Artificial Intelligence & Generative AI speakers

Why organisations work with Tim Ringo A practitioner thesis on productivity, not a survey of the field. Solving the Productivity Puzzle won the HR & Management category at the Business Book Awards because it sets out a specific operating model for connecting engagement, performance and learning, rather than describing the problem. Three decades inside the firms that built the modern HR function: Accenture, IBM and SAP SuccessFactors, including global leadership of IBM’s 1,500-strong Human Capital Management consulting practice and EMEA leadership at SAP SuccessFactors. A rare combination of HR strategy and workforce analytics credentials, evidenced by Calculating Success, his Harvard Business Review Press book on workforce analytics co-authored with Carl Hoffmann and Eric Lesser. Recognised peer authority: named to HR Magazine’s Most Influential HR Thinkers list in 2022, alongside the people the audience is reading. A working point of view on AI in the workplace from someone who has run global HR technology programmes, not a commentator new to the topic. Biography highlights Named to HR Magazine’s HR Most Influential Thinkers, 2022. Author, Solving the Productivity Puzzle (Kogan Page); Category Winner, HR & Management, Business Book Awards. Co-author, Calculating Success (Harvard Business Review Press), on workforce analytics. Former Vice President and Global Leader, IBM Human Capital Management consulting practice. Former Vice President for EMEA, SAP SuccessFactors. Chartered Fellow of the CIPD; BSc, Fisher College of Business, The Ohio State University. Biography Most large organisations now spend more on HR technology, engagement programmes and learning platforms than at any point in their history. Productivity has not followed. Tim Ringo’s work begins where that gap sits, and treats it as a design problem inside the people function rather than a cultural mood. His 2020 book Solving the Productivity Puzzle, published by Kogan Page, won the HR & Management category at the Business Book Awards. The argument is operational: engagement, performance management and learning have to be wired together, and supported by analytics, before any productivity number moves. His earlier book with Carl Hoffmann and Eric Lesser, Calculating Success, was published by Harvard Business Review Press and helped to define what serious workforce analytics looks like inside an enterprise. The credibility behind the work is built over three decades. Ringo led IBM’s global Human Capital Management consulting practice, with more than 1,500 consultants worldwide, ran SAP SuccessFactors HR advisory across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and spent sixteen years as an executive partner in Accenture’s Human Performance service line. He is a Chartered Fellow of the CIPD and was named to HR Magazine’s Most Influential HR Thinkers list in 2022. For senior HR audiences, that mix is unusual. Ringo can move from a board conversation about AI in the workforce to a working session on engagement metrics or HR technology investment, and bring the same operating language to both. His view on generative AI at work is a practitioner’s view, formed inside the systems that the rest of the function relies on. Key speaking topics Workforce productivity and engagement Digital HR transformation Workforce analytics Generative AI in the workplace Employee experience and retention Workforce wellbeing strategy HR technology investment Ideal for CHROs, CPOs and HR directors leading productivity, engagement or HR technology agendas Executive teams reviewing return on HR technology and workforce analytics investment HR leadership conferences, CHRO summits and people analytics events Boards considering the workforce implications of generative AI Audience outcomes A clearer view of where productivity is actually lost inside the organisation, and which HR levers move it. A working model for connecting engagement, performance and learning to business outcomes. A practical sense of what good workforce analytics looks like, and what most organisations are still missing. An informed perspective on how to introduce generative AI to the workforce without losing trust or governance.

Why organisations work with Tim Sanders He sits inside G2’s data on how millions of business buyers actually evaluate and adopt software, which gives his AI commentary an evidence base most keynote voices do not have. His Harvard Business School Digital Data Design Institute fellowship pairs that operator view with formal research on AI and digital innovation, so the argument lands with both the CIO and the CFO. He has run the playbook before: as Yahoo!’s Chief Solutions Officer through the original platform shift, and at Upwork on digital transformation and talent strategy, he has lived the gap between platform promise and operating reality. Five books, including the New York Times bestsellers “Love Is the Killer App” and “The Likeability Factor,” give him a thirty-year track record of translating shifts in how technology changes commercial behaviour into language operators can use. “Dealstorming” gives sales and revenue audiences a structured method for unsticking high-value deals, named in case studies at Yahoo!, CareerBuilder, Regus, and Conde Nast. Biography highlights Chief Innovation Officer at G2, the world’s largest software marketplace Executive Fellow, Digital Data Design Institute at Harvard Business School Former Chief Solutions Officer at Yahoo! and head of Yahoo’s in-house think tank Former Vice President of Client Strategy at Upwork Author of five business books, including New York Times bestsellers “Love Is the Killer App” and “The Likeability Factor” Author of “Dealstorming,” with referenced sales work at Yahoo!, CareerBuilder, Regus, and Conde Nast Biography The hard problem inside most AI programmes is no longer the model. It is the operating decision: which workflows to rebuild, which software to back, which vendors are quietly underdelivering. Tim Sanders works on exactly that question, with two unusual vantage points behind him. The first is G2, where he is Chief Innovation Officer. G2 holds the largest first-party dataset on how business buyers evaluate software, which gives him a live read on what is actually being bought, abandoned, and renewed across the SaaS and AI stack. The second is Harvard Business School’s Digital Data Design Institute, where he is an Executive Fellow translating research on AI and digital innovation into material business leaders can act on. Earlier in his career, he was Chief Solutions Officer at Yahoo! during the original web platform shift and led its internal think tank. He went on to serve as Vice President of Client Strategy at Upwork, working with enterprises on digital transformation and the talent side of technology change. That sequence of operator roles is what gives his keynote work its bite: he has been the executive on the receiving end of the slide that says “AI will change everything.” He has also written through every one of these shifts. “Love Is the Killer App” and “The Likeability Factor” became New York Times bestsellers and remain mainstays of corporate reading lists. “Dealstorming” is used by sales organisations as a structured method for breaking through high-value deal blockers, with named work at companies including CareerBuilder, Regus, and Conde Nast. Key speaking topics AI adoption and return on AI for the enterprise Software buying behaviour and the SaaS market Sales strategy and revenue collaboration Customer experience and modern buyer behaviour Digital transformation and the future of work Leadership in technology-driven organisations Ideal for CEOs, CIOs, CDOs, and Chief AI Officers running enterprise AI programmes CROs, CCOs, and sales leadership teams under pressure on revenue productivity Boards and ExCo sessions weighing AI capital allocation and software portfolio decisions SaaS, technology, and professional services organisations rethinking go-to-market in an AI buyer environment Audience outcomes A clear read on where enterprise AI adoption actually is, based on first-party SaaS buyer data rather than vendor narrative A sharper view of which AI use cases are creating measurable operating advantage and which are stuck in pilot Practical moves for sales and revenue teams to work with, not against, an AI-augmented buyer A repeatable method for breaking through stalled high-value deals through cross-functional collaboration Renewed confidence at the leadership level that AI strategy is a decision domain, not a technology domain

Why organisations work with Timandra Harkness A working statistician on the Council of Trustees of the Royal Statistical Society who can speak fluently to technical and non-technical audiences in the same room. Author of two books that bracket the AI conversation: Big Data: Does Size Matter? on what data actually does and does not tell us, and Technology Is Not the Problem on why our cultural anxieties about tech are misdirected. A mainstream BBC Radio 4 presenter on FutureProofing, How To Disagree and Steelmanning, which means she handles complex, contested material on air for general audiences and brings that craft to a corporate room. Speaks regularly at institutions that take rigour seriously, including the Royal Society, the Alan Turing Institute, and the Royal Academy of Engineering, so the substance survives scrutiny from technical buyers. Comfortable as keynote speaker, panel moderator, or event host, which makes her useful across the full shape of a leadership offsite or technology summit. Biography highlights Author, Big Data: Does Size Matter? (Bloomsbury Sigma, 2016) and Technology Is Not the Problem (HarperCollins, 2024). Council of Trustees, Royal Statistical Society; chair of the editorial board, Significance journal. Writer and presenter, BBC Radio 4 series including FutureProofing, How To Disagree, Steelmanning, and Political School. Resident reporter across eight series of BBC Radio 4’s The Human Zoo. Speaker and lecturer at the Royal Society, Alan Turing Institute, Royal Academy of Engineering, RSA, Cheltenham Science Festival, and the Abel Prize for Mathematics. Contributor to the Telegraph, Guardian, Sunday Times, WIRED, New Statesman, UnHerd and BBC Focus. Biography Most arguments about technology in the boardroom are arguments about something else. Trust. Identity. What kind of company we want to be. Timandra Harkness, a statistician and broadcaster whose work spans both BBC Radio 4 and the Royal Statistical Society, is unusually well placed to name what is actually being discussed. Her first book, Big Data: Does Size Matter?, published by Bloomsbury Sigma in 2016, took the data revolution seriously without inflating it. Her second, Technology Is Not the Problem, published by HarperCollins in 2024, makes the harder case: that our anxieties about AI and social media are anxieties about ourselves, and that locating the problem in the technology is what stops us from acting on it. She presents BBC Radio 4’s FutureProofing, How To Disagree, and Steelmanning, programmes that work because they take competing arguments seriously rather than flattening them. That habit transfers. In a leadership room, she is the speaker who can hold a senior team’s attention on the awkward middle of an AI question, where the technical position and the cultural position have to be reconciled. She sits on the Royal Statistical Society’s Council of Trustees and chairs the editorial board of Significance, the Society’s journal. She has spoken at the Royal Society, the Alan Turing Institute, and the Royal Academy of Engineering. The technical rigour is real, and it is what stops the cultural argument from drifting into commentary. Key speaking topics Big data and what it does and does not reveal The cultural and ethical questions raised by AI Statistics, evidence and decision-making Human agency in an automated environment Identity, recognition and the social media question Technology and trust Disagreement and constructive argument inside organisations Ideal for Boards and executive teams making AI, data, and digital infrastructure decisions Technology and innovation summits seeking a credible non-vendor voice Leadership offsites where the AI conversation has to bridge technical and cultural ground CDO, CTO, and CHRO audiences working through the human consequences of new systems Audience outcomes A sharper sense of what data and AI systems can and cannot do, written by someone who works with statisticians A clearer language for the cultural and ethical questions executive teams keep deferring A defensible way to think about agency, recognition and trust as the technology landscape shifts Better-quality internal disagreement on contested technology decisions

Why organisations work with Ting Li A sitting professor at a top European business school whose work appears in Management Science, MIS Quarterly, and Information Systems Research, which means the frameworks she brings to a leadership room have already been tested against the strongest academic standards. Director of Digital Business Practice at the Erasmus Centre for Data Analytics, where research is run alongside large corporates and the Dutch government, so the recommendations are grounded in operating reality rather than slideware. One of the few academic voices working across digital pricing, online advertising, social and mobile analytics, and immersive technology, which lets her connect AI investment decisions to concrete commercial levers. Named to the Poets and Quants Top 40 Under 40 ranking of business school professors, an external signal that the teaching translates for senior executive audiences, not only doctoral students. Bilingual in English and Mandarin, with research and teaching ties across Europe, North America, and China, useful for boards working through digital strategy with operations on both sides of the rules-based order. Biography highlights Professor of Digital Business and head of the Information Systems group at Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University. Founding member and Academic Director of Digital Business Practice at the Erasmus Centre for Data Analytics, and head of the Immersive Tech and AI Lab. Visiting Professor positions at Wharton, MIT, Tsinghua, Temple, Arizona State, and City University of Hong Kong. Published in Management Science, MIS Quarterly, Information Systems Research, Nature Communications, Production and Operations Management, and Harvard Business Review. Named by Poets and Quants as one of the Top 40 Best Business School Professors Under 40 Worldwide. Research funded by the Dutch National Science Foundation and by industry partners including VIVAT, AllSafe, and the Dutch Police. Biography Most digital strategy advice on AI and platforms is opinion dressed as evidence. Ting Li works the other way around. Her research at Rotterdam School of Management uses econometrics, field experiments, and machine learning to test what digital technologies actually do to consumer behaviour, pricing, and competitive position, then translates the result for the people making the investment call. At RSM she holds the chair in Digital Business and runs the Information Systems group. She is also Academic Director of Digital Business Practice at the Erasmus Centre for Data Analytics, where she works with corporates and Dutch public bodies on live problems in digital advertising, platform design, and AI deployment. The Immersive Tech and AI Lab she leads gives her a working view of where AR, VR, and generative tools are starting to change customer experience rather than only marketing decks. Her academic record sits at the top of the field. Papers in Management Science, MIS Quarterly, Information Systems Research, and Nature Communications, alongside articles in Harvard Business Review, mean a board hearing her on digital pricing or online advertising is hearing the underlying evidence, not a secondhand reading of it. Visiting positions at Wharton, MIT, and Tsinghua give her a working network across the leading research centres on the digital economy. The Poets and Quants Top 40 Under 40 ranking captured what executive education clients already report: she is a researcher who can hold a senior room. That is what makes her useful when the question on the table is whether a specific AI or platform bet will move the business. Key speaking topics Digital strategy and the digital economy AI and decision-making in the enterprise Digital platforms and online advertising Pricing and revenue management Social and mobile analytics Digital privacy and algorithmic accountability Generative AI, AR, VR, and immersive technology Ideal for Boards and executive committees setting digital and AI investment priorities. Chief Digital, Data, and AI Officers moving from pilots to operating deployment. Chief Marketing Officers and revenue leaders working on pricing, platform, and advertising decisions. Strategy and innovation leads in retail, financial services, and consumer-facing platforms. Audience outcomes A clearer read on which AI and digital investments have evidence behind them and which do not. A sharper view of how digital pricing, advertising, and platform mechanics affect customer behaviour at scale. Practical reference points for governing AI use in commercial decisions. A working sense of how immersive and generative technologies are starting to reshape customer experience.

Why organisations work with Toju Duke Ten years inside Google, including three running Responsible AI programmes across product and research teams on large-scale models. The framework she teaches is the one she ran. A published, structured Responsible AI framework covering fairness, transparency, safety, privacy and robustness across the full ML lifecycle, available to leadership teams as a shared reference point. Operator credibility on the question boards actually ask: how do we deploy AI at pace without inviting regulatory, reputational or human-rights exposure. Independent of any platform or model vendor. With no product to sell, her advice on governance and deployment answers only to the organisation buying it. Biography highlights Author of Building Responsible AI Algorithms (Apress, 2023), a structured framework for fairness, transparency, safety, privacy and robustness across the machine learning lifecycle. Co-author with Prof Paolo Giudici of Responsible AI in Practice (Apress/Springer Nature). Ten years at Google. Final three years as Responsible AI Programme Manager working across product and research teams on large-scale models. Founder and CEO of Diverse AI, a community interest organisation running education and research programmes for groups underrepresented in AI, including a project to build a dataset documenting the cultures of communities without internet access. Media contributor including BBC One Sunday Morning Live, Sky News, Al Jazeera, CGTN America, El Pais, La Vanguardia and Sifted. Biography Most organisations now have an AI policy. Very few have the operating mechanisms to make it real. Toju Duke spent the final three years of a ten-year career at Google building exactly those mechanisms, as a Responsible AI Programme Manager working across product and research teams on large-scale models. That work became Building Responsible AI Algorithms, published by Apress in 2023. The book takes Responsible AI out of principles documents and into the machine learning lifecycle: how to define a problem, audit data, evaluate fairness, document a model, and decide whether to ship. A second volume, Responsible AI in Practice, co-authored with Prof Paolo Giudici, extends the framework into regulation, risk taxonomies and assessment. She advises boards and executive teams on governance, AI readiness, and deployment, and sits on the programme committee for the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics and Society. Through Diverse AI, the community interest organisation she founded, she runs education and research programmes for groups underrepresented in the field, including a project to build a dataset documenting the cultures of communities the internet has left out. Governance and inclusion are the same question seen from two sides of the model. She speaks and writes for serious outlets, including BBC One Sunday Morning Live, Sky News, Al Jazeera, CGTN America, El Pais, La Vanguardia and Sifted. For a board weighing how to govern an AI programme it does not fully understand, she brings the rare combination of operator experience inside a frontier-model team and a published framework to organise the conversation around. Key speaking topics Responsible AI frameworks and governance AI ethics and accountability Generative AI risk and oversight AI regulation and policy Fairness, bias and inclusion in AI systems Diversity in AI talent and design Implementing AI principles across the machine learning lifecycle Ideal for Boards and executive committees commissioning or governing AI programmes Chief AI officers, CTOs, CIOs and chief data officers building Responsible AI operating models Risk, audit, legal and compliance leaders translating AI regulation into controls DEI and people leaders working on inclusion in technical organisations Audience outcomes A working vocabulary for Responsible AI grounded in a published framework rather than vendor marketing. A view of where AI risk actually sits in the machine learning lifecycle, from problem definition through deployment. A reference model for translating AI principles into review processes, documentation and accountability structures. A sharper read on how regulation, fairness and human-rights considerations intersect for organisations deploying large-scale models.

Why organisations work with Tom Cheesewright The Intersections methodology maps incoming macro trends against the specific stress points inside an organisation or sector; producing prioritised decision-points with the analysis behind them, not a generic forecast that leadership teams have to interpret themselves. The framework is teachable and licensable. Organisations leave with a repeatable process they can run internally, not a dependency on a single advisor. His published credentials – Future-Proof Your Business (Penguin; FT business book of the month) and High Frequency Change (Business Book Awards shortlist, 2020) – mean audiences arrive already oriented to his thinking. He does not need to spend the first third of a session building the intellectual case. A decade-plus of broadcast experience across BBC, Channel 4, and national press makes him unusually effective at translating complex AI and technology change for non-technical board audiences without losing analytical precision. Named clients across sectors – Google, Barclays, NASA, HMRC, BMW, Virgin Media, Visa – give procurement teams confidence in sector-agnostic credibility. This is not a speaker whose framework only works in one industry. Biography highlights Creator of the Intersections foresight methodology, now licensed and delivered to third-party organisations Author of High Frequency Change (LID Publishing, 2019) shortlisted, Business Book Awards 2020, ‘Leadership for the Future’ category Author of Future-Proof Your Business (Penguin Business Experts, 2020), Financial Times business book of the month Clients include Google, Barclays, NASA, HMRC, BMW, Visa, HSBC, Accenture, and Virgin Media and more than 30 Global 500 companies Regular contributor and broadcaster: BBC Breakfast, BBC Radio 4, Channel 4 Sunday Brunch, The Guardian, The Times, Evening Standard, The Daily Telegraph BEng in Mechatronics, Lancaster University; established as a full-time applied futurist in 2012 Biography Most organisations know they need to anticipate change. Very few have a structured way to do it. The annual strategic planning cycle and the technology roadmap were not designed to connect incoming macro trends to the specific decisions a leadership team faces this quarter. Tom Cheesewright built the Intersections methodology to close that gap. It maps macro trends, from AI capability shifts to demographic and regulatory change, against the existing pressures inside an organisation or sector, identifying the points where disruption will hit hardest and where meaningful opportunity sits. More than 30 Global 500 companies and government bodies, including NASA, HMRC, Google, and Barclays, have put the framework to work. His two business books establish the intellectual foundation. High Frequency Change (LID Publishing, 2019; shortlisted for the Business Book Awards 2020) sets out why organisations feel overwhelmed by the pace of change and what structural responses actually work. Future-Proof Your Business (Penguin Business Experts, 2020; Financial Times business book of the month) translates the methodology into practical tools for strategy teams. His sustained media presence – BBC Breakfast, Radio 4, Channel 4, The Guardian, The Times – means he is not an unknown quantity when he walks on stage. A mechatronics engineer by training, Cheesewright spent years in technology marketing and digital business before establishing himself as a futurist in 2012. That background – engineering logic, commercial experience, years of public communication about technology – is what keeps the Intersections work grounded. The output is not prediction. It is a structured process for stress-testing an organisation’s assumptions against what is actually coming. Key speaking topics AI and automation in strategic decision-making Scenario planning and applied foresight methodology Organisational agility and adaptive strategy Technology-driven disruption and competitive positioning The future of consumer behaviour and business models Change management in high-frequency environments Long-range strategic planning under uncertainty Ideal for Executive leadership teams and boards preparing long-range or scenario-based strategy Chief Strategy Officers and Chief Technology Officers navigating AI investment decisions Industry associations and sector bodies facing structural disruption from technology or regulation Conference audiences drawn from finance, technology, retail, government, or professional services sectors Audience outcomes A working understanding of the Intersections methodology and how to apply it to their own organisation’s planning process Clarity on which AI and technology developments are commercially significant in their sector, and which can be deprioritised A revised set of strategic questions, not just better answers to the existing ones Stronger language and frameworks for briefing boards and senior stakeholders on emerging technology risk and opportunity A clearer view of where their organisation is most exposed to macro-level disruption over the next three to five years

Why organisations work with Tom Goodwin His 2015 observation that Uber owns no vehicles and Airbnb no real estate became the standard way executives describe asset-light competition. He gives a leadership team the same lens on its own business: where value is moving, and who is positioned to own the customer. He has made technology bets inside two of the world’s largest advertising and media groups, as EVP and Head of Innovation at Publicis-owned Zenith Media and before that as SVP of strategy and innovation at Havas Media. He advises others now on calls he has had to make himself. His read on AI cuts against both the hype and the gloom. Under the banner he calls “nowism,” he argues the technology to grow already exists and the constraint is nerve and imagination. Boards leave with something to act on, not another warning about the future. He has spent two decades translating technology for commercial audiences, as a columnist for The Guardian, TechCrunch, and Forbes and as host of the Euronews series The Edge. Operators follow the argument and can repeat it, without needing a specialist to decode it. Biography highlights Author of Digital Darwinism: Survival of the Fittest in the Age of Business Disruption, published by Kogan Page and translated into several languages Author of the 2015 TechCrunch essay “The Battle Is For The Customer Interface,” one of the most widely cited descriptions of platform business models Former EVP and Head of Innovation at Zenith Media, part of Publicis Groupe; earlier SVP, Strategy and Innovation at Havas Media Founder of the innovation consultancy All We Have Is Now, advising Fortune 500 companies and startups Named LinkedIn’s #1 Voice in Marketing Host of The Edge, a technology series for Euronews; columnist for The Guardian, TechCrunch, Forbes, Adweek, and Marketing Week Biography In 2015, a single paragraph in TechCrunch changed how executives talk about competition. It pointed out that Uber owned no vehicles, Airbnb no real estate, Alibaba no inventory, and Facebook made no content. The author was Tom Goodwin, then senior vice-president of strategy and innovation at Havas Media. The line stuck because it named something leaders could feel but had not put into words: value was moving from owning assets to owning the customer relationship. Goodwin had spent his career inside that shift, later running innovation at Publicis-owned Zenith Media and advising large companies on where to place their bets. His argument now centres on artificial intelligence, and it runs against the prevailing mood. Most organisations, he contends, use new technology to make the old business run more smoothly, when the real opportunity is to rebuild what the business does. He calls the practical version of this “nowism”: the tools to grow already exist, and the limit is nerve and imagination. That case reaches a wide audience. Goodwin hosts The Edge, a technology series for Euronews, and has been named LinkedIn’s #1 Voice in Marketing. He set out the full argument in his book Digital Darwinism, published by Kogan Page. Key speaking topics Artificial intelligence and business strategy Digital transformation Platform and asset-light business models The future of business Technology and consumer behaviour Marketing and the customer interface Ideal for CEOs and boards setting the direction of a digital or AI strategy Chief Marketing and Chief Digital Officers deciding where technology changes the customer relationship Innovation, strategy, and transformation leads under pressure to show a return on technology investment Senior leadership teams at large incumbents facing platform-native competitors Audience outcomes A way to judge which technologies change their business and which are noise A concrete test for their own model: what the company would look like if it were built today Language to explain asset-light and platform competition to their own teams and boards A more pragmatic read on AI that stays on what is usable today

Why organisations work with Tom Gruber He shipped the first mainstream intelligent assistant. When he speaks about what AI deployment actually requires inside a product organisation, it is from the inside of a system Apple now runs across its entire device base. He authored the foundational definition of an ontology in computer science. Boards wrestling with AI governance, knowledge representation and explainability are talking to the person whose 1993 paper their technical teams still cite. His Humanistic AI framework gives leadership a usable language for AI design choices. It moves the conversation from “should we use AI” to “what does this system do for the human using it”, which is the question regulators and employees are now asking. He chooses his advisory portfolio around AI applied to assistive neurotech, mental health and clinical accuracy. The examples he brings to a keynote are concrete deployments, not hypotheticals. He is one of very few speakers who can credibly walk a room from ontology engineering to product design to ethics in a single talk, without losing either the technical audience or the executive one. Biography highlights Co-founder, CTO and head of design of Siri Inc., acquired by Apple in 2010. Led Siri’s Advanced Development Group at Apple for eight years following the acquisition. Author of the foundational 1993 paper defining ontology in AI, the highest-cited article in the history of the International Journal of Human-Computer Studies. Main-stage TED 2017 speaker on Humanistic AI. Co-founder and CTO of LifeScore, an adaptive AI music company backed by Octopus Ventures. Advisor to the Ocean Plastics Leadership Network on organisational intelligence and technology. Biography Siri began as a research project, became a startup, and was acquired by Apple in 2010, the same year it launched. Tom Gruber was its co-founder, CTO and head of design. The product now runs across Apple’s device base and processes more than a billion interactions a day. Most of what users now expect from a voice assistant was decided inside the small team he helped lead. Before Siri, the foundation. In 1993, working at Stanford’s Knowledge Systems Laboratory, Gruber published the paper that gave AI its working definition of an ontology: “an explicit specification of a conceptualization”. It became the highest-cited article in the history of the journal it appeared in, and it remains the reference point for anyone building systems where machines have to share knowledge cleanly. The shipping product and the citation history are connected. Siri worked because the underlying representation was right. After eight years leading Apple’s Advanced Development Group for Siri, Gruber stepped out to focus on what he calls Humanistic AI. The argument, set out in his 2017 TED talk, is that AI design is a choice between automation that competes with people and augmentation that collaborates with them. He puts the framework to work as co-founder and CTO of LifeScore, an adaptive music company, and as advisor to AI ventures in assistive neurotechnology, mental health, and clinical decision support. The Humanistic AI lens is what leadership teams find most useful from him. It reframes AI deployment as a design decision with named consequences for customers, employees and society, rather than a procurement decision about which model to license. For boards approving AI strategy and CEOs explaining it, that reframing is doing work no other AI keynote does. Key speaking topics Humanistic AI and human-centred design AI governance, ethics and trust Intelligent assistants and conversational AI Ontology engineering and knowledge representation AI in assistive technology and healthcare AI for collective intelligence and ocean conservation Building AI products from research to scale Ideal for Boards and CEOs setting AI policy and accountability Chief Technology Officers and Chief AI Officers shaping enterprise AI deployment Heads of product and design building AI into customer-facing systems Healthcare, financial services and public-sector leaders deploying AI in high-stakes contexts Audience outcomes A working definition of Humanistic AI that distinguishes augmentation from automation in their own operating context A clearer framework for evaluating AI design choices against customer, employee and societal impact Concrete reference points from Siri and from current AI deployments in healthcare, assistive tech and creative industries A language for leadership conversations about AI ethics that goes beyond compliance and into product design Recognition of where their own AI roadmap is making automation choices it should be making augmentation choices

Why organisations work with Tom Roach He originated the “performance plateau” framework, a specific, named diagnosis of the growth ceiling that confronts brands over-indexed on performance channels, developed in collaboration with econometrician Dr Grace Kite and published in Marketing Week. His IPA Effectiveness Gold Awards span McDonald’s, Sainsbury’s, John Lewis, and Barclays, among the most analytically rigorous advertising effectiveness cases in UK industry history. As Head of Effectiveness at adam&eveDDB, he worked directly alongside Les Binet, the most cited figure in marketing effectiveness research, placing him at the centre of the field’s most serious practitioner thinking. He is one of the few voices making the commercial case for brand investment from inside a performance-first agency group, giving his arguments about the brand/performance divide an operational credibility that consulting positions rarely carry. His “Share of Model” framework addresses an unmapped emergent risk: how large language models represent brands, and what that means for commercial visibility as AI increasingly mediates discovery and purchase intent. Biography highlights VP Brand Strategy at Jellyfish, part of The Brandtech Group; prior roles at adam&eveDDB, BBH London, Leo Burnett, and AMV BBDO – a career spanning over two decades at the leading edge of UK advertising Multiple Gold IPA Effectiveness Awards across campaigns for McDonald’s, Sainsbury’s, John Lewis, and Barclays Head of Effectiveness at adam&eveDDB working directly alongside Les Binet Key contributor to BBH London’s designation as IPA Effectiveness Company of the Year 2018–19 Marketing Week columnist; regular speaker at Cannes Lions, SXSW, Google Firestarters, and IPA Effweek Originator of the “performance plateau” concept (with Dr Grace Kite) and associated “Bothism” brand/performance integration framework, widely adopted in marketing practice Biography Many marketing organisations are measuring the right things in the wrong sequence. Brands that concentrated investment in performance channels – search, social, display – often found their growth curve flattening at precisely the moment leadership expected it to accelerate. Tom Roach named this pattern the “performance plateau,” developing the concept with econometrician Dr Grace Kite and publishing it in Marketing Week, where it has since entered mainstream marketing vocabulary. The credibility behind that argument is operational. As Head of Effectiveness at adam&eveDDB, Roach worked directly alongside Les Binet – the most cited figure in marketing effectiveness research – before that, spending seven years driving BBH London’s effectiveness practice to IPA Effectiveness Company of the Year status in 2018–19. The IPA Gold Awards he contributed to, across McDonald’s, Sainsbury’s, John Lewis, and Barclays, represent some of the most analytically demanding advertising cases in UK industry history. At Jellyfish, part of The Brandtech Group, Roach holds a position that few brand effectiveness thinkers occupy: making the case for long-term brand investment from within a digital-first, performance-oriented agency. That vantage point has produced frameworks with real institutional friction behind them, “Bothism” (the philosophy of ending the false choice between brand and performance), a revised model of how people enter and move through markets, and “Share of Model,” which addresses what large language models say about brands and why this matters commercially. He writes regularly for Marketing Week and speaks at Cannes Lions, SXSW, and IPA Effweek, using those platforms to pressure-test frameworks with practitioners rather than simply advocate positions. Key speaking topics Marketing effectiveness Brand and performance marketing integration The performance plateau Brand building in fragmented media Creative effectiveness Generative AI and brand strategy AI brand visibility and Share of Model Ideal for CMOs and marketing leadership teams whose growth from performance channels is flattening CFOs and senior leaders challenged to build the internal case for long-term brand investment Brand and performance marketing teams operating in organisational silos Agency leadership and strategy teams working across integrated client portfolios Audience outcomes A specific diagnostic for identifying whether their organisation has hit the performance plateau, and a framework for addressing it Clearer understanding of how brand building and performance marketing are commercially interdependent rather than competing priorities A framework for evaluating creative effectiveness across fragmented, platform-native media environments Practical thinking on what AI-mediated search and discovery means for brand visibility (Share of Model) Language and commercial evidence to make the case for brand investment to boards and finance leadership

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

Why organisations work with Ulrich Walter He brings the credibility of a flown astronaut and a sitting university chair to AI and robotics conversations that usually rely on consultants or vendor analysts. He works on AI from both ends a board cares about: national policy, through the Bavarian Ethics Council, and live corporate implementation, as a supervisory board member responsible for AI and transformation at the Die Bayerische insurance group. Disruptive-innovation content drawn from NASA mission cases and his own IBM project-management work, not from secondhand business literature. A working researcher in geriatronics and service robotics, which gives him a concrete view of what AI-assisted hardware can and cannot do today, beyond the generative-AI conversation. Comfortable in technical depth and broad audience formats. Eleven books, a weekly TV programme on Welt TV, and a Spiegel bestseller indicate a speaker who can carry a non-specialist room without softening the science. Biography highlights Payload Specialist, NASA Space Shuttle Columbia, Spacelab D-2 mission (STS-55), 1993. Chair of the Institute of Astronautics, Technical University of Munich, 2003 to 2023, now emeritus. Member, Bavarian Ethics Council on robotics and artificial intelligence. Member of three supervisory boards within the Die Bayerische insurance group, responsible for the group’s AI implementation and transformation programme. Senior Executive Advisor, Deloitte Space, Germany. German Professor of the Year 2008 in engineering sciences and informatics. Author of eleven books including the Spiegel bestseller Im Schwarzen Loch ist der Teufel los, and host of the weekly Welt TV documentary Spacetimes. Biography Most leadership teams are asked to make decisions about AI and robotics without a working understanding of how the underlying systems behave. That gap is where Ulrich Walter does his most useful work. Trained as a physicist at the University of Cologne, with postdoctoral years at Argonne National Laboratory and UC Berkeley, he combines an active scientific career with a policy seat that few keynote speakers can match. In 1993 he flew Spacelab D-2 aboard Space Shuttle Columbia as Payload Specialist, running 89 experiments across materials science, life sciences and robotics in just under ten days in orbit. After the mission he managed satellite imaging programmes at the German Aerospace Center, then ran development projects at IBM, before being appointed to the Chair of Astronautics at TU Munich in 2003. At TUM he led research on service robotics, geriatronics, and the systems engineering behind human spaceflight. He also sits on the Bavarian Ethics Council on robotics and AI, advising on where the operational and moral limits of these technologies should fall. The work is technical, and it is current. For corporate audiences, the most useful translation is the one between high-risk technical environments and ordinary business decision-making. How does NASA assess disruptive change? How does a project manager at IBM apply mission-grade discipline? What does a working scientist on Germany’s AI ethics body actually think a board should worry about? Walter is unusually direct on all three. Key speaking topics Artificial intelligence and ethics Disruptive innovation Space technology and the NewSpace economy Robotics and geriatronics Systems engineering and project management The future of human spaceflight Science communication for non-specialist audiences Ideal for Boards and executive teams setting governance on AI and emerging technology Engineering, R&D and innovation leadership at industrial and aerospace firms Senior project and programme managers in complex, high-risk environments Conferences and offsites looking for a substantive technology keynote that can also carry a non-technical room Audience outcomes A working view of where AI and robotics genuinely change the operating picture, and where the hype runs ahead of the science. A practical translation of NASA-style risk management and project discipline into commercial settings. A clearer sense of how European regulators and ethicists are framing the limits of AI deployment. Exposure to the NewSpace economy and what it signals about the next generation of commercial technology. A reset of perspective on long-horizon strategic thinking from someone who has spent ten days looking at the planet from orbit.

Why organisations work with Vijay Govindarajan The Three-Box Solution gives leadership teams a concrete operating model for the hardest resource allocation decision in strategy: how much of the organisation’s attention, talent, and capital belongs to managing the present, letting go of outdated practices, and building the future – simultaneously, with different disciplines for each. His 2009 HBR article «How GE Is Disrupting Itself,» co-authored with GE’s CEO Jeff Immelt, introduced reverse innovation to the management canon; Harvard Business Review later named it one of the Great Moments in Management in the Last Century – a designation that marks a genuinely new idea rather than a refinement of an existing one. Fusion Strategy (HBR Press, 2024) gives leaders of industrial and asset-heavy companies a specific strategic answer to the AI competitive threat – not a general AI primer, but a framework for how manufacturers, infrastructure operators, and physical-product businesses can fuse operational excellence with real-time data intelligence. He developed these frameworks inside a Fortune 10 company: as GE’s first-ever Professor in Residence and Chief Innovation Consultant (2008–2010), he applied the ideas under operational conditions alongside a sitting CEO – a form of proof that most strategy academics cannot point to. Inducted into the Thinkers50 Hall of Fame in 2019, and the only thinker to win Thinkers50 Distinguished Achievement Awards in two separate categories, VG’s standing in the field is independently credentialed – not a function of self-promotion. Biography highlights Coxe Distinguished Professor, Tuck School of Business, Dartmouth College – a Dartmouth-wide chair and the highest distinction awarded to Dartmouth faculty Inducted into the Thinkers50 Hall of Fame (2019); recipient of the Thinkers50 Distinguished Innovation Award (2019) and Breakthrough Idea Award (2011) – the only management thinker to win Thinkers50 Distinguished Achievement Awards in two categories Two-time McKinsey Award winner for best article in Harvard Business Review: «Engineering Reverse Innovations» (2015) and «Stop the Innovation Wars» (2010) Author of 15 books, including the New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller Reverse Innovation, The Three-Box Solution, and Fusion Strategy (HBR Press, 2024) First Professor in Residence and Chief Innovation Consultant at General Electric; former Marvin Bower Fellow at Harvard Business School Prior faculty at Harvard Business School, INSEAD (Fontainebleau), and the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad Inducted into the Academy of Management Journals’ Hall of Fame; HBR contributor with multiple all-time top-50 best-selling articles Biography Vijay Govindarajan has one central argument: that managing today’s performance and inventing tomorrow’s business require fundamentally different logic, and that running both inside one organisation is the hardest problem in strategy. His Three-Box Solution – now four decades in development at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business – gives executives a structural answer. Box 1 is the discipline of running the present core at peak efficiency. Box 2 is the harder discipline of letting go of practices, assumptions, and investments that made the organisation successful but will impede what comes next. Box 3 is the work of creating the future from genuinely non-linear ideas. The concept of reverse innovation, which VG introduced in his 2009 HBR article co-authored with GE’s CEO Jeff Immelt, extended this thinking to global strategy. Rather than adapting developed-world solutions for emerging markets, VG argued that innovation should begin in the developing world – where constraints force ingenuity – and then move upward. Harvard Business Review later named reverse innovation one of the Great Moments in Management in the Last Century. His most recent book, Fusion Strategy (HBR Press, 2024), addresses the AI disruption challenge directly – not in the abstract, but for a specific set of organisations. The three-quarters of global GDP produced by industrial and asset-heavy companies has yet to be transformed by digital technology. VG’s argument is that these companies must fuse their physical product strength with AI-powered, real-time data intelligence – or be eclipsed by digital-native rivals who will. It is the most commercially urgent application of his frameworks to date. VG served as GE’s first-ever Professor in Residence and Chief Innovation Consultant from 2008 to 2010, developing these ideas under operational conditions inside one of the world’s most complex industrial organisations. He is a two-time McKinsey Award winner in Harvard Business Review, a former Marvin Bower Fellow at Harvard Business School, and was inducted into the Thinkers50 Hall of Fame in 2019 – the only management thinker to receive Thinkers50 Distinguished Achievement Awards in two separate categories. Key speaking topics The Three-Box Solution: managing present, past, and future simultaneously Reverse innovation and emerging-market growth strategy Fusion Strategy: AI, real-time data, and the industrial competitive frontier Business model reinvention in established organisations Innovation execution inside large corporations Global strategy and cross-border competitive advantage Scenario planning and strategic foresight Ideal for CEOs and executive teams of established or asset-heavy industrial companies facing digital disruption Chief Strategy Officers and heads of corporate innovation managing tension between core business performance and growth investments Boards and senior leadership teams evaluating long-term portfolio strategy against near-term performance pressure Global organisations with significant emerging-market presence or expansion ambitions Audience outcomes A working understanding of the Three-Box Solution and how to apply its logic to their organisation’s specific resource allocation, governance, and portfolio decisions A clear framework for identifying which current practices are protecting value versus those quietly preventing the next phase of growth A strategic lens for evaluating how AI and real-time data can be fused with their company’s physical product or service base to generate competitive advantage Recognition of the specific organisational tensions – in staffing, structure, incentives, and culture – that prevent innovation from scaling inside established businesses Practical language for taking the strategy-versus-innovation conversation to board level with greater precision and less abstraction