Automation and Robotics

Why organisations work with Kieran Gilmurray He has shipped AI and intelligent automation programmes inside named enterprises including Rapid7, Mercer, and Pearson, with documented savings in the tens of millions. That track record sits behind every framework he presents. His three books on generative AI, agentic AI, and organisational digital transformation give boards a structured reference, not a hype reel. They are written for the executive who has to decide, not the engineer who has to build. He treats agentic AI as an operating model question. The conversation moves quickly from “what is an AI agent” to which decisions an agent should own, what governance the board needs to put around it, and how the workforce is redesigned in response. Seven LinkedIn Top Voice recognitions and Thinkers360 rankings in generative and agentic AI mean the audience is hearing from a voice already widely cited in their own feeds, which lifts the in-room credibility of the conversation. Biography highlights Author of Agentic AI: A Business Leader’s Guide to the Future of Work and Digital Labour, The A to Z of Generative AI, and The A-Z of Organizational Digital Transformation. CEO and Founder, Kieran Gilmurray and Company Limited. Chief AI Innovator, Technology Transformation Group. Seven-time LinkedIn Top Voice in AI and related categories. Listed by Thinkers360 in the Top 50 Generative AI and Top 100 Agentic AI thought leaders. MBA (1st Class Distinction, Entrepreneurship Award) and MSc in Computer Science, both Queen’s University Belfast. Biography The gap between AI ambition and AI in operation has become the defining management problem of the decade. Pilots prove the technology works. Boards then struggle to convert those pilots into structural advantage, and most leadership teams still lack a clear view of which decisions an AI agent should now own. This is the territory Kieran Gilmurray works in. As CEO of Kieran Gilmurray and Company Limited and Chief AI Innovator at the Technology Transformation Group, he advises boards and executive teams on moving generative and agentic AI from concept into operating reality. His work spans finance, HR, customer service, and the wider digital labour stack. The credibility behind the advice is operational. Programmes he has led inside Rapid7, Mercer, and Pearson are referenced across his bureau profiles with quantified outcomes in the tens of millions of pounds and dollars. His three books, including Agentic AI: A Business Leader’s Guide to the Future of Work and Digital Labour, give business leaders a structured way to think about agent design, governance, and workforce redesign without retreating into engineering language. Independent recognition reinforces the position. Kieran has been named a LinkedIn Top Voice seven times and ranks on Thinkers360 leaderboards for both generative AI and agentic AI. He holds an MBA with distinction from Queen’s University Belfast and an MSc in Computer Science from the same institution, a pairing that maps directly onto the audience he writes for: business leaders who need the technology to make commercial sense. Key speaking topics Agentic AI and digital labour Generative AI for business leaders AI strategy and operating model design Intelligent automation at enterprise scale Digital transformation in regulated industries AI governance and board-level oversight Future of work in the age of AI Ideal for Boards and executive committees moving from AI pilots to enterprise deployment CIOs, CTOs, CDOs, and Chief AI Officers designing operating models around generative and agentic AI CHROs and transformation leads redesigning roles and workflows as AI agents enter the workforce Industry conferences in financial services, professional services, technology, insurance, and the public sector Audience outcomes A working definition of agentic AI that distinguishes it from generative AI and earlier automation, with examples from named enterprises A board-level view of where AI agents are already producing operating savings and where they are still pilot theatre A practical map of governance questions a leadership team must answer before scaling AI agents across functions A clear framing of workforce redesign as AI shifts which decisions sit with humans and which sit with digital labour

Why organisations work with Byron Reese He places today’s AI moment inside a 100,000-year arc of technology shifts, giving senior leaders a framework for long-range decisions that vendor briefings cannot supply. As CEO of Gigaom, he sits at the intersection of independent technology analysis and operating leadership, which lets him speak to both the engineering reality and the boardroom question. His five books, published by Simon & Schuster and BenBella, take positions on machine consciousness, automation, and the future of work that are specific and contestable, not generic optimism. He addresses AI without the doom-or-hype binary that dominates the speaking circuit, which is what most leadership audiences are quietly asking for. Biography highlights CEO and publisher of Gigaom, an independent technology research firm. Author of five books, including The Fourth Age (Simon & Schuster, 2018), described by The New York Times as “entertaining and engaging”. Founder of multiple technology companies, with two NASDAQ IPOs and several US patents to his name. Hosts podcasts on artificial intelligence, including Voices in AI and The Agora Podcast. Featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, Bloomberg Businessweek, USA Today and the Financial Times. Bloomberg Businessweek credited him with “quietly pioneer[ing] a new breed of media company”. Biography Most futurists work in five-year horizons because that is what corporate planning cycles demand. The cost is that the most important question, which is what AI actually does to the human story, gets answered by analogy and anecdote rather than by argument. Byron Reese works in a different timeframe. In The Fourth Age, published by Simon & Schuster in 2018, he argues that technology has reshaped humanity three times: fire and language, agriculture and cities, the wheel and writing. Artificial intelligence and robotics, he argues, are now driving the fourth. The book reframes machine consciousness, automation and the future of work as questions of philosophy and history rather than software roadmaps, and The New York Times called it “entertaining and engaging”. His credibility is operational as well as intellectual. As CEO and publisher of Gigaom, he runs one of the better-known independent technology research firms. Before that he founded and sold multiple companies, took two through NASDAQ IPOs, and built consumer internet platforms that Bloomberg Businessweek described as “a new breed of media company”. He holds several US patents in crowdsourcing and content technology. Reese is, by his own description, the “Future of” guy: he has written and spoken on the future of AI, work, banking, education, agriculture, and the planet. His later books, Stories, Dice, and Rocks That Think and We Are Agora, extend the same long-range argument into how humans forecast and how human collectives behave. The thread that connects all of it, and the reason boards keep booking him, is that he is willing to take a position on where this is going. Key speaking topics Artificial intelligence and the future of work The long arc of technology and human civilisation Automation and workforce redesign Machine consciousness and AI ethics Innovation in conditions of rapid technological change Reasoned optimism as a leadership stance on technology The future of education, banking and agriculture Ideal for Boards and executive teams setting long-range AI and automation strategy CHROs and workforce planners redesigning roles around AI capability Innovation and strategy leaders in financial services, education and industrial sectors Conference audiences looking for a substantive counterweight to AI hype and AI doom Audience outcomes A clearer mental model of where AI sits in the longer history of human technology Sharper questions for internal AI strategy conversations, particularly on workforce and capital allocation A credible counter-position to the dominant doom-or-hype framing of AI in the press A specific account of how automation reshapes employment, drawn from Reese’s published argument rather than generic forecasts Renewed confidence that leadership decisions on technology can be made with intellectual rigour, not faith

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. His role on the Bavarian Ethics Council gives him direct exposure to how regulators, ethicists and engineers are drawing the operating lines around AI, useful for boards setting their own. 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. 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 the Wiley textbook Astronautics. Host, Spacetimes, weekly space-science documentary on Welt TV since 2016. 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 Danilo McGarry He has run AI inside two of the largest regulated enterprises on the planet. Buyers get an operator who has defended budgets, cleared risk committees and shipped at scale, not a consultant describing other people’s work. His track record is tied to outcomes in the numbers. His work at Alter Domus is associated with a period of significant valuation growth, and his engagements are framed around measurable cost, revenue and risk impact rather than adoption metrics. He sits at the board-level interface of AI. He teaches on the Financial Times Board Directors Programme and advises the CIPD on AI, which means the language he uses lands with directors, not just technologists. He explains complex AI choices in terms non-technical leaders can act on. That is what earns him repeat invitations from banks, insurers, health systems and consultancies where the decision rests with a chief executive or a chair. Biography highlights Former Head of AI at Citigroup, leading enterprise AI and automation inside one of the world’s largest banks. Former Head of AI at UnitedHealth Group, operator of one of the largest software-robot estates in any healthcare business. Former Global Head of AI and Automation at Alter Domus, the fund services group, from December 2019. Strategic adviser on artificial intelligence to the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD). Faculty contributor to the Financial Times Board Directors Programme. Host of the “It’s All About AI” podcast; TEDx speaker; ranked on Thinkers360 and Onalytica lists of leading AI voices. Biography The hard part of enterprise AI is not the model. It is the decision to commit, the governance to contain the risk, and the operational grip to turn a working pilot into a line on the P&L. Danilo McGarry has spent his career on the inside of that problem. At Citigroup he led artificial intelligence and machine learning, launching automation and AI initiatives across capital markets operations. He then became a senior AI leader at UnitedHealth Group, where his remit included a programme of roughly 3,500 software “digital workers” embedded in one of the largest healthcare businesses in the United States. As Global Head of AI and Automation at Alter Domus from 2019, he built an AI and automation function inside a fund services firm through a period of significant growth. Earlier roles at JPMorgan and Royal Bank of Canada gave him the grounding in regulated operations that now sits under everything he says on stage. That operator track record is why boards listen. He is a faculty contributor to the Financial Times Board Directors Programme and strategic adviser on AI to the CIPD, which puts him in front of chairs, chief executives and people leaders making the governance calls. He is cited and quoted in outlets including the Financial Times, The Times, Bloomberg, Forbes and WIRED, and ranks on Thinkers360 and Onalytica lists of leading voices in AI and intelligent automation. His argument on stage is practical. Treat AI as an operating-model question, not a tooling question. Pick the handful of processes where the economics are real, industrialise them, and build the governance that lets the next wave scale without fresh permission every time. It is a message that lands with leadership teams who are tired of pilot decks and want to know what to do on Monday. Key speaking topics Enterprise AI strategy AI operating models and governance Intelligent automation at scale AI in financial services and healthcare Board-level AI literacy Digital workers and the future of operations Responsible AI adoption Ideal for Boards and chief executives setting enterprise AI policy and investment envelopes. CIOs, CDOs and heads of transformation running AI and automation portfolios. CHROs and people leaders rethinking workforce design around AI and digital workers. Regulated-sector leadership teams in banking, insurance, asset servicing and healthcare. Audience outcomes A clearer view of where AI actually moves the numbers inside their own operating model. A working vocabulary for the governance, risk and workforce questions AI creates at board level. Concrete reference points from AI deployments inside Citigroup, UnitedHealth Group and Alter Domus. A sharper read on which AI investments industrialise and which stay trapped as pilots. Confidence to set the next twelve months of AI priorities with fewer, better bets.

Why organisations work with Cornel Amariei Operator credibility on both sides of the innovation question: ran innovation as Head of Innovation at Continental Automotive with patents adopted across European electric vehicles, then built .lumen from research project to a venture-backed company. Built the first Romanian company to receive EIC Accelerator funding, with a €9.7M blended finance package and a €5M January 2025 round led by Catalyst Romania alongside the EIC Fund. The story is a working playbook on European deep-tech capital formation. Working at the intersection of autonomous driving, robotics and assistive technology, with a defensible patent portfolio. Useful to leadership teams thinking about how to convert AI and sensor capability into a product proposition with a real customer. Recognition from credible institutions, not bureau awards: Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe, JCI Ten Outstanding Young Persons of the World, Global Business Hall of Fame. A personal stake that travels well into corporate audiences. Grew up in a family where every member had a disability, and built a company that addresses an underserved global market of 40 million blind people. Authority on social impact ventures without the activist framing. Biography highlights Founder and CEO, .lumen. Pedestrian Autonomous Driving technology, first deployed in glasses for blind users. Former Head of Innovation, Continental Automotive. Patents applied in European electric vehicles. First Romanian inductee, Global Business Hall of Fame, 2021. Innovators category, alongside Canva’s Melanie Perkins. Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe; JCI Ten Outstanding Young Persons of the World. Author, “Arduino Development Cookbook” (Packt Publishing, 2015). Alumnus, Constructor University (formerly Jacobs University Bremen). Biography A research project inside a Romanian engineering team in 2018 became, by early 2020, a venture called .lumen. By 2025 the company had closed a €5M round led by Catalyst Romania with the European Innovation Council Fund and Tigrim Capital alongside it, the latest tranche in a €9.7M blended finance package that made it the first Romanian startup to take EIC Accelerator capital. The product, Pedestrian Autonomous Driving, was first demonstrated in glasses that replicate and extend the function of a guide dog. The global addressable problem is concrete: roughly 40 million blind people, fewer than 20,000 guide dogs. The biography behind the company matters because it explains the design choice. Cornel Amariei grew up in a family where every member had a disability: parents with locomotor conditions, a sister with cerebral palsy. The motivation is not a brand layer on top of a venture. It is the reason the venture exists. Before .lumen, Amariei was Head of Innovation at Continental Automotive, where his patent work was integrated into European electric vehicles. That experience matters for boards thinking about innovation governance. He has run the discipline inside a multinational tier-one and built it from scratch as a founder, which is rare in a market where most speakers have done only one. The recognition is from named institutions: Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe, JCI’s Ten Outstanding Young Persons of the World, and induction into the Global Business Hall of Fame in 2021 as the first Romanian laureate, in the innovators category alongside Canva founder Melanie Perkins. He is also a published technical author with Packt and an alumnus of Constructor University in Bremen. Key speaking topics Deep-tech entrepreneurship and scale-up leadership Innovation management inside multinationals Assistive technology and accessibility ventures Autonomous driving and robotics applied to consumer products Patent strategy and IP-led product development European deep-tech capital and the EIC Accelerator route Social impact through technology commercialisation Ideal for Innovation, R&D and CTO leadership inside industrials, automotive and consumer technology Boards and executive committees reviewing how invention is governed and converted to product ESG, accessibility and inclusion programmes seeking a credible technology voice rather than an activist one Entrepreneurship summits, deep-tech investor events and scale-up programmes across Europe Audience outcomes A working view of how a research prototype becomes a regulated, funded, commercial product A founder’s account of building patent value inside both a multinational and a startup A grounded reference point for what European deep-tech capital, including EIC blended finance, actually requires of a company A clearer sense of where assistive and accessibility technology is going as autonomous driving capabilities scale down to wearables A reset on what social impact looks like when it is a product proposition rather than a corporate programme

Why organisations work with Aaron Frank As one of only two lead facilitators of Singularity University’s flagship five-day Executive Program, he translates emerging technology trajectories into specific decisions a senior team can make this quarter, not abstract futures. He has taught the same material to the United States Marine Corps, the Central Bank of Denmark, Ernst & Young, FC Barcelona, GE, and The Economist Group, which means his frame is tested across regulators, militaries, sports bodies, and Fortune 500 operators. He guest lectures inside Oxford’s Saïd Business School Digital Transformation course, evidence that his content survives peer scrutiny in a serious executive-education environment. He writes a steady stream of analysis for Singularity Hub, Wired, Forbes, Vice, and VentureBeat, and authored Singularity’s 2026 executive briefing on Physical AI, so audiences get a speaker whose arguments are already pressure-tested in print. His current research focus is the convergence of generative AI, spatial computing, 3D simulation, and physical AI, a frame that gives him a concrete read on where the next wave of enterprise infrastructure is heading. Biography highlights Principal Faculty, Singularity University, and one of only two lead facilitators of its flagship five-day Executive Program. MBA, University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School, where he also guest lectures on the Digital Transformation course. Bylines in Vice, Wired, Forbes, VentureBeat, and Singularity Hub. Author of A Business Leader’s Introduction to Physical AI (Singularity, 2026). Has spoken to or advised the United States Marine Corps, the CIA, the Department of Defense, the Central Bank of Denmark, Ernst & Young, GE, The Economist Group, Coca-Cola, Under Armour, FC Barcelona, the NBA, Sony, and Honeywell. Board member, Saint Francis Living Room, a community kitchen in San Francisco’s Tenderloin. Biography Generative AI is now familiar territory for most senior leaders. What comes after is the harder question: which emerging shifts genuinely reshape an industry, and where capital should actually move. That interpretive read is what Aaron Frank does for a living. He is one of only two lead facilitators of Singularity University’s flagship Executive Program. The five-day intensive puts him in a room with around a hundred senior leaders, working through emerging technology trajectories as a structured curriculum. Few speakers test their arguments against a senior audience that often. His range covers rapid technological change, spatial computing and 3D simulation, digital twins as enterprise infrastructure, and the move toward physical AI. He has taught that material to the United States Marine Corps, the Central Bank of Denmark, Ernst & Young, FC Barcelona, and GE. His bylines appear in Wired, Forbes, Vice, VentureBeat, and Singularity Hub. Outside Singularity, he holds an MBA from Oxford’s Saïd Business School and guest lectures on its Digital Transformation course. He also sits on the board of Saint Francis Living Room, a community kitchen in San Francisco’s Tenderloin. His current research focus is the rise of physical AI, set out for Singularity in a 2026 executive briefing on the convergence of robotics, simulation, and spatial intelligence. Key speaking topics Exponential technology trajectories and leadership decisions Innovation strategy under technology acceleration Spatial computing, 3D simulation, and digital twins Physical AI and robotics Ideal for Boards and executive teams setting AI and emerging technology investment direction CTO, CIO and head of digital transformation audiences Industrial, manufacturing, defence and supply chain leadership planning around physical AI and digital twins Strategy and innovation leads in financial services, sport, media and government Audience outcomes A clearer read on which emerging technology shifts actually reshape their industry, and which are noise. A working vocabulary for generative AI, spatial computing, digital twins, and physical AI that a senior team can use in the same conversation. Specific examples of how regulators, militaries, sports bodies, and Fortune 500 operators are deploying these technologies today. A view on the next two to five years of enterprise AI infrastructure beyond the chatbot, drawn from operating deployments.

Why organisations work with Spencer Kelly Two decades inside the BBC’s flagship technology programme, Click, give him a working knowledge of frontier tech that very few keynote speakers can match, and a presenter’s instinct for what a general audience can absorb. He is one of the few speakers who is equally credible as a keynote on AI and emerging tech and as the host or moderator who runs the rest of the day, which reduces the number of people a conference organiser has to brief. A Cambridge Computer Science background, with an undergraduate dissertation on AI, means his explanations sit on actual technical understanding rather than on borrowed framing. He has interviewed the people audiences are most curious about, from Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer to James Cameron, Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, which gives his sessions named primary material instead of recycled commentary. BBC Radio 4’s Understand: Tech & AI and the technology segment on BBC Morning Live keep him in current weekly conversation with a non-specialist audience, which is the audience most leadership teams actually resemble. Biography highlights Presenter of BBC Click from January 2006 to its final episode in March 2025, the BBC’s longest-serving technology presenter. Host of BBC Radio 4’s Understand: Tech & AI, a 10-part series first broadcast in July 2023. Presents the technology segment on BBC Morning Live. Computer Science double first from Churchill College, Cambridge, with an undergraduate dissertation on artificial intelligence. Honorary Doctor of Technology, Coventry University. Named T3 Magazine Tech Personality of the Year in 2015. Biography BBC Click ran for 25 years on BBC World News and the BBC News Channel. Spencer Kelly presented it for nearly 19 of them, from January 2006 to its final episode in March 2025. That single fact carries more weight in a leadership audience than any speaker bio summary, because it means the person at the front of the room has been tracking, testing and explaining frontier technology to a global audience continuously across an entire technology cycle. The Cambridge Computer Science training matters here. His double first at Churchill College, with an undergraduate dissertation on artificial intelligence and genetic algorithms, is the reason his explanations of AI sit on actual technical foundations rather than on metaphors. He moves fluently between the engineering reality and the boardroom question, which is exactly what most senior audiences are trying to do when they sit down at a strategy day. Beyond Click, he hosts BBC Radio 4’s Understand: Tech & AI, the 10-part series launched in July 2023, and presents the technology segment on BBC Morning Live. He has interviewed Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, James Cameron, Edward Snowden and Julian Assange. T3 Magazine named him Tech Personality of the Year in 2015. Coventry University awarded him an Honorary Doctor of Technology. For an event with leadership stakes, he is unusually flexible. He delivers the keynote on AI, automation and emerging technology when that is the brief, and he hosts, moderates or runs the awards when the day needs a presenter who can carry the room and stay on the subject. The same person does both jobs to BBC standard, which is rarer than most conference programmes assume. Key speaking topics Artificial intelligence in business Emerging technology and its commercial impact Automation and the future of work Quantum computing, blockchain and the metaverse Technology hosting, moderation and awards presenting Ideal for Boards and executive teams running an AI literacy or emerging tech briefing Conference organisers who need a single host across keynote, panel and awards CIO, CTO and digital transformation leaders running annual offsites Industry awards and sector summits that want a recognisable, technically credible host Audience outcomes A clearer picture of where AI and adjacent technologies are now, separated from the marketing layer. Specific named examples of how organisations are using emerging tech, drawn from his Click reporting. A working sense of which technologies sit in the next 18 months and which sit further out. The confidence to ask sharper questions of internal teams and external vendors.

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 Dalia Marin Her peer-reviewed research links automation, trade-policy uncertainty, and reshoring in a single empirical model, giving leadership teams a defensible basis for supply-chain decisions rather than a narrative. She translates between the Brussels and Berlin policy worlds and the corporate boardroom, drawing on advisory work with the European Commission, the EBRD, and the IMF. Her Project Syndicate column is a running public reference point on deglobalisation, German deindustrialisation, and the labour-market consequences of AI, read by policy and business readers across Europe. She is one of the few senior economists who has tracked the German industrial model, and the Eastern European production network around it, continuously since the 1990s. That long view matters when companies are re-assessing the same geographies. Biography highlights Chair in International Economics, TUM School of Management, Technical University of Munich. Non-resident Fellow at Bruegel and Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research. Former Professor of International Economics at Ludwig-Maximilians University Munich (1998 to 2017). Co-editor of “The Organization of Firms in a Global Economy” (Harvard University Press, 2008) with Elhanan Helpman and Thierry Verdier. Co-author of “Global Value Chains in a World of Uncertainty and Automation”, Journal of International Economics, 2025. Visiting appointments at Harvard, Stanford, NYU Stern, the IMF, the NBER, and the European University Institute. Project Syndicate columnist on deglobalisation, industrial policy, and the future of the German economic model. Biography The reshoring debate has moved past the slogan stage. Firms are actually pulling production back to high-income economies, and the economic literature is starting to explain why. Trade-policy uncertainty and cheaper industrial robots, working together, are restructuring global supply chains in ways that a decade of offshoring logic did not anticipate. That is the core argument of Marin’s recent work, co-authored in the Journal of International Economics in 2025. Her research shows that exposure to uncertainty in developing-country suppliers pushes production back to high-income countries, but only where robots have made it economically feasible. For a senior operations or strategy audience, this is a usable frame: reshoring is not a political mood, it is a measurable response to two forces that can be modelled. The wider body of work runs through Bruegel, CEPR, and a sustained Project Syndicate column. She has written continuously on the German economic model, the Eastern European production network built around it, and the inflationary and labour-market consequences of a partial retreat from globalisation. Her advisory work with the European Commission, the EBRD, and the IMF sits alongside the academic record rather than replacing it. She was Chair in International Economics at Ludwig-Maximilians University Munich for almost two decades before moving to TUM. Visiting appointments at Harvard, Stanford, NYU Stern, the IMF, and the NBER place her inside the network of economists who set the terms of the trade-policy debate. The value for a corporate audience is that she can connect that technical conversation to the question actually on the table: what does the next decade of supply-chain strategy look like when the old globalisation assumptions no longer hold. Key speaking topics Deglobalisation and the restructuring of global supply chains Automation, robots, and reshoring The German economic model and European competitiveness International trade policy and geopolitical risk Multinational firms and the organisation of global production Industrial policy in Europe and the United States Inflation, labour markets, and the economics of deglobalisation Ideal for Boards and executive committees reassessing supply-chain footprint in light of tariffs, geopolitical risk, and automation CSOs, Heads of Strategy, and COOs responsible for manufacturing and sourcing decisions in industrial and export-led businesses Policy forums, investor conferences, and economic summits focused on Europe, Germany, and the future of global trade Senior leadership in financial institutions and multinational corporates with significant exposure to Eastern Europe and the German industrial base Audience outcomes A clear read of the empirical evidence on reshoring, automation, and trade-policy uncertainty, rather than the headline narrative A sharper view of where the German economic model is strong and where it is exposed, with implications for anyone doing business across the European industrial network A working framework for assessing which parts of a supply chain are candidates for reshoring and which are not A grounded perspective on the macro-economic consequences of deglobalisation, including effects on inflation and labour markets Language and evidence that senior leaders can use in their own board conversations on geopolitical and trade exposure

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

Why organisations work with Raffaello D’Andrea He has built two commercially-deployed autonomous systems from the ground up – Kiva Systems, now the architecture powering over a million Amazon Robotics units across 300+ facilities, and Verity, whose autonomous indoor drones operate at nearly 200 sites worldwide. Most technology speakers have observed others build at scale; D’Andrea has done it twice. His account of the gap between academic research and industrial deployment is not speculative. He moved from Cornell professor to co-founder to chief technical advisor to ETH faculty, and back to founder again – carrying hands-on engineering responsibility at every stage. That trajectory gives organisations a rare, inside view of what makes autonomous systems fail or succeed in practice. The Kiva story – a $775M acquisition that became the operational backbone of the world’s largest e-commerce company – is a fully documented, publicly available case study in redesigning an entire industry’s logistics model around autonomous systems. D’Andrea can speak to that case from the inside, as the architect of the core system. His ongoing research at ETH Zurich, through platforms like CyberRunner, Cubli and the Flying Machine Arena, sits at the frontier of autonomous learning and control. Audiences hear what is actually being solved in research today, not what is being forecast by analysts. Elected to the National Academy of Engineering, inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame for the Kiva system, and recognised by the Logistics Hall of Fame – D’Andrea holds formal peer recognition across engineering, invention and industry simultaneously, a combination that is rare among technology speakers. Biography highlights Professor of Dynamic Systems and Control, ETH Zurich; founder of ETH’s Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control Co-founder of Kiva Systems, acquired by Amazon in 2012 and now operating as Amazon Robotics, the autonomous fulfilment system at the core of Amazon’s global warehouse operations Founder and CEO of Verity, autonomous indoor drone company deployed at nearly 200 sites worldwide, with clients including IKEA, Maersk and UPS Elected member, National Academy of Engineering (2020); National Inventors Hall of Fame inductee (2022); Logistics Hall of Fame inductee (2024) IEEE Fellow; IEEE Robotics and Automation Award (2016); Engelberger Robotics Award (2015); Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (2001); named on more than 40 US patents TED Global 2013 and TED 2016 speaker; TED and research videos with tens of millions of views New media artworks held in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Canada and France’s FRAC Centre; exhibited at the Venice Biennale Biography The systems running inside Amazon’s warehouses today – more than a million autonomous robots across over 300 facilities – trace their core architecture directly to Raffaello D’Andrea. As co-founder of Kiva Systems, D’Andrea designed the navigation logic, fleet coordination algorithms and adaptive control systems that made warehouse automation economically viable at commercial scale for the first time. When Amazon acquired Kiva in 2012, it rebranded the company as Amazon Robotics and made it the operational foundation of its global fulfilment network. That work was built on a research track record with real competitive stakes. Before Kiva, D’Andrea was at Cornell University, where he led the Robot Soccer Team to four consecutive RoboCup world championships – using autonomous multi-agent competition as a proving ground for the kinds of coordination and real-time decision-making that large-scale robotics deployments require. The move from academic research to commercial deployment, and back to academic research, is the defining pattern of his career. At ETH Zurich, where he founded the Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control, D’Andrea leads research through hands-on experimental platforms – CyberRunner, Cubli, the Flying Machine Arena, the Distributed Flight Array – that probe the real limits of autonomous learning, not its theoretical promise. In 2014, he co-founded Verity, whose autonomous indoor drone systems now operate at nearly 200 sites worldwide, automating inventory tracking and operational data collection for clients including IKEA, Maersk and UPS. The company raised a $43M Series B in 2023 with Qualcomm Ventures among the investors. Elected to the National Academy of Engineering and inducted into both the National Inventors Hall of Fame and the Logistics Hall of Fame, D’Andrea holds formal peer recognition across engineering, invention and industry – a combination that reflects a career built on closing the distance between what autonomous systems can do in a laboratory and what they can sustain across an industrial operation. Key speaking topics Autonomous systems design and commercial-scale deployment AI, machine learning and physical intelligence Warehouse automation and supply chain operations Deep-tech entrepreneurship and venture building Autonomous flight and drone systems The gap between robotics research and real-world application The future of human-machine collaboration in physical operations Ideal for COOs, heads of supply chain and logistics leaders evaluating or scaling autonomous operations CTOs and technology leadership teams making investment decisions in robotics and AI deployment Boards and executive committees setting autonomous systems strategy Innovation and transformation leadership forums focused on operational technology Audience outcomes A practitioner’s framework for distinguishing autonomous systems that create genuine operational value from those that stall between proof of concept and deployment Concrete understanding of the systems design conditions that make robotics reliable and economically viable at industrial scale An insider account of how Kiva Systems redesigned warehouse operations – and what that process reveals about the real requirements of large-scale autonomous deployment A more accurate picture of where AI and robotics are heading, grounded in what is already working at commercial scale rather than in market speculation Sharper criteria for evaluating autonomous technology partnerships, vendor claims and investment priorities

Why organisations work with Guy Hoffman He runs one of the leading labs in the world on human-robot and human-AI collaboration, so the content is drawn from active research, not recycled commentary. His design training at Parsons sits on top of an MIT computer science doctorate, which is why his work on non-anthropomorphic robots and nonverbal machine communication reads as rigorous rather than aesthetic. His TEDxJaffa talk “Robots with Soul” passed three million views and remains one of the most-watched public explanations of why machines feel awkward to work with, and how to fix it. He has shipped work that reached wide audiences: the AUR robotic desk lamp won the IEEE Robot Design Competition, and his collaboration on the Digital Water Pavilion was named a TIME Best Invention of the Year. He speaks to leadership audiences about AI without the two failure modes buyers dread: pure hype on one side, and pure academic detachment on the other. Biography highlights Associate Professor and Mills Family Faculty Fellow, Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Cornell University. Heads the Human-Robot Collaboration and Companionship (HRC2) group at Cornell. PhD, MIT Media Lab (human-robot interaction); MSc Computer Science, Tel Aviv University; animation studies, Parsons School of Design. Best Paper awards at HRI and robotics conferences across 2004, 2006, 2008, 2010, 2013, 2015, 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021. Co-author of “Social Robot Morphology: Cultural Histories of Robot Design” in Cultural Robotics (Springer, 2023). Work covered by CNN, BBC, The New York Times, PBS, NBC, IEEE Spectrum and Semafor. Biography The hard problem in applied AI is not the model. It is the hand-off. The moment a machine has to time its action to a human’s, read context, share a task, or back off when the person wants to lead, most systems fail in ways that erode trust faster than any single output error. Guy Hoffman has spent two decades building the science of that moment. At Cornell, Hoffman leads the Human-Robot Collaboration and Companionship group as Associate Professor and Mills Family Faculty Fellow in the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. The lab’s work sits across mechanical engineering, computer science and information science, which is why it produces research on timing, nonverbal communication and the design of machines that do not pretend to be human. His doctorate is from the MIT Media Lab; he also trained in animation at Parsons, and that combination shapes the questions he asks. The public version of that thinking is his TEDxJaffa talk “Robots with Soul,” watched more than three million times and still one of the clearest explanations of why so many AI products feel wrong to use. The academic version is a body of work that has been recognised with Best Paper awards at HRI and robotics conferences across a decade and more, and a 2023 Springer chapter, “Social Robot Morphology,” that traces how cultural assumptions get baked into machine design. For senior audiences, the through-line is practical. Companies are now deploying AI into workflows that were built for humans. Hoffman’s research shows what breaks at that boundary, why it breaks, and what good looks like when a machine is designed to collaborate rather than merely perform. That is a more specific brief than the usual AI keynote, and it lands with operators who have already moved past the demo. Key speaking topics Human-AI collaboration and the design of productive machine partners Human-robot interaction in workplaces and homes Nonverbal communication between people and intelligent systems Non-anthropomorphic robot and AI design Timing, trust and hand-offs in human-machine teams Cultural assumptions embedded in AI and robot design The future of robots in care, service and creative work Ideal for Chief technology and chief AI officers leading enterprise AI deployment Heads of R and D, innovation and product in technology-intensive sectors Boards and executive teams setting strategy for automation and AI-enabled services Health, manufacturing and service leaders introducing robotic or AI systems into human workflows Audience outcomes A clearer map of where AI and robotic systems tend to fail at the human boundary, and why those failures are predictable A working vocabulary for discussing trust, timing and hand-offs in AI-enabled operations Specific design principles from two decades of human-robot interaction research, translated for non-technical leaders A view of where near-term robotics is heading in workplaces, homes and care settings, grounded in current lab work Sharper questions to bring back to internal AI and automation roadmaps