Customer Experience & Marketing

Why organisations work with Amy Thomson A founder who has actually built and sold in consumer markets twice, once in brand communications with Nike, Microsoft and Instagram as clients, and once in femtech with a venture-backed app and a Penguin-published book underneath it. Specific operating knowledge of category creation in stigmatised territory: how to position, fundraise, and market around hormonal health without the wellness-industry shortcuts that erode trust. A published Penguin title grounded in research from gynaecologists, endocrinologists and nutritionists, which means consumer health and pharma teams get a speaker with editorial credibility, not just a founder pitch. A first-person account of hormonal burnout as a CEO that resonates with leadership audiences, then connects to a commercial argument about why workforce health is being misread by employers. Biography highlights Founder and CEO, Moody Month, awarded “Top Female Health App” by Apple Author, Moody: A 21st Century Hormone Guide, Penguin Founder, SEEN brand agency, clients including Nike, Microsoft, RBS, Instagram and Diageo; sold to Captivate Group Co-founder, Future Girl Corp, with Sharmadean Reid, partnered with Google and Diageo Sociology, Goldsmiths, University of London Keynote engagements include Apple HQ and Vogue Biography Most consumer health products built for women have been designed without a serious commercial thesis attached to female physiology. Thomson started Moody Month to close that gap, building a venture-backed app that tracks hormonal and mental health across the menstrual cycle. Apple named it “Top Female Health App” and featured it on the App Store Today Tab. Her route to femtech was operational. She founded SEEN at 23, a brand and content agency working with Nike, Microsoft, RBS, Instagram and Diageo, before selling the company to Captivate Group. A hormonal burnout, driven by years of high-intensity client work, forced her to stop. The decision to study what had happened to her body became the foundation for Moody and for her Penguin book, Moody: A 21st Century Hormone Guide, which draws on gynaecologists, endocrinologists and nutritionists rather than wellness orthodoxy. That dual track, agency exit then femtech category creation, gives her a particular usefulness to consumer health, FMCG and pharma teams trying to build credibly in physiology markets. She has co-founded Future Girl Corp with Sharmadean Reid, partnered Google and Diageo into that programme, and raised institutional capital around a product category most investors still find awkward to underwrite. The commercial argument she makes is concrete: hormonal health is a consumer market that has been mispriced by incumbents and underserved by wellness branding. For leadership audiences, the burnout story carries a sharper edge than the wellness circuit typically allows. It is told by a founder who walked away from a profitable agency, rebuilt around a physiological problem her own body forced her to take seriously, and then commercialised the answer. Key speaking topics Femtech and women’s health as a commercial category Consumer brand building in stigmatised markets Founder-led category creation Hormonal health, data and machine learning Raising venture capital as a female founder Burnout, physiology and executive performance Ideal for CMOs, brand directors and consumer innovation teams in FMCG, pharma and health Investor audiences in femtech, digital health and consumer technology Founder programmes and scale-up leadership networks Boards and leadership teams reviewing workforce health beyond standard wellbeing programming Audience outcomes A working commercial frame for women’s health as a consumer category, not a CSR line A founder’s account of fundraising in stigmatised markets, with the patterns that move investors A first-person view of hormonal burnout at CEO level and what it changed about her operating model A clearer read on why hormonal data is becoming a serious input for consumer product and workforce health

Why organisations work with Philip Sheppard He has actually built and runs an AI creative business. LifeScore, the generative music platform he co-founded with Siri creator Tom Gruber, has raised £11m and ships to Warner Music Group and Octopus Ventures-backed commercial partners. The argument is grounded in a working company, not a slide on disruption. He brings a working composer’s view of human-AI collaboration. Most AI commentary is by analysts. His comes from sitting at the boundary where a human writes the musical raw materials and the machine selects, layers and mixes them in real time, which is the same architectural question now facing design, copy, video and brand teams. The credentials carry weight in a creative-leadership audience. A Fellowship of the Royal Academy of Music, an Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Music Branch membership, and conducting all 205 national anthems for the London 2012 Olympics with the London Philharmonic Orchestra at Abbey Road are not transferable credentials. He has a track record of speaking to technology buyers, not music audiences. Keynotes for Ernst & Young, Deloitte, Google, Facebook, YouTube and Kyu Collective, and on stages including C2MTL, TTI Vanguard and Business Innovation Factory. He turns an abstract debate into a live demonstration. He performs and composes on stage using a six-string electric cello, which makes the argument about generative systems and human craft visible rather than theoretical. Biography highlights Founder and CEO of LifeScore, an AI adaptive music platform co-founded with Tom Gruber, co-creator of Siri at Apple; backed by Warner Music Group and Octopus Ventures. Fellow of the Royal Academy of Music, awarded as a lifetime recognition of services to music and education. Composer of more than 65 scores for film, television, gaming and theatre, including Detroit: Become Human (Sony), the Star Wars: The Force Awakens Comic Con trailer, Mercury 13 (Netflix), In the Shadow of the Moon and Meru. Conducted and arranged all 205 national anthems for the London 2012 Olympic winners’ ceremonies, recorded with the London Philharmonic Orchestra at Abbey Road Studios. Music director for the London handover at the 2008 Beijing Olympics closing ceremony; music producer for the Tour de France, Rugby World Cup and the COP21 Paris climate summit. Member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Music Branch (2017) and the Television Academy; author of Music Makes Your Child Smarter (Schirmer Trade Books). Biography LifeScore was incubated inside Abbey Road Studios for a reason. The company was set up to answer a question that now matters far beyond music. If a machine can generate plausible creative output on demand, what exactly is the human still meant to do? Philip Sheppard, a composer and Fellow of the Royal Academy of Music, co-founded the platform with Tom Gruber, co-creator of Siri at Apple, and now runs it as CEO. Warner Music Group and Octopus Ventures have backed it through an £11m funding round. The architecture of LifeScore is, in effect, the architecture of any serious human-AI creative system. Composers and musicians build the raw musical materials. The machine selects, layers, sequences and mixes them in real time around the listener’s environment. The output is generated, but the judgement, taste and craft that make it sound human are not. That is the model Sheppard now describes to technology and creative leaders trying to industrialise generative AI without losing what made their work recognisable in the first place. The credentials behind the argument are concrete. Sheppard has composed more than 65 scores for film, television and gaming, including Detroit: Become Human, the Mercury 13 documentary for Netflix and In the Shadow of the Moon. He conducted and arranged all 205 national anthems for the London 2012 Olympics with the London Philharmonic Orchestra at Abbey Road, and was music director for the London handover at the Beijing 2008 closing ceremony. He sits as a voting member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the Television Academy, and wrote Music Makes Your Child Smarter for Schirmer Trade Books. His keynote audiences are mostly outside the music industry. Ernst & Young, Deloitte, Google, Facebook, YouTube and Kyu Collective have all booked him, alongside stages such as C2MTL, TTI Vanguard and Business Innovation Factory. The reason is the same in each case. He is one of the few people who can speak about generative AI and creative work from the position of having shipped a company that does it, and a body of work that depends on it being done well. Key speaking topics Human-AI collaboration in creative work Generative AI and the future of creative industries Building an AI venture from inside a creative practice Music, data and adaptive systems Innovation and creativity as a managed discipline The role of craft in machine-augmented teams Ideal for Chief technology, AI and digital officers shaping how generative AI is deployed across creative, brand and design functions Chief marketing, brand and customer-experience leaders whose teams now produce content with generative tools Innovation, R&D and product leadership at media, entertainment, consumer and platform businesses Leadership offsites at technology, consulting and professional services firms looking for a credible voice on creativity and AI Audience outcomes A clearer account of what generative AI changes about creative production, and what it does not A working mental model for dividing labour between human judgement and machine generation in creative workflows Named examples of how an AI creative venture is actually built, funded and run, drawn from LifeScore’s own history A sharper sense of where craft and taste still differentiate a brand or product in a generative environment A live demonstration of human-machine creative collaboration through performance, not slides

Why organisations work with Tom Fishburne His Marketoonist series has run weekly since 2002 and reaches 500,000 business readers – giving him a live, continuously updated signal on where marketing and organisational thinking is currently stuck, rather than a fixed body of research. His argument is structural, not motivational: that customer engagement fails and innovation stalls for cultural reasons, and that humour is a functional tool for surfacing those reasons – not a tone choice, not entertainment. This gives leadership teams a lever that most change programmes do not include. His Marketoonist studio has built campaigns for over 200 organisations including Google, Adobe, DBS Bank, and PwC – meaning every argument he makes on stage is backed by commercial execution, not only observation. He provides a shared visual vocabulary that allows cross-functional teams to discuss what is actually blocking performance – poor customer experience, idea killers, AI adoption gaps – without triggering defensiveness. As Stanford GSB’s Cartoonist-in-Residence for the course on humour in business, and a regular guest lecturer at Harvard Business School, his framework has academic validation alongside its commercial track record. Biography highlights Founder and CEO of Marketoonist, a cartoon-led content marketing and culture change studio; 200+ campaigns for Google, Adobe, LinkedIn, DBS Bank, PwC, and Unilever Creator of the Marketoonist weekly cartoon series, published since 2002; 500,000 weekly readers; featured by the Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, and The New York Times; weekly contributor to MarketingWeek since 2007 Harvard Business School alumnus; Cartoonist-in-Residence and Lecturer, Stanford Graduate School of Business course on humour in business; regular guest lecturer at Harvard Business School Author of Your Ad Ignored Here; illustrator of three Deloitte business books – Provoke (WSJ Bestseller), Detonate (National Bestseller), and Work Disrupted Former Interim CMO at HotelTonight (acquired by Airbnb); Marketing VP at Method Products (European brand launch named Brand Launch of the Year, The Grocer); brand management at Nestlé and General Mills Speaker at TED Salon: Unconventional, TED World Theater, New York; 200+ keynotes delivered in more than 30 countries Biography Tom Fishburne started drawing cartoons on the backs of Harvard Business School cases in 2000 and has published the Marketoonist series weekly since 2002. That series now reaches 500,000 readers a week and has been featured by the Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, and The New York Times. The reason it travels is not novelty – it is recognition. The cartoons name what people in organisations already know but rarely say aloud. His argument, developed across a marketing career at Nestlé, General Mills, Method Products, and HotelTonight, is that most marketing underperformance and most innovation failure is cultural in origin. Customer journeys break not because teams lack data, but because organisational dynamics prevent anyone from acting on it. Ideas lose momentum between brainstorm and launch not because of resource constraints, but because of unspoken idea killers that no one has named. Humour, Fishburne argues, is a functional diagnostic tool for exactly these problems – not a way to make difficult conversations comfortable, but a way to make them possible. In 2010, he expanded Marketoonist into a creative studio. The studio has since built cartoon-led content and culture change campaigns for more than 200 organisations, including Google, Adobe, DBS Bank, and PwC. He is Cartoonist-in-Residence at Stanford GSB for the course on humour in business and returns regularly to guest lecture at Harvard Business School. He illustrated three bestselling Deloitte business books – Provoke, Detonate, and Work Disrupted – and authored Your Ad Ignored Here. A senior buyer leaving his session does not leave with a framework to file. They leave with a vocabulary for conversations their team has been avoiding – and a demonstrated method for making those conversations productive. Key speaking topics Marketing effectiveness and customer engagement Innovation culture and idea management Humour as a strategic tool for culture change AI adoption and organisational readiness Visual communication and storytelling in business Challenger brand thinking Creative culture and overcoming idea killers Ideal for Chief Marketing Officers and senior marketing leadership teams Chief People Officers and culture change leads Innovation and digital transformation leads Leadership conferences where marketing, creative culture, or organisational change is on the agenda Audience outcomes A clear diagnostic framework for identifying where marketing efforts break down and why Practical understanding of the cultural conditions that allow creative ideas to survive from brainstorm to launch A shared vocabulary for discussing organisational blockers – customer experience failures, AI adoption gaps, innovation stalls – without defensiveness Insight into humour as a repeatable strategic tool for culture change, distinct from motivation or entertainment A more honest assessment of whether technology and AI initiatives are failing for technical reasons or organisational ones

Why organisations work with Louie Gravance He authored core content for “Disney’s Approach to Quality Service” at the Disney Institute, the programme that taught Disney’s service operating model to outside corporate clients. Buyers get the curriculum source, not a second-hand interpretation of it. His post-Disney consulting work has produced named, large-scale service campaigns for Bank of America, ING Financial, Choice Hotels, Nikon and Microbac Technologies. The work has a commercial track record outside theme parks. He treats service as stagecraft. His frameworks (the P.L.A.N. model, the Ten Skills of the Service Superhero, the Seven Secrets for Crafting WOW Service Experiences) give frontline managers something to teach on Monday, not a philosophy to absorb. He continues to work inside live guest operations, including the Ollivanders Wand Experience at Universal Orlando’s Diagon Alley. The content is sharpened on a working stage, not refined in a slide deck. The book Service is a Superpower: Lessons Learned in a Magic Kingdom (Mascot Books, 2020) gives organisations a takeaway that travels into the team after the keynote ends. Biography highlights 25-plus years at the Walt Disney Company, including curriculum design at the Disney Institute in Orlando. Lead designer on Disney’s “Approach to Quality Service” programme for external corporate clients. Architect of multi-million-dollar service campaigns for Bank of America, ING Financial, Choice Hotels, Nikon, Microbac Technologies and the American Council of Independent Laboratories. Author, Service is a Superpower: Lessons Learned in a Magic Kingdom (Mascot Books, 2020). Opening team member for Harry Potter’s Diagon Alley at Universal Orlando from 2014; continues to perform at the Ollivanders Wand Experience. Recipient of Disney’s Partners in Excellence Award and the Spirit of Disney Award. Biography The hardest part of a service strategy is not writing it. It is the moment when a brand promise meets a tired employee at the end of a long shift. Disney’s operating answer to that problem was not a slogan. It was a curriculum, and Louie Gravance helped build it. Inside the Disney Institute in Orlando, Gravance was part of the team that turned the theme park’s service model into “Disney’s Approach to Quality Service,” the programme that exported the company’s frontline practice to outside corporates. That work sat on top of a longer Disney career: live entertainment design, cast training, and the daily craft of running guest experiences at scale. He spent over 25 years inside the company. The post-Disney work moves the same operating logic into industries where service is the product but the theatre is harder to see. His campaigns include Bank of America’s “Spirit” initiative, alongside named programmes for ING Financial, Choice Hotels, Nikon, Microbac Technologies and the American Council of Independent Laboratories. The book that distils this practice, Service is a Superpower: Lessons Learned in a Magic Kingdom (Mascot Books, 2020), is structured around what he calls the Ten Skills of the Service Superhero. He has not left the operational stage. Since 2014 he has been part of the team behind the Ollivanders Wand Experience inside Universal Orlando’s Diagon Alley, where the content he teaches to corporate clients is tested on real guests, several times a day. Key speaking topics Customer experience and service culture Employee engagement on the frontline Hospitality and member-services operating practice Service storytelling and brand moments Difficult customer interactions Disney-trained service design Ideal for CX, customer service and member-services leaders in financial services, retail, hospitality and healthcare CMOs and brand leaders whose customer promise depends on frontline delivery HR and L&D directors building service onboarding and engagement programmes Franchise, branch and field operations leaders running distributed service teams Audience outcomes A working definition of what a “WOW moment” is and how it is constructed, not described. Specific tools (P.L.A.N., the Ten Skills of the Service Superhero) that translate brand intent into frontline behaviour. A method for handling difficult customer interactions without scripting employees into rigidity. A clear separation between service performance and customer service technology, with the human craft restored to the centre. A model for treating employee engagement as the precondition for service quality, not a parallel HR programme.

Why organisations work with Brent Adamson He co-authored the two books that redefined how serious B2B organisations think about commercial effectiveness; the Challenger thesis is now the reference point most large sales transformations are measured against. His research at CEB and Gartner, conducted over nearly two decades with thousands of B2B sales organisations, gives him a dataset on buyer behaviour that almost no individual practitioner can match. He gives commercial leaders a specific diagnosis of why win rates fall in complex deals, decision complexity, information overload, implementation uncertainty and value opacity, and a vocabulary their teams can act on. He works at the boundary between sales and marketing, which is where most B2B revenue problems actually live, and addresses both functions as one commercial system. His sensemaking and buyer-confidence work has moved the conversation past closing technique into the harder question of how customers come to a decision they will defend internally. Biography highlights Co-author, The Challenger Sale (Portfolio, 2011) and The Challenger Customer (Portfolio, 2015), with Matthew Dixon, Pat Spenner and Nick Toman. Chief storyteller for CEB, now Gartner’s, sales, marketing and customer service practices, 2003 to 2022; Distinguished Vice President at Gartner. Current Global Head of Research, Advisory and Communities at Ecosystems, a SaaS platform for collaborative customer value management. Harvard Business Review contributor, including “Sensemaking for Sales” (January to February 2022) and “Traditional B2B Sales and Marketing Are Becoming Obsolete” (2022). Originator, with colleagues, of the Mobilizer profile, Buyer Enablement and Customer Decision Confidence as working concepts in B2B sales. MBA, University of Michigan Ross School of Business; PhD in Applied Linguistics, University of Texas; former faculty member at Michigan State University. Biography The Challenger Sale argued, on the basis of CEB research across thousands of B2B reps, that the best performers do not build relationships and then sell. They teach, tailor and take control of the conversation. Published in 2011, it became the reference text for a generation of sales transformation programmes. That book was the first chapter of a longer argument. With The Challenger Customer in 2015, Adamson and his co-authors turned their attention from the seller to the buyer, showing that the average B2B purchase now involves more than five stakeholders and that consensus, not persuasion, is the binding constraint. The Mobilizer, the stakeholder willing to drive change inside their own organisation, became the figure most B2B commercial teams now train to find. From 2003 to 2022, Adamson served as chief storyteller for CEB, later Gartner, where he held the role of Distinguished Vice President. His “Sensemaking for Sales” article in the Harvard Business Review set out the next step in the work: in markets saturated with information, the seller’s job is to help the buyer make sense of what they already know, not to add to the pile. He now leads research, advisory and communities at Ecosystems, a SaaS platform for collaborative customer value management. The throughline across two decades is the same question. What does an effective commercial organisation look like when the buyer has more information than they can use and less confidence than they need to act on it? Key speaking topics B2B sales effectiveness and the Challenger model Buyer enablement and customer decision confidence Sensemaking as a commercial discipline Mobilizers and consensus selling in complex B2B deals The sales and marketing operating system Commercial leadership for digital-first buyers Ideal for Chief revenue officers, chief sales officers and chief commercial officers leading B2B sales transformation Chief marketing officers in B2B environments aligning demand and revenue functions Sales enablement and sales operations leaders rebuilding methodology and training Boards and executive teams reviewing the commercial model in complex, multi-stakeholder markets Audience outcomes A clear diagnosis of why complex B2B deals stall, framed around decision complexity, information overload, implementation uncertainty and value opacity A working vocabulary for buyer enablement, sensemaking and customer decision confidence that sales and marketing teams can apply together A concrete picture of the Mobilizer profile and what it changes about how teams qualify and pursue accounts A sharper view of where the commercial organisation needs to invest next, beyond seller skills, into how customers actually buy

Why organisations work with Tanya O’Callaghan She speaks to consumer scepticism from the inside. Fifteen years touring globally in arena rock, paired with lifelong plant-based advocacy, gives her credibility with the audience corporate sustainability teams are trying to reach but rarely understand. Her Highway to Health documentary series with Sepultura’s Derrick Green, distributed through UNCHAINEDTV, has road-tested her arguments with farmers, chefs, scientists and figures including Moby and Kat Von D. The material on stage is sourced, not theoretical. The Leadership Rhapsody keynote, co-built with former Hallmark executive Wayne Strickland, translates band dynamics into a working language for senior teams on cohesion, performance under pressure and creative discipline. As the first woman in Whitesnake, she carries a story senior audiences remember. The hook draws the room; the content keeps them. She is unusual in the speaker market for combining a working stage career with serious advocacy on plant-based business, animal welfare and consumer-led change, which gives her access to audiences and corporate briefs that purely corporate speakers cannot reach. Biography highlights Bassist of Whitesnake, the first woman to hold a permanent member position in the band’s history. Toured and recorded with Bruce Dickinson, Puscifer (Maynard James Keenan), Dee Snider, Steven Adler, Nuno Bettencourt, Orianthi and Sharon Corr. Creator and co-host of Highway to Health, a plant-based travel and sustainability documentary series on UNCHAINEDTV with Sepultura frontman Derrick Green. Co-creator of the Leadership Rhapsody corporate keynote with Wayne Strickland, a 38-year Hallmark executive. Featured on the Rich Roll Podcast and profiled by Bass Magazine, Guitar World, Thrive Global, Sentient Media and Lady Freethinker. Lifelong vegan and public advocate for plant-based living, environmental sustainability and animal welfare. Biography Consumer trust in corporate sustainability claims is thinner than the marketing budget behind them. Brand teams know it, and they know the people they most need to reach are exactly the ones least likely to listen to another ESG report. That gap, between claim and credibility, is where Tanya O’Callaghan’s corporate work lives. She came to it from rock and roll. The first woman to hold a permanent place in Whitesnake, she has toured and recorded with Bruce Dickinson, Puscifer, Dee Snider, Steven Adler, Nuno Bettencourt and Sharon Corr. The stage career is not the message. It is the credibility that lets her tell sustainability stories to audiences who tune out the standard sustainability voice. Highway to Health, the documentary series she created with Sepultura’s Derrick Green and distributes on UNCHAINEDTV, takes that approach further. The show follows the two musicians around the world meeting farmers, chefs, scientists and cultural figures including Moby and Kat Von D, building a working picture of what plant-based living and authentic sustainability look like in practice. The material she brings to corporate stages is field-tested, not theoretical. Her Leadership Rhapsody keynote, co-built with former Hallmark executive Wayne Strickland, takes the same translation approach in the other direction. Forty years of stage discipline, ensemble cohesion and live decision-making become a language senior teams can use to talk about performance, trust and creative work without resorting to the usual corporate vocabulary. It is a rare profile: a working professional musician with a serious second act in business conversation, picked up by sustainability and people teams that want a different kind of voice on greenwashing, consumer power and the social contract between brands and the audiences who buy from them. Key speaking topics Sustainability and authentic ESG communication Consumer power and brand credibility Plant-based business and food systems Corporate social leadership Creative performance and ensemble dynamics Health and wellbeing for travelling and remote workforces Ideal for ESG, sustainability and brand teams briefing for consumer-facing change CHROs and people leaders looking for an outside voice on wellbeing and engagement Senior leadership offsites where a different register is needed to open a difficult conversation Conferences in food, retail, consumer goods and lifestyle sectors Audience outcomes A sharper read on how younger and sustainability-conscious consumers test corporate claims Practical examples of where greenwashing is exposed and where credibility is earned A working framework for translating ensemble performance into corporate team dynamics New language for talking about health and sustainability inside the organisation without the usual jargon A memorable opening that gets a senior room engaged on subjects they would normally resist

Why organisations work with Tia White Operator perspective from inside a hyperscaler. She runs go-to-market, product and engineering for an AWS AI portfolio tracking over USD 25M in profit, including some of the fastest-growing services at AWS. A track record of taking generative AI and personalisation from theory into customer-facing product. She led the introduction of Personalized Search, Next Best Action and generative AI capabilities into Amazon Personalize. Cross-sector enterprise fluency. Before AWS she held senior technology roles at Wells Fargo, Capital One and JPMorgan Chase, leading regulated digital transformation programmes in financial services. A specific point of view on what separates AI investments that compound from AI investments that stall, grounded in current AWS customer work rather than vendor abstraction. A credible voice on building the technical leadership bench behind AI, including women and Black technologists, that boards are now being asked to account for. Biography highlights General Manager, AI and Machine Learning, Amazon Web Services. First Black woman hired as a GM in Machine Learning, AI and Analytics at AWS. Director of Engineering at a Fortune 100 company before age 30. Prior senior technology roles at Wells Fargo, Capital One and JPMorgan Chase. Led the launch of new Amazon Personalize capabilities including Personalized Search, Next Best Action and generative AI features; speaker at AWS re:Invent 2022 on personalisation. Featured in Forbes; keynote and emcee credits include SXSW and the Grace Hopper Celebration. Board and advisory roles include Rewriting the Code. Biography Generative AI has moved faster than most enterprise operating models can absorb. Inside AWS, Tia White runs the AI and Machine Learning business that customers turn to when a pilot has to become a product. She owns go-to-market, product and engineering for an AI portfolio tracking over USD 25M in profit, including some of the fastest-growing services at AWS. Her work at AWS includes leading the next generation of Amazon Personalize, with features such as Personalized Search, Next Best Action and generative AI capabilities now used by enterprises to lift engagement and revenue. She has spoken at AWS re:Invent on personalisation as an operating discipline rather than a marketing feature, and is regularly cited by AWS as a voice on what Gen Y and Gen Z customers expect from personalised experiences. Before AWS she held senior technology roles at Wells Fargo, Capital One and JPMorgan Chase, including the leadership of public cloud migrations in financial services. She reached Director of Engineering at a Fortune 100 company before the age of 30. That financial services background gives her a working answer to the questions regulated industries are now asking about generative AI, data, privacy and risk. She was the first Black woman hired as a GM in Machine Learning, AI and Analytics at AWS, and uses that platform to address the harder question behind most AI roadmaps, which is whether the organisation has the talent and the leadership bench to deliver them. She has been featured in Forbes, has keynoted and emceed at SXSW and the Grace Hopper Celebration, and sits on boards including Rewriting the Code. Key speaking topics Generative AI in the enterprise Personalisation as a revenue and engagement discipline AI agents and agentic workflows Machine learning in regulated industries Cloud migration and digital transformation Responsible AI and bias mitigation Building diverse technical leadership in AI and engineering Ideal for CTOs, CIOs and Chief Data and AI Officers moving from AI pilots into production CMOs and Chief Customer Officers investing in personalisation, recommendation and customer engagement Boards and executive committees in financial services, retail and regulated industries setting AI strategy CHROs and DEI leads responsible for the technical talent pipeline behind AI Audience outcomes A clearer read on which generative AI use cases pay back and which do not, drawn from live AWS customer patterns. A working view of personalisation as an operating capability that touches data, product and engineering, not a marketing campaign. Sharper questions for the board on AI risk, privacy and the operating model around generative AI. A concrete sense of what the technical leadership bench behind a serious AI roadmap looks like, and where most organisations are short.

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 Kian Bakhtiari Direct primary-source insight from a live community of 2,000+ Gen-Z and Gen-Alpha contributors across 50+ markets, rather than the lagged trend reports most boards are working from. A published, practitioner argument on purpose-led marketing through Kogan Page’s “Marketing for Social Change”, giving commercial teams a framework for purpose that survives the backlash cycle. Strategic credibility across two registers: the agency boardroom (former Head of Strategy at Dentsu Aegis Network) and the multilateral institution (WEF Agenda Contributor, UNFCCC advisor). Operating experience with consumer-facing brands that have to convert Gen-Z, including Adidas, Unilever, Diesel, L’Oreal, Danone, Innocent Drinks, Pentland Brands and Speedo. A Financial Times Top 50 Future Leaders listing, which gives a buyer external validation that the perspective is taken seriously by the business press. Biography highlights Founder of The People, a Gen-Z and Gen-Alpha cultural intelligence consultancy with contributors across 50+ markets. Author of “Marketing for Social Change: How to Turn Purpose Into Business and Social Impact”, Kogan Page (2024). Named in the Financial Times “Top 50 Future Leaders” for contributions to marketing. Agenda Contributor to the World Economic Forum; Advisor to UN Climate Change (UNFCCC). Forbes contributor on Gen-Z, brand and consumer culture; featured in Campaign, The Drum, Vogue Business and Rolling Stone. Former Head of Strategy at Dentsu Aegis Network; TEDx Brighton speaker on imagination and innovation. Biography Marketing teams have been trying to “reach Gen-Z” with the tools of the previous cycle: panels, focus groups, agency trend decks. The cohort itself has moved on, and most of the commercial signals reaching the boardroom are already a generation late. Kian Bakhtiari built The People to close that gap, running a live network of Gen-Z and Gen-Alpha contributors across 50+ markets that feeds primary cultural intelligence directly into client work. His background is unusually balanced for the field. Former Head of Strategy at Dentsu Aegis Network, he understands what the commercial brief looks like inside a holding company. As Agenda Contributor to the World Economic Forum and Advisor to UN Climate Change, he sees how the same generational questions land in policy and multilateral settings. The Financial Times named him in its Top 50 Future Leaders for marketing, an external read on where his work sits in the discipline. His book, “Marketing for Social Change” (Kogan Page, 2024), is the practitioner argument behind the consultancy. It sets out how brands can embed purpose into the operating substance of the business rather than the campaign layer, and how to avoid the backlash that hits when the two diverge. Clients he has worked with on this terrain include Unilever, L’Oreal, Diesel, Adidas, Danone, Innocent Drinks, Pentland Brands, Speedo and the BBC. What he gives a senior team is a route into a consumer base they cannot read with their existing tools, and a defensible position on purpose that holds up when scrutinised. That sits at the centre of how commercial strategy is now being rewritten for younger consumers and workers. Key speaking topics Gen-Z and Gen-Alpha consumer behaviour Purpose-led marketing and brand activism Cultural intelligence and foresight Marketing for social change The future workforce and generational diversity Brand communities and the creator economy Innovation, imagination and creativity Ideal for CMOs, brand directors and consumer insight leads recalibrating their approach to Gen-Z and Gen-Alpha audiences Chief Strategy Officers and growth leads in consumer-facing categories where younger cohorts decide the next decade of revenue Boards and executive committees stress-testing purpose, ESG and brand positioning against a more sceptical, more political consumer base CHROs and culture leads working on multigenerational workforces where Gen-Z is reshaping engagement and retention Audience outcomes A sharper picture of what Gen-Z and Gen-Alpha actually want from brands, employers and institutions, drawn from a live primary-source network rather than syndicated research. A practical test for whether a brand’s purpose can survive contact with the operating business, and where it most often breaks. A view of the commercial cost of getting generational signals wrong, and the categories where that cost is already showing up. Specific examples of brands that have moved purpose from campaign to product, and what made the difference.

Why organisations work with Hatem Salem Operating perspective from running an integrated communication group across Cairo and Paris since 1991, including Media Hatem Salem, Brands & Branding, Act CSR, and Global Arabian Network. Few speakers on AI in marketing have built and led the full agency stack themselves. Practical fluency in MENA consumer markets that most Western marketing speakers do not have, useful for organisations looking at brand entry, expansion, or partner work across the Arab world. Track record of building owned platforms, including Cairo Fashion Week, Cairo Mobile Film Festival, Egypt CSR Day, the International Branding Conference, and the Blue Star Award. Useful for clients thinking about brand events as a channel, not a line item. Multiple Agency of the Year awards from the International Advertising Association Egypt Chapter, including for the Smart Village and Sharm El Sheikh public service campaigns. Concrete agency credibility, not a personal-brand claim. Current focus on neuromarketing and AI in advertising creativity gives buyers a speaker who can connect behavioural science, generative tools and brand strategy in the same talk, rather than picking one lens. Biography highlights Chairman and CEO, Hatem Salem Communication Group; founder of Media Hatem Salem (1991), Brands & Branding (2000), Act CSR (2010), and Global Arabian Network (2014). Founder and President of Cairo Fashion Week, Cairo Mobile Film Festival, Egypt CSR Day, the International Branding Conference, and the Blue Star Award. Multiple Agency of the Year awards from the International Advertising Association Egypt Chapter and from the American University in Cairo. BA in Mass Communication, Cairo University; MA in Mass Communication, Press, Publicity, New Media and Cinema Science, Stendhal Grenoble 3. Former journalist and press correspondent in Paris covering European and Middle Eastern media for over five years. Has taught media, marketing, branding and advertising at Cairo University, the French University in Egypt, the British University in Egypt and the University of Grenoble. Biography The marketing function is being rebuilt twice over. AI is reshaping how creative, media and customer experience are produced, and the audience side has changed too, with attention more fragmented and brand loyalty thinner than at any point in the past two decades. Most organisations are still reasoning about this as a set of tool choices, when the real question is which parts of the marketing operation hold their shape and which get redesigned. Salem has been running marketing and communication businesses through every prior wave of this shift. He founded Media Hatem Salem in Cairo in 1991, then built out an integrated group with Brands & Branding, Act CSR, and the Global Arabian Network, working across above the line, below the line and through the line channels for clients across Egypt and the wider Arab market. The group has earned multiple Agency of the Year honours from the International Advertising Association Egypt Chapter, including for the Smart Village and Sharm El Sheikh campaigns. Alongside the agency work, he has built owned brand platforms that operate as commercial assets in their own right. Cairo Fashion Week, Cairo Mobile Film Festival, Egypt CSR Day, the International Branding Conference and the Blue Star Award all sit inside the group, giving him a working view of brand events as a channel rather than a marketing line item. Earlier in his career he worked as a Paris-based press correspondent covering European and Middle Eastern media, and held research and teaching posts at Stendhal Grenoble 3, Cairo University, the French University in Egypt, and the British University in Egypt. His current work focuses on neuromarketing, AI in advertising creativity, AI in event management, and the future of media, cinema and social platforms. The connecting thread is operational: how generative tools, behavioural science and experience design change what marketing teams actually produce, and what stays human. Key speaking topics Neuromarketing and consumer behaviour AI in advertising and creative production AI in marketing and customer experience Brand strategy in MENA and emerging markets Event platforms as brand assets The future of media, cinema and social platforms Corporate social responsibility and brand reputation Ideal for CMOs, brand directors and marketing leadership teams rebuilding the marketing operating model around AI. Boards and executive teams of consumer brands entering or scaling in MENA and the Arab market. Heads of communications, customer experience and creative agencies working through generative AI integration. Event, sponsorship and brand partnership leads rethinking the role of owned platforms. Audience outcomes A clearer view of which parts of the marketing operation are most exposed to AI redesign, and which parts hold. Working examples of neuromarketing and behavioural science applied to brand, advertising and event work. A practitioner read on the MENA market that most Western marketing voices cannot provide. A more concrete sense of how owned brand platforms function as a commercial channel. Sharper questions for CMOs and agency partners on AI in creative production, personalisation and customer experience.

Why organisations work with Louis Gudema He has published an award-winning framework for the order in which B2B marketing should be built. The Bullseye Marketing model, set out in a 400-page second edition that won the 2023 Goody Business Book Award for Best Marketing/Branding Book, sequences fast-payback demand programs before brand investment rather than running them in parallel. He has run the playbook himself at scale. Gudema founded Magic Hour Communications, pivoted it from services into an early SaaS business with a Web CMS product, grew it into one of the top firms in its national market, and exited in 2009, so the operating advice is tested against a P&L he owned. He has worked across roughly 200 organisations from IBM down to early-stage MIT spin-outs, which means a CMO or founder gets advice calibrated to the actual stage of their business rather than a generic enterprise template. His MIT Venture Mentoring Service work, including ten consecutive years of the MIT marketing boot camp, gives him pattern recognition on what actually moves revenue for a young technology company versus what wastes founder time. He brings a behavioural-economics layer that most B2B marketers ignore. His brain-science talk applies seven named heuristics (anchoring, authority, availability, liking, loss aversion, reciprocity, scarcity) to live sales and marketing decisions. Biography highlights Author of Bullseye Marketing: How to Grow Your B2B Business Faster, second edition 2023. 2023 Goody Business Book Award winner for Best Marketing/Branding Book; finalist at the Book Excellence Awards; named to Book Authority’s Best Marketing Plan Books of All Time. Founder and former CEO of Magic Hour Communications, an early SaaS firm with the MagicWand Web CMS, sold in 2009. Founder of Revenue & Associates, LLC, a fractional CMO practice for B2B startups and growth-stage companies. Mentor with the MIT Venture Mentoring Service and leader of the annual MIT marketing boot camp, tenth edition in 2024. Contributor to Harvard Business Review, MarketingProfs, HubSpot, VentureBeat, Content Marketing Institute, Chiefmartec, and TechTarget. Biography Most B2B marketing budgets are spent in the wrong order. Brand campaigns get funded before the demand-generation programs that would have paid for them, and the pipeline arrives late. Bullseye Marketing, the book Louis Gudema published in its second edition in 2023, exists to fix that sequencing problem. The framework is built around three concentric rings. Start with the customers and prospects already in the system, where conversion is fastest. Move outward into demand capture and active-buyer programs, search, retargeting, and review sites. Then, with cash flow funding it, invest in the brand and awareness work that compounds over the years. The book won the 2023 Goody Business Book Award for Best Marketing/Branding Book and a Book Excellence Awards finalist nod, and was named one of the Best Marketing Plan Books of All Time by Book Authority. Gudema runs the playbook for a living. He founded Magic Hour Communications, pivoted it from a marketing-services agency into an early SaaS firm built around a Web CMS product, grew it into one of the top three or four firms in its market, and exited in 2009. He now operates revenue & associates as a fractional head of marketing, and has worked with roughly 200 organisations from IBM to early-stage MIT spin-outs. The MIT connection runs deep. Gudema mentors through the MIT Venture Mentoring Service and led the tenth annual MIT marketing boot camp in 2024. His writing in Harvard Business Review, MarketingProfs, HubSpot, and VentureBeat extends the same operating thesis: B2B growth comes from disciplined sequencing of programs with measurable ROI, not from creative reinvention. Key speaking topics B2B marketing strategy and demand generation Bullseye Marketing framework Startup and scale-up growth marketing Behavioural economics in B2B sales and marketing Fractional and interim marketing leadership Account-based marketing and pipeline acceleration Ideal for CEOs and founders of B2B technology and SaaS companies under $50m in revenue CMOs and heads of marketing at growth-stage businesses need to defend program spend to a CFO Investor-backed startup cohorts and accelerator programs looking for a sequenced go-to-market playbook Sales leaders responsible for the pipeline who want to align marketing programs to revenue-cycle reality Audience outcomes A defensible order in which to run B2B marketing programs, with the fastest-payback work first A working knowledge of the three-ring Bullseye Marketing Framework and how to apply it to an existing budget Specific demand-generation tactics, search, retargeting, ABM, customer expansion, that map to short payback windows A view of how seven behavioural heuristics change conversion in real B2B sales and marketing assets A shared vocabulary for marketing, sales, and finance to evaluate program ROI on the same terms

Why organisations work with Guillem Graell He ran brand, digital and direct-to-fan at FC Barcelona between 2017 and 2021, a period in which the club’s digital products generated over one billion euros. Few speakers have operated a P and L of that size in this category. He built Barça Studios and BarçaTV+ from scratch into a direct-to-consumer business valued at more than 250 million euros, giving him a working blueprint for content as a revenue line, not a marketing cost. He took the club’s social footprint past 400 million followers and made it the first football club with 10 million YouTube subscribers, with engagement that consistently led the global sports rankings. He is now building, not retired. As co-founder of D2F Partners he designs, operates and funds direct-to-fan brands, so the case material in any keynote is current rather than archival. He teaches brand strategy at UPF Barcelona School of Management and marketing management at ESADE, which forces him to translate operating experience into frameworks that other leaders can use. Biography highlights Chief Marketing Officer, FC Barcelona, 2017 to 2021. Co-founder and Managing Partner, D2F Partners, building direct-to-fan businesses in sport and entertainment. Founder of Barça Studios and BarçaTV+, a direct-to-consumer venture valued at over 250 million euros. Earlier brand and marketing roles at Procter and Gamble, Reckitt Benckiser, Chupa Chups, Codorniu Group and Accenture. Faculty at UPF Barcelona School of Management (Master in Brand Strategy, since 2014) and ESADE Business School (Master in Marketing Management). Industrial Engineering, Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya, and General Management Programme (PDG), IESE Business School. Biography Sports clubs were among the first consumer brands to discover that their audience was bigger than their stadium and worth more than their broadcast deal. Between 2017 and 2021, FC Barcelona had to act on that fact, and the person running brand, digital and direct-to-fan inside the club was Guillem Graell. As Chief Marketing Officer, he rebuilt the club’s commercial relationship with its supporters around a direct-to-consumer model. He founded Barça Studios and launched BarçaTV+, a venture later valued at more than 250 million euros, alongside subscription, content and product lines that pushed digital revenue past one billion euros. The social audience grew past 400 million followers, and the club became the first in football to cross 10 million YouTube subscribers. His route into that role was unusual for sport. Industrial engineering at the Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya, the General Management Programme at IESE, and brand and commercial roles at Procter and Gamble, Reckitt Benckiser, Chupa Chups, Codorniu and Accenture. The FMCG discipline of building emotional brands at scale travelled with him into one of the most-watched sporting institutions in the world. He now co-runs D2F Partners with Enric Llopart, the club’s former digital director, designing and funding direct-to-fan businesses for other sports and entertainment brands. He teaches brand strategy at UPF Barcelona School of Management and ESADE, which is where the operating playbook from Barça gets pressure-tested against other categories trying to own their audience. Key speaking topics Direct-to-consumer strategy in sport and entertainment Building and monetising LoveBrands Digital business models and content as revenue Brand transformation in legacy organisations Audience, community and fan engagement at scale Innovation in marketing and commercial models Ideal for CMOs, Chief Brand Officers and Chief Digital Officers in consumer-facing categories CEOs and boards of sports, entertainment, media and lifestyle businesses Heads of direct-to-consumer, content and digital product Marketing and growth leadership teams reframing how they own customer relationships Audience outcomes A working view of how a billion-euro digital and direct-to-fan business actually gets built and run Practical reference points for moving from audience metrics to commercial outcomes A clearer line between brand strategy, content investment and direct revenue Useful comparisons between sport, entertainment and other consumer categories trying to own the customer A confident perspective on where digital products, subscriptions and community fit inside a brand P and L