology, is the bottleneck Heads of leadership development and learning at global enterprises Audience outcomes A defensible model for handling the conversations leaders most often avoid Concrete practices for sustaining composure and judgement under sustained pressure A clearer view of where AI should and should not replace human leadership work Language to describe what “good leadership” actually looks like in their organisation, grounded in research rather than slogans Reference points from a peer set of global enterprises that have implemented the work

Why organisations work with Andrea Iorio Operator credibility from inside a platform business: five years running Tinder across Latin America, where consumer-tech decisions had to be made under real commercial pressure, not theorised about. A published, peer-reviewed thesis on the AI-human boundary. Between You and AI (Wiley) made the USA Today bestseller list and gives him a defensible point of view that maps to a three-part framework executives can use. Four-language, multi-market authority. He writes the MIT Technology Review Brasil column, hosts NVIDIA Brazil’s official podcast, and lectures on the MBA at Fundação Dom Cabral, while delivering keynotes to Fortune 500 audiences in English, Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian. A working CX and digital-transformation playbook drawn from his time as Chief Digital Officer at L’Oréal Brazil, useful for any consumer-facing organisation rebuilding its phygital journey. A delivery cadence at Fortune 500 scale. Repeat clients include Abbott, Bayer, Cargill, Dow, IBM, Roche, Syngenta, and Tetra Pak. Biography highlights USA Today bestselling author of Between You and AI: Unlock the Power of Human Skills to Thrive in an AI-Driven World (Wiley). Author of two #1 Amazon Brazil bestsellers in People Management and Leadership: 6 Competências para Surfar na Transformação Digital and O futuro não é mais como antigamente. Former Head of Tinder, Latin America (5 years) and Chief Digital Officer, L’Oréal Brazil. MBA professor at Fundação Dom Cabral. Columnist at MIT Technology Review Brasil; host of NVIDIA Brazil’s official podcast. Economics, Bocconi University (Milan); MA International Relations, Johns Hopkins SAIS (Washington, DC). Biography AI capability is no longer the scarce resource inside large organisations. Human judgement is. Between You and AI, the Wiley book that put Andrea Iorio on the USA Today bestseller list in 2025, makes that case for senior teams trying to convert pilots into operating advantage. The argument runs along three axes: cognitive, behavioural, and emotional. Each carries a practical set of skills that AI tools cannot supply on their own. The operator credentials behind that argument are unusual for someone now working primarily as an author and educator. Iorio spent five years as Head of Tinder for Latin America, then served as Chief Digital Officer at L’Oréal Brazil. Both roles forced commercial decisions about consumer technology under real revenue pressure, not the conference-room version of digital transformation. The academic platform sits alongside. He teaches on the MBA at Fundação Dom Cabral, writes the MIT Technology Review Brasil column, and hosts NVIDIA’s official Brazil podcast. His first book in Portuguese, 6 Competências para Surfar na Transformação Digital, set out a framework of six competencies, from cognitive flexibility to digital altruism, that became the most-read leadership title on Amazon Brazil. Clients book him for Fortune 500 keynotes in English, Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian. The roster includes Abbott, Bayer, Cargill, Dow, IBM, Roche, Syngenta, and Tetra Pak. The work that follows the keynote is usually a board-level conversation about which human skills the organisation now needs to build, fast, alongside its AI deployment. Key speaking topics Artificial intelligence and human skills Digital transformation and leadership Customer-centricity and phygital experience Innovation culture Future of work in the age of AI Ideal for Boards and CEOs setting the human-skills agenda alongside an AI roadmap. CHROs and learning leaders redesigning capability programmes for an AI-augmented workforce. CMOs and CX leaders rebuilding the customer journey across digital and physical touchpoints. Latin America regional executive teams of multinational consumer and B2B businesses. Audience outcomes A three-part framework for the cognitive, behavioural, and emotional skills that matter most when AI enters the workflow. A concrete set of decisions about which managerial behaviours to keep, change, or retire in an AI-augmented operating model. Reference examples from Tinder, L’Oréal, and other consumer-facing businesses that have rebuilt the phygital customer journey. A working definition of innovation culture that distinguishes managed practice from creative theatre.

Why organisations work with Krista Jäntti She runs the validation work most internal innovation teams skip, separating generative AI and XR concepts that have a defensible business case from those that do not. Her perspective is operator-led, not analyst-led: as founder of EventuallyXR and Exthereal, she has built and shipped immersive products, not only written about them. She combines an Aalto Executive MBA with a working knowledge of AI, XR and blockchain, which lets her translate engineering reality into language a leadership team can act on. Selection for the 100 Women of the Future list and her advisory role at Aalto University place her inside the European deep-tech and creative-industries network, with current visibility into where the technology is actually heading. She speaks about AI and immersive technology with measured scepticism, naming the limits and risks alongside the opportunity, which lands well with senior audiences tired of hype. Biography highlights Founder and CEO of EventuallyXR, advising organisations on commercial use cases in extended reality, generative AI and blockchain. Founder of Exthereal, a digital fashion and immersive virtual production studio. Business Advisor at Aalto University, working inside the Aalto Digital Creatives programme. Named to the 100 Women of the Future list in 2023 for her work at the boundary of physical and generated reality. Aalto Executive MBA holder, with prior Master of Science training spanning life sciences and computer science. Task leader on the EU Horizon Seeds of Bravery programme supporting the Ukrainian deep-tech ecosystem. Published author on AI-powered digital humans and immersive UX in AR/VR Journey and on Medium. Biography Generative AI and extended reality keep arriving on board agendas faster than organisations can absorb them. The result, in most companies, is a pile of pilots, vendor demos and internal experiments that never connect to a commercial decision. Krista Jäntti’s work sits in that gap, between a technology that is genuinely interesting and a use case that is genuinely defensible. As founder and CEO of EventuallyXR, she advises organisations on where XR, generative AI and blockchain belong inside their business model, and where they do not. She is an operator first. Her second company, Exthereal, builds digital fashion and immersive virtual productions, which means she has shipped the kind of content and experience layer her clients are trying to evaluate. Her academic path runs from microbiology and biochemistry through computer science to an Aalto Executive MBA. That mix matters in the work, because emerging-technology decisions cut across engineering, design, regulation and commercial strategy at the same time. As Business Advisor inside Aalto University’s Digital Creatives programme, and as task leader on the EU Horizon Seeds of Bravery programme for the Ukrainian deep-tech ecosystem, she stays close to where the technology is being built, not only sold. She was selected for the 100 Women of the Future list in 2023, recognised for working at the boundary of physical and generated reality. Audiences who book her tend to want what that recognition implies: a speaker who can hold both the technical detail and the commercial question in the same sentence, and who will tell a leadership team which of their AI and XR bets are worth keeping. Key speaking topics Generative AI in business Extended reality and the metaverse Emerging technology validation AI-powered digital humans and immersive UX Digital fashion and virtual production Responsible adoption of AI and XR Innovation strategy for creative industries Ideal for CEOs, CDOs and innovation leaders shaping a generative AI or XR strategy. Boards weighing the commercial case for immersive and generative technology investment. Marketing, brand and creative leadership teams in consumer, fashion and media businesses. Corporate venture, R&D and emerging-technology teams choosing where to place pilot budget. Audience outcomes A clearer view of which generative AI and XR use cases have a defensible commercial case in their sector. A sharper sense of the difference between vendor narrative and real technical capability. Specific examples of how digital humans, immersive production and generative content are already being deployed. Language to brief internal teams and boards on responsible adoption of AI and immersive technology. Confidence to retire pilots that will not scale and double down on the ones that will.

Why organisations work with Jochen Wirtz He wrote the textbook the global services marketing field teaches from. Services Marketing: People, Technology, Strategy, co-authored with Christopher Lovelock, has sold over a million copies and shaped how MBAs are taught the discipline in more than 26 countries. He has paired that academic authority with two operator-facing AI books, Intelligent Automation and Agentic Artificial Intelligence, written with Pascal Bornet. Few service strategy voices can speak as fluently to both a CMO and a Chief Automation Officer. His Christopher Lovelock Career Contributions Award from the American Marketing Association and the Gronroos Service Research Award are the two most senior honours in the global services research community. Boards get a recognised authority, not a generalist. He has been Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher in economics and business in 2022, 2023, and 2024, which means his frameworks are the ones other researchers and practitioners are actively building on. He spent fifteen years running the UCLA-NUS Executive MBA Programme as founding director, so the audiences he addresses most naturally are senior leaders, not students. Biography highlights Vice Dean of MBA Programmes and Professor of Marketing, NUS Business School, National University of Singapore. Co-author of Services Marketing: People, Technology, Strategy (9th edition) with the late Christopher Lovelock, adapted for over 26 countries. Co-author of Intelligent Automation (2021) and Agentic Artificial Intelligence (2025) with Pascal Bornet, with contributors including Thomas H. Davenport. Christopher Lovelock Career Contributions Award (AMA, 2019) and Christian Gronroos Service Research Award (2024). Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher in economics and business, 2022, 2023, and 2024; over 200 academic articles and six features in Harvard Business Review. Academic Scholar at Cornell Institute for Healthy Futures; International Fellow at Karlstad University Service Research Center; Global Faculty at Arizona State University Center for Services Leadership. Biography Service businesses are where AI is hitting the operating model first. Customer interactions, advisory work, claims handling, hospitality, healthcare reception, professional services delivery: all of it is being rewired around intelligent agents, and very few people on the academic side have stayed close to that shift in practical terms. Jochen Wirtz has. He is Vice Dean of MBA Programmes and Professor of Marketing at NUS Business School, and the co-author, with the late Christopher Lovelock, of Services Marketing: People, Technology, Strategy. The textbook is now in its ninth edition, has sold over a million copies, and has been adapted for more than 26 countries. It is the spine of the discipline globally. What makes him useful in a leadership room rather than a classroom is the second body of work. With Pascal Bornet he wrote Intelligent Automation in 2021 and Agentic Artificial Intelligence in 2025, with contributions from Thomas H. Davenport and others. Both are written for operators making real choices about where to put AI inside their service architecture and where not to. The credentials line up behind that: the Christopher Lovelock Career Contributions Award from the American Marketing Association, the Christian Gronroos Service Research Award, three consecutive years as a Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher in economics and business, and fifteen years as founding director of the UCLA-NUS Executive MBA Programme. Boards get an academic with the authority to set the agenda and the operator literacy to follow it through. Key speaking topics Services marketing and service management AI agents and intelligent automation in service organisations Service strategy and organisational redesign Customer experience in AI-enabled service Platform business models Corporate digital responsibility and governance Cost-effective service excellence Ideal for CEOs, COOs, and CMOs of service-led businesses redesigning operations around AI agents. Chief Digital, Transformation, and Automation Officers building the AI-and-services roadmap. Boards and executive committees in financial services, professional services, hospitality, healthcare, and telecoms working through service productivity and customer impact at the same time. Audience outcomes A clearer view of where AI agents create durable advantage in a service business and where they create new risk. A working vocabulary for the service strategy choices behind automation programmes, drawn from the field’s leading textbook. Frameworks from Intelligent Automation and Agentic Artificial Intelligence that translate AI investment into service design decisions. A sharper sense of corporate digital responsibility as service interactions become increasingly machine-mediated. Confidence that the operating model conversation and the customer experience conversation are the same conversation.

Why organisations work with Giuseppe Stigliano Co-author with Philip Kotler of three books on the future of retail and marketing, including Redefining Retail: 10 Guiding Principles for a Post-Digital World, giving boards a tested framework rather than a point of view. Sits on both sides of the table: Global CEO of Spring Studios, former CEO of Wunderman Thompson Italy, and Adjunct Professor at UCL, so the same person who teaches the framework has run the P&L it applies to. Named to the Thinkers50 Radar Class of 2024, the bench of emerging thinkers the Thinkers50 community expects to shape management practice. Works directly with CMOs and retail leadership on the operating consequences of AI, omnichannel and changing consumer behaviour, not the headline trends. Delivers keynotes in English, Italian, Spanish and French, with a substantial and growing share now in Spanish for audiences across Spain and Latin America. Platform experience spans more than thirty countries and both B2B and B2C audiences. Biography highlights Co-author with Philip Kotler of Retail 4.0, Onlife Fashion and Redefining Retail (Wiley, 2024); books translated into eight languages. Global CEO of Spring Studios; former CEO of Wunderman Thompson Italy; previously led a WPP EMEA team across FCA, J. Walter Thompson and Spring Studios. Thinkers50 Radar Class of 2024. Adjunct Professor of Retail and Consumer Entrepreneurship at UCL School of Management, with prior teaching at Universita Cattolica del Sacro Cuore and POLIMI Graduate School of Management. Ph.D. in Marketing and Economics; Forbes columnist and LinkedIn Top Voice. TEDx talk How To Become a Marketing Superhero with over one million views. Biography Retail used to be a question of channel. It is now a question of operating model. Consumer businesses run physical stores, e-commerce, marketplace, social commerce and emerging virtual touchpoints in parallel, often with separate leadership, separate metrics and separate technology stacks. The customer sees one brand. The organisation behaves like several. Redefining Retail, co-authored with Philip Kotler and published by Wiley in 2024, sets out ten principles for running the commercial model of a consumer business when the digital age is no longer the destination but the baseline. The argument behind the book is operational: sustainability, inclusion, working policy and AI are no longer brand topics, they are inputs into the value chain. The book sits alongside two earlier Kotler co-authorships, Retail 4.0 and Onlife Fashion, and together the three are translated into eight languages. The credibility on the operating side comes from three CEO tenures at international marketing agencies. As Global CEO of Spring Studios, Stigliano leads a creative platform with offices in London, New York, Los Angeles and Milan, serving fashion, beauty, luxury, hospitality and lifestyle clients. Before that he was CEO of Wunderman Thompson Italy and led a WPP EMEA team across FCA, J. Walter Thompson and Spring Studios. The academic side is held at UCL School of Management, where he is Adjunct Professor of Retail and Consumer Entrepreneurship. Thinkers50 named him to its Radar Class of 2024. He writes a Forbes column, holds a LinkedIn Top Voice designation, and his TEDx talk on marketing has passed a million views. In a boardroom on retail or consumer strategy, the most useful thing he brings is the dual standing: the framework being discussed is one he wrote, and the operating problem in the room is one he has had to solve as CEO. Key speaking topics The future of retail and the post-digital consumer Marketing and brand transformation Customer experience and commerce across physical, digital and virtual channels The business implications of AI for consumer-facing organisations Post-digital leadership Innovation in fashion, beauty and luxury Scaling consumer businesses internationally Ideal for CMOs and Chief Customer Officers redesigning the marketing and commerce operating model Retail, fashion, beauty, luxury and hospitality executive teams and boards Heads of digital and e-commerce inside consumer businesses moving past pilot-stage AI Innovation, transformation and strategy leads in consumer industries Audience outcomes A working vocabulary for the post-digital retail model and where it breaks current operating assumptions A framework, taken from Redefining Retail, for prioritising the ten shifts that matter most Sharper questions about where AI changes the customer-facing P&L and where it does not A clear read on how leading consumer brands are restructuring around omnichannel commerce Concrete examples drawn from his client work and CEO experience across luxury, fashion and beauty

Why organisations work with Ali Rebaie He reads AI adoption through anthropology and phenomenology, which exposes cultural and behavioural risks that pure technical assessments miss. He founded Rebaie Analytics Group in his early twenties and has since advised Fortune 500 clients across sectors on AI strategy, giving him pattern recognition across industries that a single-sector advisor cannot offer. Through Kiangle.ai he has built METIS, a generative AI scenario-planning platform, so his advice to boards comes from someone actively shipping the technology, not only commenting on it. He speaks to the human sciences side of AI, covering machine consciousness, decision intelligence, and the effects on children and future generations, which lets him hold a boardroom conversation that moves past tooling into governance and values. His analyst background, including a seat on the Boulder BI Brain Trust advisory board, gives him access to the vendor landscape most executives only see through sales decks. Biography highlights Founder and President, Rebaie Analytics Group, an AI and human sciences strategy and research firm with Fortune 500 clients. Founder of Kiangle.ai, Portugal-based, building METIS for generative AI scenario planning. Keynote speaker at MWC Barcelona and Hannover Messe. Advisory Board member, Boulder BI Brain Trust (BBBT). Developed an AI and Machine Learning for Engineering course hosted via UC Berkeley Global. Listed among the top 100 AI influencers globally (self-reported). Biography Enterprise AI projects fail more often on culture than on code. A model ships, a workflow changes, and the people working inside it start making decisions differently, often without anyone noticing until the results move. That is the territory Ali Rebaie works in. He runs Rebaie Analytics Group, the AI and human sciences strategy firm he founded in his early twenties, which now advises Fortune 500 clients on how to adopt AI without losing the judgement and cultural fabric that made them worth automating in the first place. His method treats AI rollout as an anthropological event, something that reshapes how a team thinks, decides, and relates, not only what it produces. The analytical background is substantive. He sits on the advisory board of the Boulder BI Brain Trust, the long-running industry analyst consortium, and developed an AI and Machine Learning for Engineering course hosted via UC Berkeley Global. That gives him a working view of the vendor landscape most executives only see through procurement cycles. The most recent work is operational. Through Kiangle.ai, his Portugal-based venture, he is building METIS, a generative AI scenario-planning platform that combines mathematical simulation with insights from human sciences to stress-test strategic decisions under uncertainty. Boards get an advisor whose views on AI governance are informed by the pressures of actually building one of these systems. Key speaking topics AI strategy and adoption Scenario planning and strategic foresight Decision intelligence Generative AI and enterprise risk Human sciences and AI Future of work and future skills AI governance and responsible technology Ideal for CIOs, CDOs, and CTOs scoping enterprise AI adoption beyond proof-of-concept. Boards and executive committees setting AI governance and risk posture. Strategy and transformation leads running scenario planning on AI-driven market shifts. Industry conferences on AI, data, and the future of technology. Audience outcomes A clearer read on how AI adoption changes behaviour and decision-making inside teams, not only workflows. A working vocabulary for AI scenario planning under genuine uncertainty. Sharper questions for vendors, framed by an analyst who has seen how the market actually sells. A considered position on AI governance that accounts for cultural and human consequences alongside technical ones.