Customer Experience & Marketing

Why organisations work with Jahkini Bisselink She sits inside Whetston Strategic Foresight, a practice built for long-range corporate planning, which means her insights arrive as briefable strategy inputs rather than generational commentary. She is one of the few speakers who is both a member of Generation Z and a trained foresight researcher of it, which closes the gap between authentic voice and analytical distance. Her UN Youth Representative work involved structured consultations with more than 4,000 young people, giving her data depth most generational speakers cannot match. Senior clients including Deutsche Telekom, the European Parliament, and Lloyds Banking Group have used her to shape leadership conversations about Gen Z, not as a panel novelty. She works in English and Dutch, and she presents to boards, HR functions, and customer experience teams without translating the message between them. Biography highlights Dutch United Nations Youth Representative, 2017 to 2019, elected through open national election. First UN General Assembly speech delivered at age 18. Youth expert at Whetston Strategic Foresight, Amsterdam, since 2020. TEDxYouth@Maastricht speaker, March 2019, “Why Youth Participation is Key”. Named in MIPAD (Most Influential People of African Descent) Class of 2023. Corporate clients include Deutsche Telekom, the European Parliament, Lloyds Banking Group, Rabobank, R/GA, and AVEVA. Biography A quarter of the workforce is now Generation Z, and most leadership teams are still describing them in language borrowed from coverage of millennials a decade earlier. The result is a steady mismatch between what organisations design for younger employees and customers, and what those groups actually want. Closing that gap is now a board-level problem, not an HR one. Bisselink works inside Whetston Strategic Foresight in Amsterdam, where her job is to translate generational research into corporate strategy. Whetston is a foresight practice, not a marketing agency, which shapes how her work lands: she briefs leadership teams the way a strategy consultant would, with a defined argument and named implications, rather than offering generational colour. Her credibility on Gen Z is built on two layers. She is a member of the generation, born in Amsterdam in 1999. She also spent two years as the Dutch United Nations Youth Representative, running structured consultations with more than 4,000 young people across the country and presenting their views at the UN General Assembly in New York. That fieldwork, conducted before she joined Whetston, is the data foundation under her current commercial work. Boards and HR functions at Deutsche Telekom, Lloyds Banking Group, the European Parliament, and Rabobank have used her to pressure-test assumptions about how their next generation of employees and customers actually decide. She was recognised in the MIPAD Class of 2023 for the same body of work. Key speaking topics Generation Z in the workforce The multigenerational workplace Future of customer experience Strategic foresight and generational trends Corporate purpose and youth activism Talent attraction and retention for the next generation Ideal for CHROs and heads of talent rebuilding attraction and retention strategies around a Gen Z-majority workforce CMOs and customer experience leaders whose growth segment is now Gen Z Executive teams and boards reviewing workforce, culture, and brand strategy through a generational lens Public sector and policy bodies that need a credible Gen Z voice in stakeholder conversations Audience outcomes A clearer read on what Gen Z employees and customers actually decide on, separated from common media generalisations. Specific implications for how attraction, retention, and customer strategy need to change inside the audience’s own organisation. A working understanding of the friction points between four working generations and where leaders are still managing on outdated assumptions. Direct exposure to a Gen Z researcher whose evidence base is consultation work, not commentary.

Why organisations work with James Hardy He has run growth on both sides of the platform divide, leading EMEA for Alibaba and now global retail at Flutterwave, so he can argue marketplace strategy from inside the operating model, not from a consultancy slide. He co-founded Avenue51, the platform that won the Queen’s Award for Enterprise in 2020 and The Guardian Start Up of the Year in 2016, which gives him founder credibility on selling Western brands into China. He frames e-commerce as ecosystem competition, not site optimisation, which reframes how boards think about platform dependency, payments infrastructure and customer data. He is one of the very few speakers who can speak with operator authority on Africa as a commercial market, via Flutterwave’s role as the continent’s largest fintech. Biography highlights Head of Global Retail & Market Development at Flutterwave, Africa’s largest fintech. Former Head of Europe, Middle East and Africa at Alibaba.com. Co-founder of Avenue51, the UK platform that helped Western brands enter China. Avenue51 won the Queen’s Award for Enterprise, International Trade, in 2020 and The Guardian Small Business Showcase Start Up of the Year in 2016. Named in the Financial Times Leap 100. MBA, Melbourne Business School; earlier career as a solicitor at Mishcon de Reya and Travers Smith, then General Counsel at Next 15, Bite Communications and Text 100. Biography Alibaba and Amazon are not the same business and never have been. One is a vertical operator that buys, stocks and ships. The other is a payments-and-data ecosystem that lets merchants sell. Hardy ran EMEA for Alibaba, and the distinction shapes how he advises Western brands on international growth. Before Alibaba, he co-founded Avenue51, the UK platform that helped European brands build market share in China through Tmall and the Alibaba marketplaces. Avenue51 won The Guardian Small Business Showcase Start Up of the Year in 2016, and the Queen’s Award for Enterprise, International Trade, in 2020. His Financial Times Leap 100 listing came out of that period. He now runs global retail and market development at Flutterwave, Africa’s largest fintech, which gives him a live operator’s view of where commerce, payments and platform competition are heading next. That perspective is rare on the speaker circuit. Most e-commerce speakers come from one platform, one geography, or one consultancy lens. Hardy has been an operator inside Alibaba, a founder selling Western brands into China, and is now building consumer and SME revenue across Africa. His earlier career was legal, with stints as a solicitor at Mishcon de Reya and Travers Smith and General Counsel roles at Next 15, Bite Communications and Text 100. That background shows up in how he handles questions on platform terms, data sovereignty and the contractual asymmetry between brands and marketplaces. Key speaking topics International e-commerce and retail globalisation Alibaba and Amazon: comparative platform strategy Marketplace and ecosystem business models China market entry for Western brands African commerce and fintech infrastructure Data-driven decision-making in commercial strategy Corporate innovation and startup operating models Ideal for CCOs, CMOs and heads of ecommerce planning for international or marketplace expansion Boards weighing platform dependency, marketplace risk and channel strategy Brand and retail leadership teams entering China, the Gulf or Africa Corporate innovation leads to working on ecosystem and platform plays Audience outcomes A clearer view of where Alibaba and Amazon are genuinely different, and what that means for marketplace strategy A working model for assessing platform dependency as a board-level risk Operator-level perspective on entering China and African markets without ceding the customer relationship Sharper questions for the leadership team on payments, data and ecosystem economics

Why organisations work with James McCabe He brings primary training in dramatic literature, not communications consulting, which gives the work a different starting point: structure, character, suspense and resolution as operating tools, not metaphors. His applied focus is the moments where corporate language usually fails most visibly, namely M&A integration, transformation programmes and AI roll-out, where employees disengage from the official storyline within weeks. He works directly with senior communication leaders at named global organisations including Allianz and Siemens, with engagement framed around outcomes for the business, not the comms function. His Fable workshop format compresses the craft into a working session that produces a usable narrative artefact for the leadership team, not a theory lecture. The intellectual lineage is unusually deep for the topic: an Oxford doctorate in literature, the British Council Millennium Prize, and twenty-five years of pattern recognition across European, American and Asian engagements. Biography highlights Doctorate in literature from St John’s College, Oxford, and a Double First from University College Dublin. British Council Millennium Prize for doctoral research. Twenty-five years applying classical narrative design at enterprise level across Europe, the US, and Asia. Engagements with Allianz and Siemens at Group Communications level. Founder of Fable, an artist collective of poets, designers, and filmmakers for corporate narrative work. Guest on industry storytelling podcasts including Business of Story and Storytelling for Business. Biography The standard corporate communication toolkit is rhetoric: slogans, value statements, change decks. It is designed to persuade in the moment and forgotten by the next quarter. Classical narrative is built differently. It is the form humans have used for three thousand years to make complex change feel inevitable, and most organisations are not using it. That gap is what McCabe has spent twenty-five years closing. He came to the work as a poet and literary scholar, with a doctorate from St John’s College, Oxford and the British Council Millennium Prize, before any of it touched the inside of a boardroom. The discipline he brought across is structural: how stories actually move audiences, why suspense and reversal matter more than messaging, and how character functions in a corporate cast. The applied work is concentrated in the moments where corporate language tends to break: mergers and acquisitions, restructures, AI roll-outs and sustainability programmes. Group Communications functions at organisations including Allianz and Siemens have used him to design the through-line of those programmes rather than the deck. His Fable workshop format takes a leadership team through a compressed version of that craft and produces a narrative artefact the team can use. What makes the offer unusual is the lineage. Most commercial storytelling consultants come from advertising or PR. McCabe’s frame of reference is dramatic literature, which is why the diagnosis tends to be sharper than the topic suggests: it is not about better stories, it is about whether the organisation has a structurally coherent one at all. Key speaking topics Corporate narrative strategy Storytelling for mergers and acquisitions Brand and reputation through narrative design Narrative for AI and digital transformation Sustainability storytelling Leadership communication and executive presence Culture and engagement through story Ideal for CCOs, Heads of Group Communications and brand leadership teams M&A integration leads and post-deal communication owners CEOs and CHROs running enterprise transformation or AI programmes Marketing and brand teams under pressure to differentiate in saturated categories Audience outcomes A working understanding of how dramatic narrative differs from corporate rhetoric, and why one travels and the other does not. The structural elements of a usable enterprise story: protagonist, stakes, reversal, resolution. A diagnostic for where the organisation’s existing story is failing, in M&A, AI roll-out, transformation or brand. A method for designing leadership communication around narrative architecture rather than message points.

Why organisations work with James Sinclair He runs the playbook he teaches. The Partyman Group is a roughly GBP 40 million portfolio across childcare, leisure, food and beverage, and heritage brands that he owns and operates, not advises. He has a concrete thesis on why price-led consumer businesses fail, set out in The Experience Business, and can show operators how to apply it inside their own units. He has done the hardest part of growth through acquisition in public: the 2023 rescue of Party Pieces from administration is a documented case study in buying a broken consumer brand and absorbing it. He raised GBP 700,000 from 21 lenders at 20 years old without venture capital, and has built every subsequent business on cash flow. Founders who are bootstrapped or PE-averse hear their own constraints in his story. He is direct, funny, and pitched at operators rather than boardrooms. Audiences of SME owners, franchisees, and consumer brand teams tend to leave with something they can action on Monday. Biography highlights Founder and CEO, Partyman Group: soft play centres, Twizzle Tops Day Nurseries, Marsh Farm Animal Adventure Park, Rossi Ice Cream, a grade II listed hotel, and Party Pieces. Acquired Party Pieces from the Middleton family out of administration in May 2023. Author of The Millionaire Clown and The Experience Business: Why Price-Focused Businesses Fail And What Winners Do Instead. Host of James Sinclair’s Business Broadcast podcast and a long-running YouTube channel focused on business operating decisions. Built the group without venture capital, funded through cash flow and lender-backed acquisitions. Speaks regularly across the UK and Europe to entrepreneur, SME, and franchise audiences. Biography Party Pieces was insolvent and more than GBP 2.5 million in debt when James Sinclair bought it out of administration in May 2023, adding the Middleton family’s party supplies brand to a portfolio that already included soft play centres, nurseries, a farm park, and Rossi Ice Cream. That kind of deal sits at the centre of how he has built the Partyman Group: find a distressed consumer business, buy it cheaply, and fold it into an operating model designed around experience rather than discounting. The group now reports turnover in the region of GBP 40 million. Sinclair built it without venture capital, starting at 16 as a children’s entertainer and, at 20, raising GBP 700,000 from 21 separate lenders to open his first soft play centre in Basildon. The first location hit GBP 1 million turnover inside a year. Every subsequent acquisition has been funded on cash flow and operator credibility, not equity rounds. His book The Experience Business sets out the thesis that underpins all of it: price-focused consumer businesses lose because customers are buying a feeling, and the winners are the operators who invest in the moments that feeling depends on. The Millionaire Clown, his earlier book, is the operator’s version of the same argument told through the businesses he has bought, broken, and fixed. What buyers get when they book him is not a strategist commenting on a sector. It is an owner-operator describing, specifically, how he grew a multi-brand consumer group through acquisition, what he overpaid for, what he did not, and how he keeps experience from degrading as the portfolio scales. The register is closer to a founders’ workshop than a keynote, which is why he tends to land well with SME and franchise audiences. Key speaking topics Growth through acquisition in consumer businesses Buying and turning around distressed brands Experience-led differentiation over price competition Building multi-brand portfolios without venture capital Cash flow, profitability, and operator discipline Customer acquisition for consumer and leisure brands Entrepreneurship and founder-led scaling Ideal for SME founders and owner-operators scaling consumer businesses Franchise networks and multi-site leisure, hospitality, and childcare operators M&A and corporate development leads working on distressed consumer assets Entrepreneur conferences, business schools, and founder communities Audience outcomes A working mental model for when to compete on experience and when price still matters A concrete view of how to evaluate a distressed consumer business before buying it Operator-level tactics for protecting customer experience as a portfolio adds brands A bootstrapped founder’s case for funding growth through cash flow and lenders rather than equity Specific stories, including Party Pieces, that audiences can pattern-match against their own deals

Why organisations work with Jamie Anderson He brings a working academic’s command of strategy and innovation research, not a recycled consultancy deck. His articles sit in California Management Review, MIT Sloan Management Review and Business Strategy Review, and he teaches the material at Antwerp Management School. His Lady Gaga and contemporary-art case work is the rare strategy content that lands with mixed senior audiences. It is taken seriously by London Business School’s journal yet readable for a leadership team without an MBA. He has built and taught executive programmes at London Business School, IMD, INSEAD, ESMT Berlin and Indian School of Business, which means his frame of reference is global executive practice, not one country or one sector. He is a Case Centre top-50 bestselling author, with a Nespresso case among the global prize winners. Buyers get a speaker whose teaching cases are actually used by other faculty. Financial Times named him a “management guru”; Business Strategy Review placed him among the world’s top 25 management thinkers. The credentialling is from named bodies, not bureau description. Biography highlights Professor of Strategy and Innovation, Antwerp Management School. Faculty and visiting positions at London Business School, IMD, INSEAD, ESMT Berlin, and Indian School of Business. Co-author, The Fine Art of Success (Wiley), and author of the Gaganomics / Strategy Gaga case work. Articles in California Management Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, Financial Times, and Wall Street Journal. The Case Centre Top 50 Bestselling Case Authors (No. 33 in 2021/22; No. 28 in 2020/21); winner of a global case prize for his Nespresso case. Named “management guru” by the Financial Times; listed among the world’s top 25 management thinkers by Business Strategy Review. Biography The classic strategy textbook assumed advantage was something a firm could build and defend. The leaders running large organisations now treat that assumption as a liability. The question is no longer how to protect a position, but how to keep generating new ones at the cadence the market demands. Anderson’s work sits inside that question. As Professor of Strategy and Innovation at Antwerp Management School, with faculty experience at London Business School, IMD, INSEAD, ESMT Berlin and Indian School of Business, he has spent two decades translating innovation research into language operating leaders can use. His articles in California Management Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, Financial Times and Wall Street Journal are the same material he teaches in executive programmes, written for practitioners. The signature of his work is its source material. Where most strategy speakers reach for the same handful of case studies, Anderson has built much of his teaching from artists and pop-culture figures, most famously his Lady Gaga case (Strategy Gaga / Gaganomics) and the book The Fine Art of Success. Business Strategy Review named the Lady Gaga article one of the top pieces of its year. The cases work because the underlying strategy is rigorous, and the surface is readable for a non-specialist audience. The recognition is from named bodies. The Financial Times has called him a management guru. Business Strategy Review put him among the top 25 management thinkers. The Case Centre lists him as a top-50 bestselling case author across multiple years, which is the closest the academic strategy world gets to a market test of whether other faculty actually use your work. Key speaking topics Strategic innovation and business model design Sustaining competitive advantage in mature industries Creativity and the strategy of contemporary brands Digital transformation and customer experience Leadership for innovation Personal strategy and career reinvention Ideal for Boards and executive committees rebuilding the innovation pipeline behind a mature core business CSOs, heads of strategy and corporate development teams in large incumbents CMOs and CXOs working on brand and customer-experience reinvention Senior leadership offsites where strategy content needs to land with a mixed, non-specialist audience Audience outcomes A clearer read on why traditional sources of competitive advantage are eroding, and what is replacing them Concrete cases of organisations and brands that have engineered new advantage in mature markets A working vocabulary for strategic innovation drawn from current management research, not consultancy framing A perspective on creativity and brand strategy that connects to operating decisions, not just marketing Energy. The Lady Gaga, Madonna and contemporary-art material is the rare strategy content senior audiences actually quote afterwards

Why organisations work with Jamie Kern Lima A founder track record at a scale almost no speaker in the entrepreneurship category can match: a category-creating consumer brand sold to L’Oreal for $1.2 billion, after Sephora said no for six years and QVC said no for three. First female CEO of a brand in L’Oreal’s history, with direct operating experience inside a $30 billion strategic acquirer post-acquisition, not just pre-exit. Two New York Times bestselling books, “Believe IT” and “Worthy”, giving sales teams and leadership audiences a tested framework on rejection and self-worth that the speaker has already road-tested with millions of readers. Host of the Gracie Award-winning Jamie Kern Lima Show, with first-time podcast interviews from figures including Meghan Markle and Michelle Obama, which gives the platform reach and the speaker a sharpened interviewer’s instinct for what actually moves an audience. A Columbia MBA and Columbia Business School board member who chooses to lead with the founder story, not the credential stack. The buyer gets the substance underneath the inspiration. Biography highlights Founder and former CEO of IT Cosmetics; sold to L’Oreal in 2016 for $1.2 billion. First female CEO of a brand in L’Oreal’s 100+ year history. Two-time New York Times bestselling author: “Believe IT” (Simon & Schuster, 2021) and “Worthy” (Hay House, 2024). Host of “The Jamie Kern Lima Show”, winner of the 2025 Gracie Award for Best Podcast, Lifestyle. Guest Shark, ABC’s Shark Tank, Season 16. MBA, Columbia Business School; member of the Columbia Business School Board of Overseers. Listed on Forbes’ America’s Richest Self-Made Women. Biography IT Cosmetics was turned down by Sephora for six years and by QVC for three before Jamie Kern Lima got either retailer on the phone. By 2016 the company was the largest luxury makeup brand in America, and L’Oreal paid $1.2 billion to acquire it. She became the first female CEO of a brand in the group’s history. The founding story is unusual because the product positioning was unusual. IT Cosmetics was built around real skin: rosacea, hyperpigmentation, post-chemotherapy skin, customers QVC’s buyers were not used to seeing on camera. Kern Lima insisted on putting them there. That decision, more than any single marketing tactic, is what separated the brand from the prestige beauty pack and made it acquirable at scale. Post-exit, she has built a second platform with similar discipline. “Believe IT” and “Worthy” are both New York Times bestsellers; “The Jamie Kern Lima Show” won the 2025 Gracie Award for Best Podcast in the lifestyle category, on the back of first-ever podcast interviews with Meghan Markle and a multi-part series with Oprah Winfrey. She is on the board of overseers at Columbia Business School, where she earned her MBA in 2004. For a corporate audience, the relevant content is concrete. How a category-creating consumer brand survives years of rejection from the gatekeepers it depends on. How founder-led marketing competes with conglomerate marketing budgets. What changes inside the business the day a $30 billion strategic acquirer owns it. What stays the same. Key speaking topics Founder-led brand building and category creation Selling to and operating inside a strategic acquirer Authenticity as a marketing operating principle Rejection as a sales and growth discipline Direct retail, on-camera selling and QVC scale-up Resilience and self-worth for senior leaders Women’s entrepreneurship at scale Ideal for Sales kick-offs, especially in consumer, retail, beauty, and direct-to-consumer categories CMOs and brand teams reframing what “authentic” marketing means in practice Founder and scale-up audiences inside corporate venture, accelerator, and women’s leadership programmes Annual conferences seeking a headline keynote with mainstream cultural reach Audience outcomes A working playbook on building demand for a consumer brand the trade buyers have already rejected A clearer framework for how founder-led companies should think about brand voice after acquisition Specific tactics on handling rejection as a recurring operational event, not a one-off setback A renewed willingness, particularly among senior women, to put their own conviction back at the centre of commercial decisions

Why organisations work with Jay Baer He has built first-party research, not opinion, into the link between speed and revenue, including the finding that customers will pay up to 50% more to avoid waiting. He treats complaints as a growth channel, with a working method (Hug Your Haters) used by service and CX teams inside large consumer and B2B brands. He gives marketing and CX leaders a named framework for engineering word of mouth on purpose, drawn from Talk Triggers and case studies including DoubleTree, Five Guys, and The Cheesecake Factory. He has advised more than 700 companies through Convince & Convert, including roughly 30 of the FORTUNE 500, so the boardroom examples are first hand, not borrowed. He is one of a small group of speakers in this category to hold both CSP and CPAE Hall of Fame recognition from the National Speakers Association, which is a useful signal for buyers booking high-stakes general sessions. Biography highlights Founder of Convince & Convert, a customer experience and marketing strategy firm advising 700+ brands since 2008. Author of seven business books, including the New York Times bestseller Youtility, Hug Your Haters, Talk Triggers, and The Time to Win. Inducted into the CPAE Speaker Hall of Fame by the National Speakers Association, holds CSP designation. Clients cited across his consulting and advisory work include Nike, Oracle, Salesforce, Caterpillar, Allstate, and the United Nations. Author of the proprietary Time to Win research on customer responsiveness, including the finding that customers will pay up to 50% more to avoid waiting. Co-founder and editor of The Tequila Report, with a subscriber base above 50,000 and a substantial second-career media presence. Biography Most companies still treat customer service as a cost centre and word of mouth as a happy accident. Both assumptions are wrong, and both are expensive. The work that defines Jay Baer’s career has been to convert each of them into something a leadership team can actually manage. Through Convince & Convert, the strategy firm he founded in 2008, Baer has advised more than 700 companies on customer experience and marketing, including around 30 of the FORTUNE 500. Named clients include Nike, Oracle, Salesforce, Caterpillar, and the United Nations. The books carry the same operating logic into a wider audience: Youtility on help-as-marketing reached number three on the New York Times business list, Hug Your Haters reframed complaints as a retention asset, and Talk Triggers, written with Daniel Lemin, set out a structured method for engineering word of mouth using case studies from DoubleTree, Five Guys, and The Cheesecake Factory. His most recent book, The Time to Win, is the sharpest expression of the argument. It is built on proprietary research showing that two thirds of customers now rate speed as important as price, that more than half hire the first company to respond, and that customers will pay up to 50% more to avoid waiting. For CX and commercial leaders, the implication is direct: response time is a pricing variable. Recognition tracks the substance. Baer was inducted into the CPAE Speaker Hall of Fame by the National Speakers Association in 2018 and holds the CSP designation, two credentials held simultaneously by a small minority of working speakers. The practical consequence for buyers is reliability under pressure: he is one of the relatively few keynote choices in this category that large general sessions and senior leadership audiences both tend to find credible. Key speaking topics Customer experience strategy Customer responsiveness and speed to revenue Word of mouth as a managed marketing discipline Complaint handling and customer retention Practical AI for customer-facing teams Marketing as customer help, not interruption Ideal for Chief Marketing Officers, Chief Customer Officers, and Chief Experience Officers setting CX or growth agendas Sales, service, and contact-centre leaders being asked to convert responsiveness into commercial outcomes Franchise, hospitality, retail, and B2B brands where word of mouth is a material growth lever Annual conferences and leadership offsites that need a senior keynote with general-session range Audience outcomes A defensible position on why response time should be treated as a commercial metric, not a service KPI A working method for converting customer complaints into a retention and acquisition channel A repeatable approach to engineering word of mouth, with named operational examples to adapt A clearer view of where AI plausibly belongs inside customer-facing workflows, and where it does not Specific, named case studies the audience can quote in their own internal conversations the next week

Why organisations work with Jeannie Walters She gives operators a working method, not a slogan: the CXI Navigator and CXI Compass frameworks turn customer-experience strategy into something a leadership team can run, not just endorse. She translates CX from a contact-centre function into a board-level commercial lever, framed around retention, loyalty, and the cost of reactive service. The dual credential set (CCXP and CSP) is unusual: she is certified in the discipline she speaks on and in the craft of speaking itself, which means content holds up under scrutiny from CX practitioners. A 2026 book with Mission Driven Press and Simon and Schuster distribution gives her thesis a citable spine, with named tools (CX Mission Statement, CX Success Blueprint, Four Cs of CX Culture) leaders can take back into the business. Reach into operating teams runs deeper than most keynote speakers: more than 500,000 LinkedIn Learning participants, plus the Experience Action podcast, mean her language is already inside many client organisations before she arrives. Biography highlights Founder and CEO of Experience Investigators, a customer experience consultancy founded in 2009. Author of “Experience Is Everything: Making Every Moment Count in the Age of Customer Expectations” (Mission Driven Press, April 2026). Certified Customer Experience Professional (CCXP) and charter member of the Customer Experience Professionals Association. Certified Speaking Professional (CSP) and Professional Member of the National Speakers Association. Host of the Experience Action podcast, recognised by CX Network among its leading CX podcasts. LinkedIn Learning instructor whose courses have reached more than 500,000 learners; named clients include Verizon, Siemens, GitLab, PayPal, BASF, Comcast, Allstate, and SAP Litmos. Biography Most companies that say they are customer-centric are not. They are service-centric, organised to absorb complaints, route tickets and react to survey scores. The decisions that actually shape loyalty, retention and willingness to pay sit upstream, in product, operations and leadership, and that is the gap Jeannie Walters has spent two decades closing. She is the founder and CEO of Experience Investigators, the consultancy she launched in 2009 to help organisations design customer experience as a deliberate discipline rather than a reactive function. Her clients include Verizon, Siemens, GitLab, PayPal, BASF, Comcast, Allstate and SAP Litmos, and the work tends to focus on the same problem: leadership intent that does not survive contact with the operating model. Her 2026 book, “Experience Is Everything: Making Every Moment Count in the Age of Customer Expectations”, published by Mission Driven Press with Simon and Schuster distribution, sets out the thesis. CX is treated as a business discipline with named tools, including a CX Mission Statement, a CX Success Blueprint, and the Four Cs of CX Culture, that give leadership teams something to run rather than something to admire. Her CXI Navigator and CXI Compass frameworks structure the operating side of that work. Credentials reinforce the practice. She is a Certified Customer Experience Professional and a charter member of the Customer Experience Professionals Association, a Certified Speaking Professional, and a LinkedIn Learning instructor whose courses have reached more than 500,000 learners. The Experience Action podcast, named by CX Network among its top CX podcasts, extends her work into the day-to-day of leaders trying to put it into effect. Key speaking topics Customer experience strategy Customer loyalty and retention Proactive versus reactive customer experience Customer journey design Employee experience and CX alignment CX measurement and accountability AI in customer experience Ideal for Chief Customer Officers, Chief Experience Officers and CX leadership functions CMOs and Chief Revenue Officers responsible for retention and lifetime value Heads of operations and service in B2C and B2B businesses where churn is a board issue Senior leadership teams trying to convert customer-centric language into operating discipline Audience outcomes A working definition of customer experience as a commercial discipline, separate from customer service. A method for spotting where the journey is leaking value, drawn from the CXI Navigator and CXI Compass frameworks. A clearer link between CX investment and the metrics finance and the board care about: retention, lifetime value, churn cost. A practical view of how AI changes CX expectations, and where automation should and should not enter the journey. Language and tools (CX Mission Statement, CX Success Blueprint, Four Cs of CX Culture) leaders can take into the next operating review.

Why organisations work with Jeffrey Schnapp He has done the rare thing of building both a respected academic institution (metaLAB at Harvard, Stanford Humanities Lab) and a venture-backed hardware business (Piaggio Fast Forward, makers of the gita robot). Most innovation speakers have done one or the other. The gita robot, which he co-conceived, won the 2020 Red Dot Award Best of the Best. He can speak to product design as a senior operator, not as a commentator on other people’s products. His framework treats culture, narrative, and material design as part of the same engineering problem. For consumer brands, mobility companies, and cultural institutions, that is the integration most teams never manage internally. He sits at the centre of the most serious institutional conversations on the future of libraries, museums, archives, and AI-augmented knowledge work, with Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center, the Triennale di Milano, and the Canadian Centre for Architecture among his collaborators. Biography highlights Carl A. Pescosolido Chair in Romance Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literature, Harvard University; Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature. Founder and faculty director of metaLAB (at) Harvard; faculty co-director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. Co-founder and Chief Visionary Officer of Piaggio Fast Forward; former CEO 2015 to 2018. Founding director of the Stanford Humanities Lab, 1999 to 2009. Co-author of Digital_Humanities (MIT Press, 2012); author of FuturPiaggio (2017) and Storia rapida della velocita (2025), winner of the 2025 Premio di saggistica “Citta delle rose.” Speaker at TED, the United Nations, and the Royal Academy of Sweden; gita robot recipient of the 2020 Red Dot Award Best of the Best. Biography The gita robot, a two-wheeled cargo follower built by Piaggio Fast Forward in Boston, won the 2020 Red Dot Award Best of the Best. Its co-founder is a Harvard professor of comparative literature. That sentence is the simplest way to describe what Jeffrey Schnapp does: he runs serious cultural scholarship and serious product engineering as a single practice, and ships from both ends. At Harvard he holds the Carl A. Pescosolido Chair, chairs the Department of Comparative Literature, and founded metaLAB, an experimental research unit at the intersection of design, technology and the humanities. He is also a faculty co-director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. Before Harvard he founded and ran the Stanford Humanities Lab, one of the earliest serious experiments in digital humanities infrastructure. In parallel, he co-founded Piaggio Fast Forward, the robotics arm of the Italian mobility group behind Vespa, and served as its CEO from 2015 to 2018 before moving into the Chief Visionary Officer role. PFF has shipped the gita and gita mini personal cargo robots and, in 2025, the kilo utility robot. His authored work, including FuturPiaggio and the prize-winning Storia rapida della velocita, treats mobility, speed and material culture as questions a serious product company needs to answer. The pattern across his career is a refusal to separate cultural intuition from operational delivery. He has curated exhibitions at the Triennale di Milano and the Canadian Centre for Architecture, redesigned tunnels in Trento into a working history museum, and helped define what the next generation of libraries, archives and AI-augmented knowledge tools will look like. For corporate audiences working on brand, customer experience, mobility, or innovation portfolios, that integrated view is the asset. Key speaking topics Innovation at the intersection of design, culture and technology Mobility and the future of urban life Robotics and human-centred product design The future of libraries, archives and museums AI and the future of knowledge work Cultural history as a strategic asset for brands Design-led entrepreneurship Ideal for Boards and executive teams in mobility, consumer products, and design-led brands Innovation, R&D, and design leaders integrating cultural insight into product development Cultural institutions, libraries, and museum leadership rethinking their operating model Universities and think tanks commissioning on the future of knowledge work and the humanities Audience outcomes A working model for treating cultural history and product design as one discipline rather than two budgets Concrete reference cases from Piaggio Fast Forward, metaLAB, and large-scale curatorial projects A clearer view of how AI is reshaping libraries, archives and knowledge institutions, from someone building inside both the academy and a venture A vocabulary for senior teams who want innovation programmes that produce shipped objects, not slide decks

Why organisations work with Jenk Oz A live daily feed of Gen Z behaviour. Thred.com publishes in 17 languages across 220+ countries and territories, feeding his brand advice with first-party data instead of commissioned surveys. Consulting credibility built on named client work. Thred Media has advised Coca-Cola, Google, Ford, Dunkin’, Microsoft, Snapchat, and Ogilvy on Gen Z strategy, so executive audiences engage with a working commercial operator. Primary-source Gen Z insight. Thred’s editorial team is almost entirely Gen Z, which grounds brand strategy work in lived cohort behaviour. A structural edge in data. The combination of publishing arm, Change Maker Discord community, and consulting practice generates zero- and first-party signals on emerging youth culture that traditional agencies do not hold. Biography highlights Founder and CEO of Thred Media, the Gen Z publishing and consulting business headquartered in London. Thred.com publishes in 17 languages, reaches audiences in 220+ countries and territories, and generates approximately 350,000 monthly article reads alongside 200,000+ social followers. Consulting clients include Coca-Cola, Google, Ford, Dunkin’, Microsoft, Snapchat, Ogilvy, Hilton, Meta, Universal Music Group, and Epic Games. Named on Forbes 30 Under 30 (Europe), winner of Digiday’s Future Leader Award and Greater Good Award, and recipient of a Webby/Anthem Young Leader Award in Diversity, Equity & Inclusion. Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. Member of the Google Z-Council, Oracle for Startups, and the Microsoft Surface young entrepreneur programme. Delivered three TEDx talks and has spoken at 90+ international conferences, including Amazon AWS Summit London (where he interviewed Amazon CTO Werner Vogels), Forbes Summit Cincinnati, Vox YMS New York, Oxford University Model UN, and Brand Week Istanbul. Biography Most brand advice about Gen Z is produced from outside the generation it describes. Survey data and panel research reach brand teams after the fact, often long after the behaviour they track has moved on. Thred Media was built on the opposite principle. What became Thred Media began with a school show-and-tell by an eight-year-old Jenk Oz about the activities he was doing outside class. That project grew into iCoolKid, which was rebranded and repositioned as Thred Media in 2019. Today, Thred.com publishes in 17 languages and reaches audiences in 220+ countries, giving the business a live first-party read on what young consumers are actually doing and buying. The consulting arm applies that feed to commercial questions. Coca-Cola, Google, Ford, Dunkin’, Microsoft, Snapchat, Ogilvy, and Hilton have used Thred Media for Gen Z strategy work that draws on live behaviour from the Change Maker Discord community and the editorial desk. Recognition has followed: Forbes 30 Under 30 (Europe), the Digiday Future Leader Award, a Webby/Anthem Award in Diversity, Equity & Inclusion, and a Fellowship of the Royal Society of Arts. The commercial distinction is straightforward. He runs a functioning Gen Z business that advises major consumer brands, and he belongs to the generation he is paid to interpret. He has delivered three TEDx talks, interviewed Amazon CTO Werner Vogels at AWS Summit London, and been featured in Forbes, Business Insider, Fortune, and the Evening Standard. Key speaking topics Gen Z consumer behaviour Brand relevance and the Gen Z market Gen Z marketing strategy Youth culture and social change Digital activism and clicktivism Youth entrepreneurship The future of work through a Gen Z lens Ideal for Chief marketing officers, brand directors, and consumer strategy teams are trying to close the relevance gap with Gen Z consumers. Agencies and consultancies whose clients are asking sharper questions about youth audiences than internal research can answer. Corporate innovation and growth teams are building commercial plans that depend on reaching emerging consumer cohorts. Board and executive audiences wanting a primary source on Gen Z behaviour, not secondhand interpretation. Audience outcomes A live view of how Gen Z is actually behaving across purchase and media decisions, drawn from Thred.com’s daily publishing feed and Change Maker community. Recalibrated assumptions about the signals brands use to judge youth relevance, with examples from named client work. Specific examples of where established brands are winning and losing Gen Z attention, drawn from Thred Media’s advisory engagements. A direct read on how social change and purpose shape purchase decisions in the generation that now accounts for the largest share of emerging consumer spend.

Why organisations work with Jennifer Hyman She has run the full arc of a venture-backed consumer subscription business, from a Harvard Business School idea in 2008 to a $1.7 billion IPO in 2021, and can speak to each stage with named decisions rather than highlight-reel anecdotes. She led Rent the Runway through a near-existential 2020, when its core demand collapsed overnight, and reset the cost base, capital structure and product. Boards under pressure want that recovery story from the operator who lived it. She sits on the board of The Estee Lauder Companies and advises Goldman Sachs through the Launch With GS council, giving her a working view of how large incumbents think about disruption from the inside. She is one of only 30 women to have taken a US company public and the first to do so with an all-female CEO, COO and CFO line-up. That credential travels well in conversations about leadership pipeline and capital access. She speaks from the operator seat on how AI is changing what a customer relationship actually is, drawing on Rent the Runway’s own use of data and personalisation rather than abstract framing. Biography highlights Co-founder and CEO of Rent the Runway since 2009; Chair of the Board. Took Rent the Runway public in October 2021, raising $357 million. Board Director, The Estee Lauder Companies. Audit Committee and Nominating and ESG Committee. Founding member of the NYSE Board Advisory Council. Adviser to Goldman Sachs via the Launch With GS Council. Named to TIME 100 Most Influential People (2019); Fortune 40 Under 40; Fast Company Most Creative People in Business; Forbes 12 Most Disruptive Names in Business. BA in social sciences and MBA, Harvard University. Biography Rent the Runway started as a Harvard Business School project in late 2008 and reached public markets in October 2021 as the first US listing led by an all-female CEO, COO and CFO trio. The company raised $357 million and listed at a $1.7 billion valuation. The person who built it from idea to ticker is Jennifer Hyman, co-founder, CEO and Chair of the Board. The interesting period for boards is not the launch. It is what happened after. The pandemic took out Rent the Runway’s core demand, weddings, events, office wear, almost overnight in early 2020. Hyman cut costs, restructured debt, reworked the subscription product, and brought the business through to IPO eighteen months later. She has since had to defend the model against shifting consumer behaviour, capital market repricing of growth, and the entry of larger players into resale and rental. Outside the operator role, Hyman serves on the Board of Directors of The Estee Lauder Companies, on its Audit Committee and Nominating and ESG Committee. She is a founding member of the NYSE Board Advisory Council and sits on the Launch With GS Advisory Council for Goldman Sachs, where the brief is improving capital access for female and diverse founders. She was named to TIME’s 100 Most Influential People list in 2019, with the profile written by Diane von Furstenberg. Hyman’s value in a board conversation is the texture of having actually done the things most strategy decks describe. She can speak to category creation, to subscription unit economics under stress, to the use of AI in personalisation and inventory, and to the politics of taking a venture-backed consumer business through a public listing without losing operational grip. Key speaking topics Subscription business model design Category creation in consumer markets Recovery and reset after demand shock AI in consumer personalisation and inventory Capital access for founders and underrepresented operators Founder-CEO journey through IPO Ideal for Boards and executive teams reviewing strategy under model pressure CEO and CFO audiences in consumer, retail, fashion and subscription businesses Investor and capital-markets events focused on founder access to capital Women’s leadership and pipeline programmes at senior levels Audience outcomes A clear-eyed account of what category creation actually costs from someone who has done it A working view of how a venture-backed CEO restructures a business through a demand shock Insight into how AI is being used in subscription consumer businesses today, with named examples from Rent the Runway A senior-operator perspective on the IPO process and post-listing reality Specific arguments for how capital access changes when founder pipelines change

Why organisations work with Jenny Fleiss She has built a consumer business from a Harvard Business School idea to a publicly listed company, and a separate venture inside Walmart’s Store No. 8 incubator. That gives a board credible answers on both routes into a new market. She speaks from inside the operating cockpit of conversational commerce and AI-driven personalisation, not from a strategist’s deck. Jetblack used text and machine learning to handle real customer requests at scale. Her seat at Initialized Capital and prior investing work put her across hundreds of early-stage decks in e-commerce, consumer and AI. She can tell a corporate audience which startup behaviours are worth importing and which are noise. She brings board-level perspective from listed and private companies including The Lanvin Group, Shutterfly and Rent the Runway, which lets her translate founder language into governance language an audit and risk committee will understand. Biography highlights Co-founder and board member, Rent the Runway, the New York-listed designer rental company she started with Jennifer Hyman in 2008. Founder and former CEO of Jetblack, the conversational commerce startup launched inside Walmart’s Store No. 8 incubator in 2018. Former Partner at Initialized Capital, the seed-stage venture firm, where she led e-commerce, consumer and AI investing. Independent director, The Lanvin Group (since 2022); board member, Shutterfly (since 2019); board member, Arteza. MBA, Harvard Business School; BA in Political Science, Yale University, cum laude. Recognised on Fortune’s 40 Under 40 (2012), Inc. 30 Under 30 (2010), Forbes Disruptors 2013, and Fast Company’s Most Influential Women in Technology. Biography Renting a designer dress through a website was not an obvious business in 2008. Jenny Fleiss and Jennifer Hyman started Rent the Runway from a Harvard Business School idea and turned it into a publicly listed consumer company. The work needed to be done in unglamorous places: dry cleaning logistics, returns flows, fit data, inventory forecasting. The brand sat on top of an operations problem. A decade later, Walmart asked her to build a startup inside its corporate body. Jetblack was a text-based, AI-assisted personal shopping service for high-spending New York households, incubated inside Store No. 8. The product taught Walmart what conversational commerce actually costs to run, what humans still have to do behind the model, and where machine learning genuinely earns its keep in retail. That double track, founder of a venture-backed unicorn and intrapreneur inside a Fortune 1 retailer, is what makes her useful in a corporate room. She has lived the trade-offs between speed and brand risk, between founder autonomy and parent-company governance, between AI promise and operating reality. Her investing work at Initialized Capital and as an angel adds a third lens: which early-stage signals are worth a corporate’s attention and which are theatre. Her board work at The Lanvin Group, Shutterfly, Rent the Runway and Arteza puts her in front of the same governance questions her audiences face. Boards want innovation, but they also want explanations. Key speaking topics Building and scaling consumer internet businesses Conversational commerce and AI in retail Corporate venture building and intrapreneurship Customer data and personalisation at scale Female founders and the funding gap Early-stage investing in consumer and AI Board governance for innovation programmes Ideal for CEOs and divisional presidents in retail, consumer goods and direct-to-consumer brands Heads of innovation, corporate venture and new ventures inside large incumbents Chief digital, chief data and chief AI officers responsible for customer-facing AI deployment Founder communities, accelerator cohorts and women-in-business leadership programmes Audience outcomes A clearer view of which startup behaviours translate into a corporate parent and which collapse on contact with it. A working vocabulary for what conversational commerce and AI personalisation actually require to run at scale. A board-level frame for sponsoring internal ventures: what to measure, what to protect, when to wind down. A grounded read on the current early-stage consumer and AI investment market from someone who has sat on both sides of the table.