Customer Experience & Marketing

Why organisations work with Jonathan Gabay He writes the textbooks the field uses. Brand Psychology (Kogan Page) and Practical Digital Marketing and AI Psychology (Routledge) are professional references, not bureau-circuit titles. He reads brand crises in real time on BBC, CNN, Bloomberg and Sky, which means his commercial diagnosis comes from sustained exposure to live reputational damage, not case-study retrospectives. He treats AI in marketing as a trust problem, not an automation problem, and connects ethics, prompt engineering and consumer psychology in one argument senior marketers can act on. His Saatchi & Saatchi Direct origin is creative, not academic, so the strategic frame stays tied to what actually moves a customer. Biography highlights Author of Brand Psychology (Kogan Page) and Practical Digital Marketing and AI Psychology (Routledge, 2024), professional textbooks used by marketing students and practitioners. Former Group Creative Head, Saatchi & Saatchi Direct. Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing and accredited brand journalist. Senior lecturer in crisis management and prompt engineering; teaching record at the London School of Economics, Management Centre Europe and Newport University. Course leader on digital psychology programmes for the Chartered Institute of Marketing and the Direct Marketing Association of Northern California. Regular media commentator on branding, political PR and AI for BBC (including Newsnight), CNN, Bloomberg, Sky, Channel 5 and ABC. Biography Most brands now compete on a question they have not faced before. Not how to reach an audience, but whether anyone still believes the message when they get it. Generative AI has industrialised marketing output and consumers have responded with a sharper, quieter scepticism that no media spend can buy past. Jonathan Gabay has spent three decades on the inside of that question. He started in creative work at Saatchi & Saatchi Direct, where he became Group Creative Head, then moved into the analytical side of the same problem. Brand Psychology (Kogan Page) sets out how social psychology, cognitive science and neuroscience explain why consumers trust some brands and abandon others, and what CEO reputation does to both. His 2024 Routledge textbook Practical Digital Marketing and AI Psychology extends the argument into the AI era. The book is used as a professional reference by marketing students and practitioners, and treats AI not as a productivity tool but as a force that changes the psychological contract between brand and buyer. He teaches the same material as a senior lecturer in crisis management and prompt engineering, with course work at the London School of Economics, the Chartered Institute of Marketing and the Direct Marketing Association of Northern California. The commentary record matters because it is unusually current. BBC Newsnight, CNN, Bloomberg, Sky and Channel 5 use him to read live brand and political PR crises as they unfold, which is why the keynote material is closer to a working diagnostic than a finished case study. Key speaking topics Brand psychology and consumer trust AI ethics in marketing communications Digital trust and online consumer behaviour Crisis communications and brand reputation Political PR, propaganda and persuasion Prompt engineering for marketers CEO reputation and brand storytelling Ideal for CMOs, brand directors and marketing leadership teams rebuilding trust under AI Communications, PR and corporate affairs leaders facing reputational risk Boards and executive teams of consumer-facing brands Marketing and brand functions integrating AI into customer-facing work Audience outcomes A working model of how consumers form trust in brands and what AI changes about it A clearer view of where AI use crosses the ethical line that customers actually punish Sharper diagnosis of brand and reputation crises drawn from live media cases A practical reading of where prompt engineering and marketing psychology meet Confidence to make defensible commercial calls on AI in marketing communications

Why organisations work with Jonathan Reynolds His research framework on omnichannel retail – built over four decades at Oxford through direct partnerships with Tesco, the British Retail Consortium, Eurocommerce, and retail associations in eight countries, gives leadership teams a structural diagnosis of competitive change, rather than a trend description. Navigating the New Retail Landscape (Oxford University Press, 3rd edition 2025) draws on over 40 international case studies to make a specific argument: the retailers that win redesign the enterprise, not just the channel mix. Audiences leave with a reference framework, not just a perspective. Reynolds leads OXIRM, the UK’s only dedicated university research institute for retail management, giving him an institutional vantage point that neither management consultants nor industry analysts can replicate. His research consistently interrogates the “death of the high street” narrative and offers a more rigorous counter-argument: physical retail is not dying, but its strategic logic has changed fundamentally. That distinction matters to boards making long-term investment decisions. As a regular contributor to the BBC, Financial Times, The Economist, and Wall Street Journal, he translates peer-reviewed research into language that executive teams and boards can act on directly. Biography highlights Associate Professor in Retail Marketing and Deputy Dean (External Relations), Saïd Business School, University of Oxford Founding member and Academic Director, Oxford Institute of Retail Management (OXIRM), since 1999 Co-author, Navigating the New Retail Landscape: A Guide for Business Leaders (Oxford University Press; 3rd edition, 2025) Deputy Director, ESRC Smart Data Research geographic data service (GeoDS) – joint initiative of Oxford, Liverpool, Edinburgh and UCL Vice-Principal and Governing Body Fellow, Green Templeton College, Oxford Keynote speaker, World Retail Congress Regular media contributor: BBC, Financial Times, The Economist, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal Visiting Professor, Amos Tuck School of Business Administration, Dartmouth College Biography In 1985, a research commission from Tesco brought Jonathan Reynolds to Oxford to examine how new technology would reshape retail operations. Four decades later, Reynolds is Associate Professor in Retail Marketing and Deputy Dean at Saïd Business School. The structural question that commission raised of how a retail enterprise stays competitive when its environment is being redrawn, has never been more pressing. Reynolds is the founding Academic Director of the Oxford Institute of Retail Management, a role he has held since 1999. OXIRM is the UK’s only dedicated university research centre for retail management. Reynolds uses it to run sustained research partnerships with practitioners and policymakers including the British Retail Consortium, Eurocommerce, and retail associations in Estonia, Finland, Greece, Malaysia, New Zealand and the UK, giving his analysis a data foundation that industry commentary rarely achieves. His central argument, developed across three editions of Navigating the New Retail Landscape (OUP, 3rd edition 2025), is that the retailers who survive the current period of disruption are not those who add channels most quickly. Drawing on over 40 international case studies, Reynolds and co-author Alan Treadgold show that success requires redesigning the enterprise: its capabilities, its leadership model, and its understanding of what physical stores are strategically for. The book is now a standard reference for senior retail executives and strategy teams internationally. Reynolds is a keynote speaker at the World Retail Congress and a regular analytical voice for the BBC, Financial Times, The Economist, and The Wall Street Journal. His research sits inside peer-reviewed journals and inside boardroom conversations simultaneously: a combination that is less common than it should be, and that gives his arguments their particular authority. Key speaking topics Omnichannel and e-commerce strategy Retail business model innovation Technology adoption and digital transformation in retail The strategic role of physical stores Retail entrepreneurship and innovation Retail productivity and workforce capability Retail development, planning and location strategy Consumer data and retail intelligence Ideal for Chief Executive Officers and strategy directors of retail and consumer-facing enterprises Chief Commercial Officers and Chief Marketing Officers navigating channel complexity Real estate and property investors with significant retail exposure Policy teams and government bodies working on town centres, high streets, and retail planning Audience outcomes A clearer framework for distinguishing between channel complexity and genuine competitive strategy An evidence-based analysis of where physical retail creates value and where it no longer does, drawn from 40+ international case studies A more precise understanding of the organisational capabilities and leadership behaviours that separate retail winners from those adding digital layers without structural change Exposure to current Oxford research on consumer data, retail geography, and market evolution that does not typically reach practitioner audiences Language and reference points for board-level conversations about long-term retail investment and transformation

Why organisations work with Juan Senor Co-edits the WAN-IFRA Innovation in News Media report and the FIPP Innovation in Magazine Media report, the two annual reference works on what is actually working commercially across global publishing. Has advised hundreds of news organisations on every continent on the parallel work of rebuilding the news product and rebuilding the business model that funds it. Speaks with authority on disinformation, AI slop, and platform dependency from inside the industry, not as an outside commentator. Hosts the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity and the Reinvention Festival, with moderating credits at Money20/20 and the World Economic Forum, which means a senior commercial audience already knows him on stage. Biography highlights President and Principal Partner, INNOVATION Media Consulting Group, London. Co-editor of the annual Innovation in News Media World Report (WAN-IFRA) and the Innovation in Media report (FIPP). Former visiting fellow, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, University of Oxford. Former foreign affairs and defence reporter, PBS’s MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour; team recipient of a DuPont-Columbia Journalism Award and Emmy nomination for interviews with Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin. Former presenter and correspondent for CNBC Europe, EBN/Wall Street Journal TV, and International Herald Tribune Television. Long-running host of the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity; moderator at the World Economic Forum, Money20/20, and the WAN-IFRA World News Media Congress. Biography Most news organisations are now wrestling with two structural problems at once. Their commercial model has been hollowed out by platform dependency. Their editorial product is competing for attention against AI-generated content produced at industrial scale, much of it designed to mimic real journalism. Juan Senor has spent two decades inside that problem. As President of Innovation Media Consulting Group, he has advised hundreds of news and media organisations across every continent on the parallel work of rebuilding the news product and the business model that funds it. He co-edits the WAN-IFRA Innovation in News Media report and the FIPP Innovation in Magazine Media report, the closest the industry has to a running ledger of what audiences are willing to pay for. His authority on the editorial side comes from the desk. He spent seven years as a war and conflict reporter for PBS NewsHour, where the team’s coverage won a DuPont Award and his own work earned an Emmy nomination. He went on to present for EBN-Wall Street Journal TV and CNBC Europe and served as London correspondent for International Herald Tribune Television. He is a former Visiting Fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford, and is quoted regularly in The Economist and The Financial Times. He has also hosted the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity for fourteen years and the Reinvention Festival for a decade, with moderating credits at Money20/20 and the World Economic Forum. That hosting work places him in front of the same senior commercial audience whose business problem he is now advising on. Key speaking topics Business model innovation in news and magazine media Paid content, subscription, and reader-revenue strategy Newsroom transformation and product strategy Digital disruption and the platform economy The future of journalism and trust in media Media leadership and editorial commercial alignment Ideal for Publisher CEOs, editors-in-chief, and chief product officers in news and magazine media CMOs and brand leaders rethinking owned-content and editorial strategy Industry associations, media congresses, and creative festivals needing a credible main-stage host or keynote Boards of content-driven businesses navigating subscription, advertising, and platform shifts Audience outcomes A current read on which paid-content models are working, with named publishers and live revenue figures A clearer view of what editorial leaders should stop doing, not only what to start Frameworks for aligning newsroom, product, and commercial teams around a single paid-content thesis A working language for board-level conversations about media disruption, drawn from the WAN-IFRA report

Why organisations work with Julian Treasure He has run an operating consultancy, The Sound Agency, advising global brands on retail, office and public-space sound for two decades. The work has commercial outcomes attached, not theory. His TED catalogue is one of the most viewed of any speaker on any subject, which gives senior audiences a shared starting point before he steps on stage. He treats listening as a leadership capability with a teachable structure, and his book How to Be Heard sets out the model in detail. He covers the rarely combined territory of personal communication craft and the sonic design of physical workplaces, so he is credible with HR, brand and facilities audiences in the same room. Awards from Toastmasters International and the International Listening Association place him inside the formal communication and listening professions, not just the speaker circuit. Biography highlights Founder and chairman of The Sound Agency, audio branding consultancy Five TED talks; combined views above 160 million; “How to Speak So That People Want to Listen” is TED’s sixth most-viewed talk Author of Sound Business (2014), How to Be Heard (2017) and Sound Affects (2025) Toastmasters International Golden Gavel Award; International Listening Association Special Recognition Award Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts; Liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Marketors Founded and sold UK customer magazine publisher TPD Group; former chairman of the UK Association of Publishing Agencies; PPA Chairman’s Award (2002) Biography Sound is the most underused operating variable in most organisations. Retailers play music chosen by the manager on shift. Offices design for visual brand and acoustic accident. Leaders speak without ever auditing how they are heard. The financial cost is real and the cultural cost is larger. The Sound Agency was built around that gap. Founded by a former publisher and musician with a Cambridge economics degree, the consultancy has spent two decades advising global brands on retail soundscapes, office acoustics and audio identity, with measurable effects on sales, wellbeing and behaviour. The argument is that sound is a commercial system, designed or accidental, and most organisations choose accidental. The communication work is the second half of the same proposition. Three books, Sound Business, How to Be Heard and Sound Affects, set out a structured model for speaking and listening as leadership skills rather than soft attributes. The TED catalogue, five talks above 160 million combined views, has made the speaking talk one of the most watched pieces of business communication content ever recorded. The Toastmasters Golden Gavel and the International Listening Association Special Recognition Award place him inside the formal disciplines, not adjacent to them. For senior teams, he offers something specific: a working theory of how attention, voice and environment shape commercial and cultural outcomes, and the operating experience to back it up. The Royal Society of Arts fellowship and the Worshipful Company of Marketors livery are part of a wider institutional footprint that signals durability rather than novelty. Key speaking topics Conscious listening as a leadership skill Powerful speaking and executive voice Audio branding and sonic identity Sound design in workplaces and retail environments Communication and engagement in distracted organisations Wellbeing effects of sound and noise Trust and credibility in senior communication Ideal for CMOs and brand leadership rethinking customer experience beyond the visual HR, internal communications and culture leads working on listening and engagement Retail, hospitality and property leadership designing customer-facing environments Senior leaders preparing for high-stakes speaking, board, investor or media Audience outcomes A working model for listening as a measurable leadership capability Specific techniques for executive voice, structure and presence in high-stakes settings A new lens on the commercial and cultural cost of accidental sound in workplaces and retail A shared vocabulary for communication quality across HR, brand and facilities functions Concrete next steps that connect personal communication craft to organisational outcomes

Why organisations work with Julie Holmes She gives leaders a way past the trap most AI programmes fall into. Second Story Strategy™, her framework, treats AI as a starting line for distinct new value, not a finish line for cost savings. She has built and sold technology, not just studied it. Two innovation companies and products in over 60 countries give her keynotes the texture of an operator, and she still builds AI applications for herself and clients today. Her material works at two stages: helping teams who are still becoming AI-capable, and pushing teams who have already proven AI makes them faster toward the harder question of what they will do with it that no one else can. PSA-UKI Hall of Fame status puts her among 33 speakers recognised for sustained craft on stage, which matters when the brief is a high-stakes leadership audience with mixed AI fluency in the room. She lectures on innovation and AI at Yale, Birkbeck, and the American University of Beirut, keeping the material tested against faculty and students as well as paying clients. Biography highlights Hall of Fame Speaker, PSA-UKI, one of 33 to hold the honour Originator of Second Story Strategy™ and the Second Story Blueprint for building competitive advantage on top of AI Author of Little Big Bangs for Leaders and of the 101+ AI Tips, Tools and Prompts series for leaders and sales professionals Founder of two innovation companies with products distributed in over 60 countries Clients include Oracle, Expedia, American Express, JetBlue, Nestle, EY, VMware, US Bank, and LinkedIn Guest lecturer at Yale, Birkbeck (University of London), and the American University of Beirut Biography AI is raising the floor for everyone. The same models, agents, and automation reach every competitor in a category at roughly the same time. That makes it easy to be good, and good is no longer a position. It is the new baseline. Julie Holmes works on the question that follows: once everyone is faster, what will your organisation be that no one else can be? Her answer is Second Story Strategy™, a framework drawn from studying which companies actually pull ahead with AI and which simply run harder in place. The pattern she found was not about budget or engineering depth. The standouts treated AI as a foundation and built something distinct on top of it, working through four levels she maps as Build, Reimagine, Extend, and Lead, with the organisation’s own distinctiveness as the load-bearing element running through all of them. Her credibility comes from building, not commenting. Holmes founded two innovation companies and shipped products into more than 60 countries, and she still builds AI applications for herself and clients. That operator history shapes how she talks to senior audiences. The diagnosis is practical, the language is plain, and her work extends into resources leaders can use directly, including the regularly updated 101+ AI Tips, Tools and Prompts series. Holmes is a Hall of Fame Speaker with PSA-UKI, one of 33 to hold the honour, and a guest lecturer at Yale, Birkbeck, and the American University of Beirut. Brands including Oracle, Expedia, JetBlue, Nestle, EY, and LinkedIn have brought her in for the same reason: to move AI from a tool that makes them cheaper to a foundation that makes them distinct. Key speaking topics Second Story Strategy™ and competitive advantage through AI AI strategy and enterprise adoption AI-empowered teams and workflows Innovation as a leadership discipline Sales and customer experience under AI Future of work and AI capability building Ideal for C-suite leaders setting enterprise AI direction Heads of department helping their teams level up with AI Sales and customer-experience leaders integrating AI into commercial workflows Company-wide events where AI fluency varies widely across the room Audience outcomes The five behaviours that set AI-savvy teams apart, framed as a Second Story Strategy™ they can act on A clear way to decide where to build genuine distinction and where keeping pace is enough Concrete examples of how AI is reshaping leadership, sales, and customer experience, with specific tools named Language for leading non-technical teams into AI with confidence rather than anxiety A sharper sense of which AI use cases build advantage and which only add speed

Why organisations work with June Sarpong She has run inclusion at scale inside one of the world’s largest media organisations. As the BBC’s first Director of Creative Diversity, she sat on the Executive Committee and oversaw a £100m commissioning commitment, which gives boards a credible peer voice rather than an outside consultant. Her three HarperCollins books (Diversify, The Power of Women, The Power of Privilege) build an economic argument for inclusion, drawing on Nuffield College, Oxford research that put the cost of UK discrimination at £127bn a year. Buyers get a speaker who can frame the case in commercial terms. Through Diversify International, she has worked with Burberry, Barclays, Nike, Google, Unilever, EY and the NHS, so the room can ask practical questions about what works in regulated, consumer-facing and public-sector contexts. She moves naturally between keynote and host or moderator, which makes her usable across formats: a leadership offsite opener, an internal town hall, an awards stage, or a chaired board conversation on diversity. Biography highlights First Director of Creative Diversity at the BBC and first Black woman on the BBC Executive Committee. Oversaw a £100m commitment to diverse and inclusive content commissioning at the BBC. Author of three HarperCollins titles on inclusion: Diversify, The Power of Women, The Power of Privilege. Founder of Diversify International, with corporate clients including Burberry, Barclays, Google, Nike, Unilever, EY, Facebook and the NHS. MBE (2007) and OBE (2020) for services to broadcasting and to broadcasting respectively. Non-Executive Trustee of Tate, appointed by the Prime Minister. Biography Inclusion is now a board-level question because the audiences, workforces and customer bases of most large organisations have changed faster than the people running them. June Sarpong’s work sits exactly in that gap. She argues, in commercial language, that closing it is an operating decision, not a values statement. She made that case from inside one of the world’s most scrutinised institutions. As the BBC’s first Director of Creative Diversity, she sat on the Executive Committee and oversaw a £100m commissioning commitment to diverse and inclusive content. It was the first time a UK public broadcaster of that scale tied inclusion to a budget line and reported against it. The argument is also published. Her three HarperCollins books, Diversify, The Power of Women and The Power of Privilege, draw on Nuffield College, Oxford research that put the annual cost of discrimination in the UK at £127bn. The books are used as a frame in her keynote work, which is how she became useful to companies trying to move beyond statements: Burberry, Barclays, Google, Nike, Unilever, EY and the NHS have all engaged Diversify International, the consultancy she founded after leaving the BBC. Her career began in broadcasting, and that range still matters commercially. She presented Channel 4’s T4 for nine years, interviewed Tony Blair for the strand, and is a regular panel and broadcast voice. The same craft that lets her host a leadership offsite or chair a board conversation also lets her bring difficult inclusion content into a room without it landing as a lecture. She is a Trustee of Tate, appointed by the Prime Minister, and holds an OBE for services to broadcasting. Key speaking topics Inclusion as an operating commitment Diverse audiences and consumer reach Workforce composition and talent The economic case for inclusion Allyship and privilege Women in leadership Culture change inside large organisations Ideal for CHROs, Chief People Officers and DEI leads under pressure to show measurable inclusion outcomes Boards and executive committees revisiting inclusion strategy after the post-2020 reset Marketing and brand leaders rethinking how products and content connect with diverse audiences Leadership offsites, internal town halls and conferences that need a credible host as well as a speaker Audience outcomes A clearer picture of what inclusion looks like as a budget and operating decision, drawn from a real public-sector example The commercial argument for inclusion in language a CFO or board chair will accept A practical reading of what worked and what failed across consumer, financial and public-sector deployments A sharper view of the difference between inclusion programmes and inclusion communications

Why organisations work with Justin King A first-hand, decade-long account of running a FTSE 100 retailer through competitive attack, recession and the shift to online, with named results: 36 consecutive quarters of like-for-like growth, tripled underlying profit, and an 85 per cent total shareholder return by the time he stepped down. The “Making Sainsbury’s Great Again” playbook talked through by the CEO who wrote it, with concrete decisions on price, fresh food, colleague engagement and the Paralympic sponsorship that reset the brand. An active cross-portfolio operating perspective from the Chair seats at Allwyn Entertainment, Dexters and Itsu Grocery, plus the recent OVO Energy chairmanship through the sector’s difficult patch, so the material is current rather than retrospective. A credible record on purpose-led commercial leadership, evidenced through Sainsbury’s Comic Relief partnership of £1 for every £10 donated, the first dedicated Paralympic sponsorship of London 2012, and Made by Sport, the charity he founded in 2019 that raised over £6m for community organisations before transferring to Sported. A leadership framework, the ten Cs, that has been pressure-tested against a real CEO seat rather than developed in a classroom, and is delivered with the candour of someone who has had to defend results to a board. Biography highlights CEO of J Sainsbury plc, 2004 to 2014, ten years that took the business from third place and falling sales to 36 consecutive quarters of like-for-like growth and an 85 per cent total shareholder return. Chair of Allwyn Entertainment and Dexters; Non-Executive Chair of Itsu Grocery; recent Chair of OVO Energy. Non-Executive Director of Marks and Spencer plc, January 2019 to September 2025; member of the PwC Public Interest Body, 2015 to 2022. Vice Chairman and Senior Adviser at Terra Firma Capital Partners, 2015 to 2021; interim Chairman of the Manor Racing F1 team during its 2014-2015 restructuring. Member of the London Organising Committee for the Olympic and Paralympic Games and its audit committee, with Sainsbury’s the first dedicated Paralympic sponsor of London 2012. Founder of Made by Sport, 2019 to 2023, raising over £6m for community sport organisations. CBE for services to the retail industry, 2011 Birthday Honours; Honorary DBA, University of Bath, 2009; Most Admired Business Leader, Management Today; Britain’s Most Impressive Businessman, IPSOS-MORI Captains of Industry Report. Biography Sainsbury’s was the third-place supermarket with falling sales when Justin King took the CEO seat in March 2004. The City viewed the appointment as the company’s last chance to remain independent. Within six months he had launched “Making Sainsbury’s Great Again”, a recovery plan built on fresh food, colleague engagement and a re-priced shelf. The plan’s headline target, a £2.5 billion sales uplift, was hit three months early. Over his ten years as CEO, the business delivered 36 consecutive quarters of like-for-like growth, tripled underlying profit from £252m to £756m, and returned 85 per cent to shareholders. The brand was rebuilt around the first dedicated Paralympic sponsorship of London 2012, and the long-standing Comic Relief partnership of £1 for every £10 donated. Sainsbury’s regained second place in UK grocery and he stepped down in 2014 with the longest unbroken growth run of any major UK supermarket CEO of the era. He arrived at Sainsbury’s with three decades in consumer businesses behind him, including senior roles at M&S Food, Asda and Häagen-Dazs UK. After leaving the CEO seat he held the Vice Chairman and Senior Adviser role at Terra Firma Capital Partners from 2015 to 2021, sat on the PwC Public Interest Body from 2015 to 2022, and served as a Non-Executive Director of Marks and Spencer from January 2019 until September 2025. He chaired the Manor Racing F1 team through its 2014-2015 restructuring. He is Chair of Allwyn Entertainment, Chair of Dexters, and Non-Executive Chair of Itsu Grocery, with adviser seats at Snappy Shopper and Rezolve. He chaired OVO Energy through the post-energy-crisis period to August 2025. The purpose thread runs through the record: he founded Made by Sport in 2019, which raised over £6m for community sport organisations before the campaign was handed to Sported in 2023. He was appointed CBE in the 2011 Birthday Honours for services to retail, named Most Admired Business Leader by Management Today, and topped the IPSOS-MORI Captains of Industry Report. The University of Bath conferred an Honorary DBA in 2009, and he served on the Prime Minister’s Business Advisory Group from 2010 to 2012. Key speaking topics Retail leadership and the long-cycle turnaround Consumer behaviour and brand reinvention Customer and colleague-led growth Purpose-led commercial leadership and responsible business Boardroom decision-making under competitive pressure Sponsorship and purpose, drawn from London 2012 Cross-portfolio non-executive leadership Ideal for FTSE and large-cap consumer business leadership teams managing a multi-year turnaround Retail, hospitality and consumer goods boards weighing strategy against operational execution Chief executives, COOs and store or operations directors in customer-facing sectors Boards and leadership teams looking to embed purpose into commercial performance rather than treat it as a side function Audience outcomes A working view of how a CEO sequences price, range, colleagues and brand through a decade-long recovery rather than a single reset. Specific lessons from London 2012, the Comic Relief partnership and Made by Sport on how purpose can shift commercial performance. A frank account of what holds boards together when results are slow, competitors aggressive and shareholders impatient. A leadership lens, the ten Cs, applied to the audience’s own operating questions during Q&A.

Why organisations work with Karl Lillrud He speaks about AI from the seat of someone who has run digital commerce businesses since the late nineties and is currently building one. PodManager AI, his AI-driven podcast production platform, is shipping to paying customers as he speaks about AI to other operators. His work connects AI directly to revenue mechanics: pricing, conversion, retention, and customer acquisition, the parts of the P&L the C-suite is actually accountable for. Nine published books, including «You, Me and AI» and «AI, Your Second Brain: Evolve or Go Extinct», give leadership teams a shared language for the second-order effects of AI on work, governance, and customer trust, beyond the productivity headlines. Membership of the Harvard Business Review Advisory Council and recognition in Thinkers360’s AI thought-leader rankings signal that the perspective travels at board level, not just at the developer conference. The client footprint, including Volvo, Spotify, Klarna, H&M, AstraZeneca, and 3, gives him pattern recognition across regulated and consumer-facing businesses that few AI speakers can match. Biography highlights Founder of PodManager AI, an AI-driven podcast production platform he is currently building. Founder of Pricelizer, a Swedish e-commerce startup named to CNBC’s 20 hottest startups list in 2015. Author of nine books on AI and digital business, including «You, Me and AI» and «AI, Your Second Brain: Evolve or Go Extinct». Member of the Harvard Business Review Advisory Council since August 2024. Two-time TEDx speaker. Recognised across multiple years in Thinkers360’s AI thought-leader rankings and Global Gurus’ Top 30 Motivational Speakers list. Public engagement footprint includes Volvo, Spotify, Klarna, H&M, AstraZeneca, Qliro, 3, Tele2, and TUI. Biography Most AI keynote speakers have never run a checkout flow at scale. Karl Lillrud has. He has been building digital businesses since the late nineties, founded Pricelizer in 2013 to solve the abandoned-cart problem he kept hitting as an operator, and watched it land on CNBC’s 20 hottest startups list in 2015. He is now building PodManager AI, an AI-driven podcast production platform shipping to paying customers. That operator history, still in present tense, is the through-line for everything he says about artificial intelligence. His books reflect the same instinct. «You, Me and AI» treats the technology across 54 chapters covering work, creativity, education, governance, and the human-machine boundary, rather than as a productivity story. «AI, Your Second Brain: Evolve or Go Extinct» focuses on how leaders and their teams should actually integrate the tools day to day. The two sit inside a wider catalogue of nine published books, written for people who have to make decisions, not people studying the field. The institutional signals followed the work. Thinkers360 has recognised him across its AI thought-leader rankings. Global Gurus has placed him repeatedly in its Top 30 Motivational Speakers ranking. In August 2024 he joined the Harvard Business Review Advisory Council. Volvo, Spotify, Klarna, H&M, AstraZeneca, Qliro, and 3 sit on a public client list that runs across consumer retail, telecoms, and pharma. What a buyer is paying for is the translation layer between board ambition and operating reality. Lillrud has been the person trying to ship the next quarter’s numbers, and he is still in the chair, building an AI product while advising executives who have AI strategies they cannot yet execute. The argument lands because he has been on both sides of the table. Key speaking topics Artificial intelligence and the C-suite agenda AI in retail and consumer experience Digital commerce and customer acquisition Innovation and business model reinvention Leadership in technology-driven organisations AI ethics and governance Future of work in the AI era Ideal for Boards and executive committees moving from AI strategy approval to execution. CEOs, CMOs, and chief digital or commerce officers in retail, telecoms, and consumer brands. Innovation, transformation, and AI leads inside large enterprises building the operating model for AI. Founder and growth-stage leadership teams using AI as a commercial wedge. Audience outcomes A sharper read on which AI use cases move commercial metrics and which are theatre. A vocabulary for discussing AI’s second-order effects on customers, employees, and brand trust at board level. Concrete reference points from operators who have shipped AI inside consumer-facing businesses. A clearer view of where leadership attention should sit next versus where it can wait. Confidence to challenge vendor narratives and refocus internal AI portfolios on revenue impact.

Why organisations work with Kate Ancketill A ten-year run delivering the trends keynote at the NRF Big Show, the largest retail technology event in the world, makes her the reference voice for what major retailers are about to do next. Twenty-five years inside GDR Creative Intelligence working with P&G, Tesco, Sephora, Microsoft, Google, Samsung, Lego and Moet Hennessy, which means her examples are drawn from live client work, not desk research. A three-to-five year forecasting horizon that is short enough to commit budget against, longer than the next quarter, and grounded in case examples rather than abstract futures. 2025 Best AI and Future Technology Speaker at the Speaker Awards, and a BizTech Top 30 IT Influencer listing, which gives buyers an external read on quality before they commission. Biography highlights CEO and founder of GDR Creative Intelligence, a London-based futures and innovation consultancy founded in 1992. Ten consecutive years as trends keynote at the National Retail Federation Big Show in New York. Named clients include P&G, Tesco, Sephora, Microsoft, Google, Samsung, Moet Hennessy, Costa Coffee, Lego and the BBC. 2025 Speaker Awards: Best AI and Future Technology Speaker. BizTech Magazine Top 30 IT Influencers, 2024. Regular broadcast and conference commentator on AI, retail, high street decline, and consumer behaviour. Biography The retail and consumer industries are running two clocks. One is quarterly, governed by trading, footfall, and conversion. The other is the three to five year horizon on which AI, automation, and Gen Z consumer behaviour are quietly rewriting the operating model. Boards are being asked to commit capital against the second clock with the analytical habits of the first. Kate Ancketill has spent twenty-five years inside that gap. As CEO and founder of GDR Creative Intelligence, she has worked as the innovation partner to a roster of consumer brands that includes P&G, Tesco, Sephora, Microsoft, Google, Samsung, Moet Hennessy, Costa Coffee, Lego and the BBC. The work is granular, weekly tracking of the innovations that are reshaping retail, hospitality, brand and technology, then translated into specific commercial implications for clients planning two and three product cycles out. That practitioner base is what makes her platform work. For ten consecutive years she has delivered the headline trends keynote at the National Retail Federation Big Show in New York, the industry’s most-watched stage for what major retailers are about to commit to. Martin Reardon, NRF’s CMO, attributes the repeat invitation to her audience scores. In 2025 she was named Best AI and Future Technology Speaker at the Speaker Awards, the year after BizTech Magazine listed her among its top thirty IT influencers. Her current work centres on what consumer-facing AI does to customer experience, brand, and the economics of the store. The argument runs against both extremes: AI is not a productivity bolt-on, and it is not an existential threat, it is the substrate on which the next generation of retail and consumer business models will be built. The job for senior leaders is to read the early signal accurately enough to commit capital before the pattern is obvious. Key speaking topics Business futurism on a three to five year horizon Consumer-facing AI in retail and brand The future of customer experience Innovation and disruptive business models in consumer industries Gen Z and Generation Alpha consumer behaviour Sustainability and the future of consumer brands Trends and innovation at the NRF Big Show The future of the high street and physical retail Ideal for Retail, consumer goods and hospitality boards making three-to-five year capital and format decisions CMOs and customer experience leaders rebuilding brand and CX around AI Innovation and strategy leads inside major consumer brands Conferences where the audience is operators, not technologists, but the agenda is technology-driven Audience outcomes A clear read on which retail and consumer innovations are signal and which are noise Specific case examples of how named global brands are already deploying AI in customer-facing roles A working three-to-five year horizon for board and CMO planning, not a ten-year futurology piece A sharper view of Gen Z and Generation Alpha as commercial customers, not as demographic abstractions

Why organisations work with Kayleigh Fazan Her training population is store teams and frontline managers at PVH, ASICS, Rituals, Hunkemöller, B&Q and Skechers. TIRA’s field trainers work in store, alongside the people who serve the customer. Unscripted resolves into four behaviours a person can practise: Awareness, Connection, Confidence and Contribution. TIRA delivers the same material as Leadership Coaching Days, so a keynote can be the front end of a programme with the same teams. She argues the people case in commercial language. TIRA’s client programmes are built and tracked around conversion, average transaction value, membership acquisition and retention. She has lived the disruption her keynote addresses. Twenty years of career built from a £3.25-an-hour shop floor job, redundancy in 2020, and The International Retail Academy founded the same year. Biography highlights Founder and Managing Director of The International Retail Academy, a retail training and consulting firm working with Rituals, ASICS, Hunkemöller, Skechers, B&Q, Tommy Hilfiger, Gap and Crocs. Two decades in retail operations before founding TIRA, from Concession Manager at Debenhams at 19 to Area Manager and Head of Franchise across Europe and the Middle East. Hosted the closing session of the 10th Global DIY-Summit in Rome, and shared a Retail Week Live fireside in London with André Pedersen, COO of Intersport Nordics, on focusing store teams on what matters most. Also billed at the Retail Technology Show, House of Retail, and the SingularityU South Africa Summit, which ran online in 2021. Contributor to Retail Jeweller and Bizcommunity, and guest on the Shiny Happy People podcast. Co-author of Women Who Inspire, contributing the chapter “Embracing Discomfort”, and writing her first solo book. Profiled by CIO Business World in its 2025 feature “The 10 Most Iconic Women Leaders Revamping the Future”. Biography The International Retail Academy exists because retailers spend heavily on systems and thinly on the people using them. Kayleigh Fazan founded it in 2020, mid-pandemic, after twenty years running stores, areas and franchise operations across Europe and the Middle East. The method is deliberately bottom-up. TIRA’s field trainers work in store alongside store leaders, moving them from supervising tasks to coaching behaviour. Programmes are tracked in conversion, average transaction value, membership acquisition and retention. Her argument is that being hard to replace is trainable. The signature keynote, Unscripted: How to Thrive When Everything Else Gets Automated, breaks that into four behaviours a person can be coached in. The stages have been mostly retail and franchise: the closing session of the 10th Global DIY-Summit in Rome, and a Retail Week Live fireside in London on focusing store teams on what matters most. Her keynote on The Retail Revolution went out online, to the SingularityU South Africa Summit in 2021. She started at 16 on a New Look shop floor in Barrow-in-Furness, earning £3.25 an hour, and was running a Debenhams concession by 19. Redundancy in 2020 ended the international career she had built. Her speaking fees part-fund her work supporting children living in poverty, a commitment she traces to having lived in a hostel as a child. Key speaking topics Human capability in an automating workplace Frontline behaviour and customer experience Service culture and its commercial results Leadership of store and frontline teams Confidence and presence at work Employee retention in high-turnover roles Retail transformation from the shop floor up Ideal for CHROs and L&D directors accountable for capability in large frontline workforces Chief Customer Officers, retail directors and heads of store operations Conference programmers in retail, franchise and consumer-facing sectors looking for a main stage or closing session Brand and franchise leadership teams at offsites, kick-off meetings and sales conferences Audience outcomes Four behaviours they can practise the next morning: Awareness, Connection, Confidence and Contribution An answer to what their own role becomes once the specifiable parts of it are automated The case for why the person in front of the customer is the brand, and what that changes about how teams are managed Managers able to describe the difference between supervising tasks and coaching behaviour

Why organisations work with Kelly Vero She has shipped AAA games (including credits across the Lara Croft and Transformers franchises) and now runs an AI-powered digital fashion business, so she speaks about immersive technology from the inside of two different commercial stacks, not from a consultancy slide. As CEO and CTO of NAK3D, she gives leadership teams a concrete view of how 3D content, AI and consumer brands are starting to fit together at production scale. Her book How Video Games Made the Metaverse: From Pixels to Portals (Routledge) gives executives a structured way to read the metaverse as the natural extension of forty years of game technology, not a marketing fad. She has worked at policy and institutional level with the European Commission and Pro Helvetia, which means she can frame technology questions in terms a regulated board will recognise. Biography highlights CEO and CTO of NAK3D, a Swiss AI-powered digital fashion start-up. Chief Metaverse Officer at Aequaland, an educational platform for children. Author of How Video Games Made the Metaverse: From Pixels to Portals, published by Routledge. Earlier edition nominated for the British Business Book Awards 2024. 30-year career in interactive entertainment, with credits across the Lara Croft and Transformers franchises. Consultant to the European Commission, Pro Helvetia (Swiss Arts Council) and Confetti Media Group. Won a Startup Innovation Award at a World Economic Forum-linked event in Davos, January 2024. Biography The metaverse arrived in the boardroom as a slogan and left as a question: where is the operational substance behind any of this. The honest answer is that it sits inside the games industry, where 3D worlds, real-time content pipelines and live-service economies have been working at scale for two decades. That is the world Kelly Vero has spent thirty years inside. Her credits stretch across the Lara Croft franchise and Hasbro’s Transformers games, taking her from script and character work into production at the heart of mass-market AAA development. The result is a deep, practitioner-level grasp of how immersive technology actually gets built, shipped and monetised. She now applies that experience as CEO and CTO of NAK3D, a Swiss AI-powered digital fashion company sitting between gaming, virtual platforms and consumer brands. NAK3D won a Startup Innovation Award at a World Economic Forum-linked event in Davos in January 2024. Vero is also Chief Metaverse Officer of the children’s education platform Aequaland, and has consulted for the European Commission and Pro Helvetia on technology and creative policy. Her book How Video Games Made the Metaverse: From Pixels to Portals, published by Routledge, treats the metaverse as the next chapter of a long technical lineage, not a sudden hype cycle. For boards trying to decide what to fund, what to ignore and what to build, that frame is more useful than any forecast. Key speaking topics AI and 3D commerce The metaverse as commercial infrastructure Digital fashion and virtual goods Generative AI in creative production Game design as a model for customer experience Web3 and immersive platforms Innovation strategy in deep tech Ideal for CMOs and brand leaders deciding how to commit to virtual goods, digital fashion and immersive customer experience CEOs and boards of consumer and entertainment businesses weighing AI and 3D investment CTOs and digital transformation leads scoping AI commerce, content pipelines and creative AI Investors and innovation teams in retail, fashion, media, gaming and adjacent sectors Audience outcomes A clear read on which immersive and metaverse claims are commercially serious and which are not Concrete examples of how AI and 3D content are already reshaping fashion, retail and entertainment commerce A working frame for treating game technology as the parent discipline of the metaverse, with practical implications for product and platform decisions Confidence to scope a first credible AI or 3D content initiative, rather than commission another exploratory study

Why organisations work with Ken Hughes His Blue Dot Consumer framework gives leadership teams a named model for the modern consumer – one who places themselves at the centre of every interaction and expects brands to be instant, personal, and emotionally authentic. It replaces vague customer-centricity language with a concrete diagnostic tool. Taylormaking, his 2025 book, uses Taylor Swift’s 12 studio albums as a structured analytical framework for brand intimacy – demonstrating how emotional loyalty, tribal belonging, and values-led branding operate in practice and what that requires from commercial strategy. A career spanning strategy consulting at Accenture, consumer insight at Nielsen, and 25 years as CEO of Glacier Consulting gives him a rare combination: analytical training in how consumers behave and sustained practical experience of what actually shifts in boardrooms. Named by CX Network among the Top 50 CX Leaders to Follow in 2025 and the Top 50 AI Leaders in CX to Follow in 2026, he brings an externally validated, current perspective on where consumer expectations are heading – not where they have been. His interdisciplinary base – consumer psychology, behavioural economics, digital anthropology, and cyberpsychology – lets him explain brand decisions as outcomes of human behaviour, not just marketing choices. That distinction is particularly valuable in conversations with senior leaders who have grown sceptical of CX as a function. Biography highlights CEO and founder of Glacier Consulting, a consumer insight agency whose clients include Coca-Cola, IKEA, AXA, Unilever, Walmart, Google, Microsoft, and PayPal Former Strategy Consultant at Accenture and Manager of Consumer Insight at Nielsen Part-time lecturer in Consumer Behaviour at University College Cork Author of Taylormaking: A New Era of Modern Branding and Customer Connection (2025), a CX strategy book structured around Taylor Swift’s 12 studio albums TEDx speaker at TEDxUniversityofNicosia; talk has received more than 100,000 online views Named by CX Network among the Top 50 Customer Experience Leaders to Follow in 2025 and Top 50 AI Leaders in CX to Follow in 2026 Biography Customer loyalty has become harder to earn as the expectations of consumers – particularly Gen Z and Gen Alpha – have shifted from satisfaction to emotional belonging. Ken Hughes built Glacier Consulting around one persistent question: why do people buy, and what does that mean for how brands should behave? After earlier careers as a strategy consultant at Accenture and a consumer insight manager at Nielsen, he has spent more than two decades embedding behavioural science into commercial practice. His named concept, the Blue Dot Consumer, gives organisations a specific model for the modern customer – one who treats themselves as the centre of every interaction, expecting brands to be instant, personal, and emotionally intelligent. That framework, rooted in consumer psychology, digital anthropology, and behavioural economics, underpins both his consultancy work and his keynote practice across five continents. His 2025 book, Taylormaking, extends that argument into a structured analysis of brand intimacy, using Taylor Swift’s 12 studio albums as a framework for understanding emotional loyalty, tribal community, and values-led leadership. It is a useful index of how Hughes works: making the mechanisms of consumer psychology legible and commercially actionable for leadership audiences well beyond the CX function. A part-time lecturer in Consumer Behaviour at University College Cork and named by CX Network among the Top 50 CX Leaders to Follow in both 2025 and 2026, Hughes speaks more than 80 times annually. His client roster – spanning Coca-Cola, Unilever, Walmart, Google, Microsoft, and PayPal – reflects both the breadth of sectors in which his behavioural arguments apply and the seniority of the audiences he typically addresses. Key speaking topics Consumer psychology and shopper behaviour Customer experience strategy Brand connection and emotional loyalty Generational consumer shifts – Gen Z and Gen Alpha AI and the future of customer experience Creativity and innovation in commercial culture Ideal for CMOs and marketing leaders focused on building brand loyalty in a competitive, AI-influenced landscape Customer experience leaders navigating the shift from transactional to emotionally driven consumer relationships Senior commercial and retail leaders seeking behavioural insight into how younger consumer cohorts make brand decisions Transformation and innovation leads rethinking how brands earn and sustain connection with modern audiences Audience outcomes A named model – the Blue Dot Consumer – for diagnosing how modern consumers make brand decisions and what they expect from every brand interaction Practical understanding of how emotional loyalty differs from satisfaction, and what organisations must do differently to build it Insight into how Gen Z and Gen Alpha are reshaping brand expectations and what that requires from commercial and marketing strategy Clarity on AI’s role in the future of customer experience – where automation strengthens brand connection and where it risks eroding it A framework, drawn from Taylormaking, for building tribal brand belonging through authenticity, community, and values-led leadership