Cybersecurity

Why organisations work with Jay Tuck He has reported on AI from inside the places it matters most: Ukrainian battlefields, US carrier decks, intelligence agencies, and the trading floors AI has effectively emptied. The talk lands as field reporting, not theory. His book Evolution ohne uns sold widely enough in Germany that the Bundeswehr bought 10,000 copies to put in front of its officers. The German defence establishment treats his framing as a serious internal reference, not bureau copy. He carries 35 years of ARD investigative reporting and a TEDxHamburgSalon talk past five million views. Audiences arrive already knowing the argument, which raises the floor on the room. He is fluent on AI risk in language that translates: what a generative model actually decides, where the human is no longer in the loop, and what a bank or hospital board can still control. Biography highlights 35 years at ARD German Television, including Executive Producer of the flagship nightly news programme ARD-Tagesthemen. Author of High-Tech Espionage (St. Martin’s Press), published in 14 countries. Author of Evolution ohne uns (Plassen Verlag), a German technology bestseller; the German Ministry of Defence acquired 10,000 copies for its armed forces. Author of KI und der moderne Krieg (Econ Verlag) on battlefield AI in the Ukraine war. War correspondent in Kuwait, Iraq, and Ukraine; embedded aboard USS Truman. TEDxHamburgSalon talk “Artificial Intelligence: It Will Kill Us” with more than five million views. Founder and CEO of Airtime Dubai Ltd, producing the technology magazine Understanding Tomorrow for Al-Jazeera Arabic. Biography The systems now embedded in military, financial, and clinical decisions are no longer fully legible to the people who own the risk. Code writes its own next version. Targets are nominated by software. Trades clear without a human in the chair. The question for any serious board is whether the governance model around these systems still matches what they actually do. Tuck reports on this gap from the inside. His investigative book High-Tech Espionage was published in fourteen countries by St. Martin’s Press. Evolution ohne uns became a sustained bestseller in Germany on Plassen Verlag, with the Federal Ministry of Defence acquiring ten thousand copies for distribution within the Bundeswehr. KI und der moderne Krieg documents how AI is being used and contested on the battlefield in Ukraine. The reporting sits on a long career in serious news. He spent 35 years inside ARD German Television, ending as Executive Producer of the flagship nightly programme ARD-Tagesthemen, with combat assignments across both Gulf Wars, Ukraine, and the carrier USS Truman. Bylines in Stern, Der Spiegel, Die Welt, Time, and Le Point. His TEDxHamburgSalon talk on AI risk has passed five million views. What he offers a room is the journalist’s job done well: specific cases, named systems, and a clear account of where human authority over machine decisions has already been ceded. Key speaking topics Artificial intelligence and national security AI in modern warfare Autonomous weapons and the human-in-the-loop question AI in financial markets and algorithmic trading AI in law enforcement and biometric forensics Cybersecurity and high-tech espionage AI in healthcare and clinical decision-making Ideal for Boards and audit committees stress-testing AI risk and oversight Defence, intelligence, and law enforcement leadership audiences CROs, CISOs, and heads of compliance in regulated industries Senior leadership offsites in financial services and healthcare are reckoning with model risk Audience outcomes A working vocabulary for how contemporary AI systems actually make decisions, and where human review has quietly dropped out. Named case studies from defence, finance, and law enforcement where the technology has already moved past existing governance. A sharper read on which AI risks belong on a board agenda and which sit lower in the organisation. A grounded view of the strategic stakes for Western institutions as adversary states deploy AI in conflict and intelligence.

Why organisations work with Audrey Tang She has run the experiment that most boards are still debating: AI governance, digital deliberation, and disinformation defence deployed at national scale, with measurable outcomes during a pandemic and a presidential election. She offers a working alternative to the binary of techno-libertarianism and centralised AI control, set out in “Plurality” with E. Glen Weyl and tested inside Taiwan’s government. She built the civic infrastructure she talks about. g0v, the Mask Map, vTaiwan, and Join.gov.tw are operational systems, not concepts, and have been adopted in Japan, the EU, and the United States. Her authority is rare in this category: a TIME100 AI honoree and Foreign Policy Top 100 Global Thinker who has signed off on policy decisions, not just commented on them. Biography highlights First Minister of Digital Affairs of Taiwan, 2022 to 2024; Digital Minister from 2016. Co-author with E. Glen Weyl of “Plurality: The Future of Collaborative Technology and Democracy”. TIME100 Most Influential People in AI, 2023. Foreign Policy Top 100 Global Thinkers, 2019. Co-founder of g0v and architect of Taiwan’s open-data COVID-19 response, including the Mask Map. Ambassador-at-large, University of Oxford Accelerator Fellowship Programme. Biography Most governments responded to COVID-19 with top-down distribution and mandates. Taiwan ran an open-data Mask Map built with civic coders, a participatory platform called vTaiwan, and a disinformation playbook with a 20-minute response window. The minister responsible was Audrey Tang. Tang served as Taiwan’s first Digital Minister from 2016, and as the first Minister of Digital Affairs from 2022 to 2024. Before government, she was a Silicon Valley engineer and a core contributor to Perl and Haskell. She joined the g0v civic-tech community in its early years and helped shape the open-government practices that later became state policy. Her book with E. Glen Weyl, “Plurality: The Future of Collaborative Technology and Democracy”, argues that AI and digital tools can be designed to widen democratic participation rather than narrow it. The book was written openly on GitHub, translated by volunteers into more than a dozen languages, and released into the public domain. It draws directly on what Taiwan built and ran. She has been named to TIME100 AI, Foreign Policy’s Top 100 Global Thinkers, and serves as an ambassador-at-large in the University of Oxford’s Accelerator Fellowship Programme. For a senior audience weighing how to govern AI inside a regulated organisation, she offers something most speakers in this category cannot: a record of decisions made in office, with results visible in pandemic outcomes and election integrity. Key speaking topics Digital democracy and participatory governance AI ethics and trustworthy AI design Plurality and collaborative technology Disinformation defence and election integrity Open-source civic infrastructure Public trust in technology Cybersecurity as democratic resilience Ideal for Boards and executive committees setting AI governance and risk policy Chief Digital, Data, and AI Officers designing deployment frameworks Public-sector and regulated-industry leaders facing trust and legitimacy questions CISOs and risk leads responsible for disinformation, election, or platform integrity Audience outcomes A working mental model for AI governance grounded in a national case, not a thought experiment. A clear view of what participatory and open-source approaches add to organisational decision-making, and where they break. Specific tactics for disinformation response, drawn from Taiwan’s 2-2-2 playbook. A vocabulary for “Plurality” that gives leaders an alternative to the techno-libertarian and centralised-control framings of AI.

Why organisations work with Tyler Cohen Wood She brings the threat picture a board actually needs: thirteen years inside the Department of Defense, including roles as Deputy Cyber Division Chief at the DIA and the Directorate’s named Cyber Subject Matter Expert, translated into language a non-technical executive can act on. She has run cyber risk at commercial scale. As Director of Cyber Risk Management at AT&T she built defences across one of the largest customer bases in the world, so her advice maps onto P&L decisions, not just policy. She is operator, not pundit. As co-founder of Dark Cryptonite (patent-pending zero-trust encryption) and CEO of MyConnectedHealth (AI in clinical diagnostics), she is currently building in the two domains she speaks on. Her work on social engineering and deepfakes draws on a digital forensics career at NASA’s Office of Inspector General and the DoD Cyber Crime Center, where she investigated major crimes and intrusions. That gives the deepfake material specific case grounding rather than headline commentary. She holds multiple US provisional patents for cyber capabilities and is a regular expert voice on Good Morning America, CNN, The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg, so she lands in front of executive audiences who recognise her from crisis coverage. Biography highlights Former Senior Intelligence Officer and Deputy Cyber Division Chief, Special Communications Division, US Defense Intelligence Agency. Former Director of Cyber Risk Management, AT&T. Co-founder, Dark Cryptonite (patent-pending zero-trust encryption); Founder and CEO, MyConnectedHealth Inc. Author of Catching the Catfishers (Career Press); co-author of Alternate Data Storage Forensics (Syngress). Holder of multiple US provisional patents for cyber capabilities. Regular commentator for Good Morning America, CNN, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and GovInfoSecurity. Biography The cyber threat picture has changed shape. Adversaries now use generative AI to scale phishing, clone executive voices and produce convincing video. The defensive vocabulary that worked in 2018, perimeter, patch, password, no longer covers the surface area a modern board is responsible for. Tyler Cohen Wood spent thirteen years inside the US Department of Defense working on exactly that surface area. At the Defense Intelligence Agency she served as Senior Intelligence Officer and Deputy Cyber Division Chief in the Special Communications Division, and was designated the Cyber Subject Matter Expert for the DIA Science and Technologies Directorate. Her remit covered the White House, the DoD, federal law enforcement and the wider intelligence community. Before that, as a digital forensic examiner at NASA’s Office of Inspector General and the DoD Cyber Crime Center, she worked intrusion and major-crimes cases at evidentiary level. She then took that fluency into the commercial world as Director of Cyber Risk Management at AT&T, where the question shifts from intelligence reporting to defending revenue, customers and brand at scale. She now co-leads Dark Cryptonite, a venture building patent-pending zero-trust encryption for governments and enterprises, and is founder and CEO of MyConnectedHealth, an AI platform for clinical diagnosis. She holds multiple US provisional patents in cyber. What that combination gives an executive audience is a speaker who is currently building the technology she discusses, has carried the threat picture at state level, and has owned commercial cyber accountability inside a Fortune 10 business. Her writing reflects the same range: Catching the Catfishers on social engineering and online identity, and the co-authored Alternate Data Storage Forensics textbook used inside the forensics community. Key speaking topics Cybersecurity as a board-level risk AI and deepfake-driven social engineering Emerging technology strategy for executives Digital transformation and cyber risk management The innovation mindset for technical and non-technical leaders AI in healthcare and connected health Women in technology and senior leadership Ideal for Boards and executive committees treating cyber as a strategic, not IT, agenda item CISOs, CIOs and CTOs briefing non-technical leadership on AI-era threat posture Risk, audit and compliance leaders preparing for AI-driven fraud and identity attacks Industry conferences in financial services, healthcare, defence and critical infrastructure Audience outcomes A clearer board-level model for where cyber risk now sits in the operating model Specific examples of how AI is changing social engineering, deepfakes and intrusion tactics A grounded view of what zero-trust and encryption actually mean for procurement and architecture decisions A working understanding of how AI is being deployed in regulated environments such as healthcare Confidence to ask sharper questions of internal security leaders and external vendors

Why organisations work with Confidence Staveley A practitioner voice on cybersecurity rooted in build-side delivery: founder of a foundation that trains thousands of women across 22-plus African countries, not a commentator describing the field from outside it. Author of API Security for White Hat Hackers (Packt, 2024), a technical book serious enough to be used inside security teams, written with co-author Christopher Romeo. Sits on the World Economic Forum Global Future Council on Cybersecurity, giving boards a direct line to how global policy and operational practice are converging. Brings a developing-economy lens most bureau cyber speakers do not: digital trust, payment threat landscapes and capacity-building in markets where the cost of a breach lands differently. Operational credibility on the workforce question: her CyberGirls Fellowship has become a model programme cited in the World Bank 2023 practitioner note on closing the cyber skills gap. Biography highlights Founder and Executive Director, CyberSafe Foundation (Nigeria) Author, API Security for White Hat Hackers, Packt Publishing Member, World Economic Forum Global Future Council on Cybersecurity Member, Forbes Technology Council 2023 Cybersecurity Woman of the World Award; ISC2 Global Achievement Award Obama Foundation Leaders Africa, 2022 cohort SANS Institute Difference Maker Award, People’s Champion of the Year, 2024 Biography Most cybersecurity conversations at the board level still depend on the security team simplifying for everyone else. The translation rarely survives the journey. Confidence Staveley built her career on closing that gap, in technical depth and in commercial clarity. She is the founder of the CyberSafe Foundation, a Nigerian non-profit that has trained women across more than twenty African countries through its CyberGirls Fellowship. The programme is a working answer to the cyber skills shortage, recognised in a 2023 World Bank practitioner note as a model worth scaling. Alongside the foundation, she co-authored API Security for White Hat Hackers, published by Packt, a working manual for security engineers rather than a thought-leadership book. Her platform reflects that hybrid of practice and policy. She sits on the World Economic Forum Global Future Council on Cybersecurity, is a member of the Forbes Technology Council, and was selected for the Obama Foundation Leaders Africa cohort in 2022. The recognitions matter because of where they cluster: technical authority, governance, and inclusion of underserved talent into the global cyber workforce. What organisations book her for is the rare combination of board-credible framing and ground-floor delivery, with a perspective shaped by markets where the cost of digital failure shows up faster. The 2023 Cybersecurity Woman of the World Award placed her against roughly 160 nominees from women-in-cyber networks worldwide; she came out on top. That kind of recognition, from inside the industry rather than from a bureau, is what separates a working practitioner from a circuit speaker. Key speaking topics Cybersecurity as board-level risk Digital trust and the payment threat landscape API security and application risk The cybersecurity workforce gap Women and inclusion in cyber Cyber capacity-building in emerging markets Data protection in the digital economy Ideal for Boards and audit committees treating cyber as a governance question CISOs, CIOs and CTOs are briefing executive teams on workforce and risk Financial services, fintech and payments leadership confronting fraud and digital trust Global organisations with African operations or talent strategy in the region Audience outcomes A clearer board-level vocabulary for cyber risk, separated from technical jargon A sharper read on where the cybersecurity workforce gap is widening, and what is actually working to close it A practitioner’s view of API and application security risk in commercial terms A more honest framing of inclusion in cyber as a talent-supply question, not a values statement

Why organisations work with Andrew Trask He has built the working infrastructure for privacy-preserving AI, not just written about it. PySyft, the open-source framework he created through OpenMined, is used by researchers and engineers to train models on data they never directly see. He sits inside one of the most consequential AI research labs in the world, DeepMind, while also leading an 18,000-strong community of privacy-preserving AI engineers. Few speakers operate credibly in both rooms. His agenda is structured transparency: making it possible for institutions to collaborate on AI without surrendering the underlying data. That is the exact tension a regulated industry leader is now trying to solve. He teaches the material rather than narrates it. Grokking Deep Learning and his Udacity courses have introduced tens of thousands of practitioners to neural networks and to private AI, which is why technical audiences find him credible rather than performative. Biography highlights Senior Research Scientist, Google DeepMind, working on privacy, federated learning, differential privacy, and secure computation. Founder of OpenMined, an open-source community of more than 18,000 researchers and engineers building privacy-preserving AI tools. Creator of PySyft, the open-source framework for training machine learning models on data the model owner cannot see. PhD candidate, University of Oxford, on the Oxford-DeepMind Graduate Scholarship; affiliated with the Future of Humanity Institute and the Centre for Governance of AI. Author of Grokking Deep Learning, Manning Publications, and instructor on Udacity’s Secure and Private AI and Deep Learning Nanodegree courses. Term Member, Council on Foreign Relations. Biography The hardest problem in applied AI is not modelling. It is access. The data that would make a healthcare model genuinely useful sits inside hospital systems that cannot legally share it. The data that would make a financial crime model work is split across banks that compete with each other. The default response has been to do less. Trask has spent the last decade building the technical answer to that problem. Through OpenMined, the open-source community he founded, he created PySyft, a framework that lets engineers train models on data they never directly see. The underlying methods, federated learning, differential privacy, secure multi-party computation, homomorphic encryption, are what serious AI governance now relies on. He calls the broader agenda structured transparency, and it is becoming the operating vocabulary for AI deployment in regulated settings. The institutional positioning matters. He is a Senior Research Scientist at Google DeepMind and a PhD candidate at Oxford, funded by the Oxford-DeepMind Graduate Scholarship and affiliated with the Future of Humanity Institute and the Centre for Governance of AI. He is also a Term Member of the Council on Foreign Relations. That combination puts him inside the frontier AI conversation and inside the AI governance conversation at the same time, which is unusual. The teaching record is the test of whether his ideas travel. Grokking Deep Learning, published by Manning, taught a generation of engineers how neural networks actually work. His Udacity courses on secure and private AI did the same for the privacy-preserving stack. The reason senior technical audiences treat him as a primary source rather than a commentator is that they have already worked through his material. Key speaking topics Privacy-preserving artificial intelligence Federated learning and secure computation AI governance and structured transparency Differential privacy in practice AI safety and responsible deployment The future of data infrastructure for AI Foundations of deep learning for non-specialists Ideal for Chief AI officers, CTOs, and chief data officers in regulated industries (healthcare, financial services, government) deciding how to deploy AI on sensitive data. Boards and audit committees pressure-tested on AI governance, data risk, and the gap between AI ambition and AI infrastructure. Heads of research, innovation, and product engineering teams building the next generation of AI products. Policy and public-sector leaders responsible for AI standards, data sharing, and international AI governance. Audience outcomes A working mental model of the privacy-preserving AI stack, named technique by named technique, instead of the usual abstractions. A clearer view of which AI use cases are unlocked by federated learning and secure computation, and which remain blocked by data access. A grounded read on where AI governance is heading, from someone inside both DeepMind and the Oxford AI governance ecosystem. A direct sense of how to move from AI pilots to deployments that survive regulatory and reputational scrutiny.

Why organisations work with H. R. McMaster A National Security Advisor’s view of how the United States, China, Russia, Iran and North Korea actually behave, drawn from the seat where the options are written, not from outside the room. A historian’s discipline applied to current events. His PhD-grade work on Vietnam decision-making in Dereliction of Duty is the same lens he turns on present-day strategic mistakes. Direct argument over diplomatic hedge. McMaster takes positions, names countries and policies, and explains the reasoning, which is what boards under sanctions and supply-chain pressure actually need. Thirty-four years of command experience translated into language executives use. He speaks about decision-making under contact with the enemy, not as metaphor, but as a method that maps onto leadership in volatile markets. A working policy interlocutor. Through Battlegrounds with H.R. McMaster at the Hoover Institution he is in regular conversation with serving and former heads of state, defence ministers and intelligence chiefs, which keeps his read of the system current. Biography highlights 25th National Security Advisor of the United States, 2017 to 2018. Retired US Army lieutenant general after a 34-year career; awarded the Silver Star for action at the Battle of 73 Easting in the Gulf War. Fouad and Michelle Ajami Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University; lecturer at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Author of three bestsellers: Dereliction of Duty, Battlegrounds: The Fight to Defend the Free World, and At War with Ourselves: My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House. Named to TIME’s 100 Most Influential People and Fortune’s World’s Greatest Leaders. Host of Battlegrounds with H.R. McMaster, the Hoover Institution’s policy interview series with serving and former heads of state and senior officials. Biography The seats where US strategy is actually written are small. McMaster has occupied two of them: command of an armoured cavalry troop in combat, and the office of National Security Advisor in the White House. That combination is what makes his read of geopolitical risk practical for boards rather than ornamental. His Gulf War record is part of the public file. As a captain in February 1991, his Eagle Troop destroyed 28 Iraqi tanks, 16 personnel carriers and 30 trucks at the Battle of 73 Easting in 23 minutes, without losing a soldier. He was awarded the Silver Star. He went on to command the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment in Tal Afar in 2005 and 2006, work that informed the US shift in counterinsurgency doctrine under General Petraeus. The intellectual record runs in parallel. Dereliction of Duty, drawn from his University of North Carolina PhD, dissected how the Joint Chiefs of Staff failed to challenge the political logic that produced the Vietnam War, and is still on US military reading lists. Battlegrounds, published in 2020, sets out how the United States misread China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, the Middle East, South Asia and the cyber domain over two decades. At War with Ourselves, the 2024 New York Times bestseller, is his account of running the National Security Council under the Trump administration. Today he is the Fouad and Michelle Ajami Senior Fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and lectures at the Graduate School of Business. Through the Battlegrounds interview series he keeps a working line into serving heads of state, defence ministers and intelligence chiefs, which is the substantive update boards want when they ask what is actually happening between Washington, Beijing, Moscow and Tehran. Key speaking topics Geopolitical competition with China, Russia, Iran and North Korea US foreign policy and national security strategy Decision-making under uncertainty and contact Leadership in high-stakes, ambiguous environments Risk to global commerce from state-level conflict Cyber, technology and the future of national power History as a discipline for present strategic choice Ideal for Boards and executive committees stress-testing China exposure, sanctions risk, and country strategy CEOs, CFOs and chief strategy officers setting capital allocation against geopolitical scenarios General counsel, chief risk officers and heads of government affairs Defence, aerospace, energy, financial services and technology leadership audiences with direct geopolitical exposure Audience outcomes A clearer read of how the United States and its rivals actually make strategic decisions, and where that points next. A working framework for thinking about competition with China and Russia that goes beyond headlines. Sharper questions for the company’s own scenario planning, sanctions exposure and supply-chain assumptions. A historian’s perspective on why strategic mistakes repeat, applied to decisions the audience is currently making. Confidence to take a position on geopolitical risk inside the company, rather than outsourcing it to consultants.

Why organisations work with Joe Toscano He left Google over the data practices he saw inside it, then wrote the book on what those practices look like from within. That insider account is hard to replicate at the keynote level. His work translates AI and privacy debates into specific operating decisions: what data to keep, what to delete, what to disclose, and where consent breaks under regulatory scrutiny. As founder of DataGrade and BEACON, he speaks from the position of someone running a privacy-first business, not commenting on one from outside. His public visibility through The Social Dilemma, Fox News, and Forbes means he can hold a non-technical audience on a technical subject without dropping the substance. Biography highlights Featured expert in Netflix’s The Social Dilemma. Author of Automating Humanity (powerHouse Books / Simon & Schuster). Founder and CEO of DataGrade. Founder of the Better Ethics and Consumer Outcomes Network (BEACON). Former Experience Design consultant for Google. TEDx speaker; Forbes contributor; recurring Fox News technology commentator. Biography The companies setting the rules for how consumer data trains AI systems are also the companies whose products most depend on that data. That conflict sits at the centre of Joe Toscano’s work. He came out of Silicon Valley with a designer’s view of how those products are built, then turned that knowledge outward. Toscano was an Experience Design consultant for Google before stepping away in 2017 over what he saw of the industry’s data practices. Automating Humanity, his book with powerHouse Books, set out the argument in detail: how attention is engineered, how disinformation pays, and how automation is being trained on data the public never knowingly handed over. He went on to found DataGrade, a privacy-first data company, and BEACON, a network focused on technology literacy and ethical innovation. The Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma brought that work to a mass audience, and he has since become a regular technology commentator on Fox News and a contributor to Forbes. What makes him useful to boards is the combination of inside knowledge and operating responsibility. He is not theorising about AI governance from a lectern. He is building a company that has to make those decisions every day, and translating that into language a non-technical executive team can act on. Key speaking topics AI ethics and governance Data privacy and consumer trust The business case for privacy-first design Technology literacy for non-technical leaders The future of work under AI and automation Disinformation and platform accountability Regulation and the post-GDPR landscape Ideal for Boards and executive committees setting AI and data governance standards Chief Privacy Officers, CISOs, and Chief Data Officers CMOs and customer experience leaders weighing personalisation against privacy HR and transformation leads planning workforce change driven by AI Audience outcomes A clearer line between defensible and indefensible uses of customer data in AI systems Specific questions a board should be asking about model training data and consent A working view of how privacy can be a commercial advantage, not just a compliance cost Sharper judgement about what to believe and discount in vendor pitches on AI capability

Why organisations work with Alex Wood First-hand operator knowledge of social engineering, impersonation and mule-account networks, drawn from years inside the work rather than modelled from the outside. Active advisor to the Home Office, the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, the Cabinet Office, the Financial Conduct Authority and UK police forces, so the material reflects current regulatory and policing priorities. Consults for Tier 1 banks including NatWest and risk firms including Experian on the fraud mindset and social engineering, giving risk, compliance and customer-protection teams a structured view of how scams are designed. Co-presenter of BBC Radio 4’s Scam Secrets with Shari Vahl and Dr Elisabeth Carter, a weekly national broadcast that keeps his case base current rather than historical. Biography highlights Co-presenter, BBC Radio 4 Scam Secrets, alongside journalist Shari Vahl and criminologist Dr Elisabeth Carter Advises the Home Office, the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, the Cabinet Office, the Financial Conduct Authority and UK police forces on fraud mindset and social engineering Consults for Tier 1 banks including NatWest and risk firms including Experian Author of the forthcoming memoir Facing the Music: From Her Majesty’s Palaces to Her Majesty’s Prisons, represented by Andrew Lownie Literary Agency Trained classical violinist, Purcell School, Royal Academy of Music and Royal College of Music; early performances at the Royal Festival Hall, Royal Opera House and Wigmore Hall Named speaker at Counter Fraud 2023 and UK Cyber Week 2024 Biography Most fraud controls assume the attacker is a technical problem. The last decade of evidence says the attacker is a psychologist with a laptop. What banks, insurers and regulators rarely get in the room is the working logic of the person on the other side of the transaction, and that is what Alex Wood brings. Wood trained as a concert violinist at the Purcell School, Royal Academy of Music and Royal College of Music, and performed at the Royal Festival Hall, Royal Opera House and Wigmore Hall. A repetitive strain injury ended the career in his early twenties. What followed was a decade of fraud, including a 2015 conviction for impersonating the Duke of Marlborough across London hotels and a later sentence tied to banking fraud. He was released from prison in 2022. Since then he has become a working advisor to the Home Office, the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, the Cabinet Office, the Financial Conduct Authority, UK police forces and Tier 1 banks including NatWest. His focus is the mule-account economy and the social engineering playbooks that defeat otherwise strong controls. He co-presents the BBC Radio 4 series Scam Secrets with Shari Vahl and Dr Elisabeth Carter, dissecting live cases with forensic detail. His memoir, Facing the Music: From Her Majesty’s Palaces to Her Majesty’s Prisons, is represented by Andrew Lownie Literary Agency, and a documentary on his story is in production with Mindhouse Productions, the company founded by Louis Theroux. For a risk committee briefing, what Wood delivers is specific: how a criminal chooses a target, how a customer is moved into a mule role, and where in a bank’s own process the decisive second of hesitation was lost. Key speaking topics The fraud mindset and how sophisticated scams are designed Social engineering and impersonation at scale Mule accounts and the retail-banking fraud perimeter AI-enabled fraud and the near-term threat surface Informal value-transfer systems and underworld banking (Hawala, Daigou) Counter-fraud culture inside large financial institutions Ideal for Heads of financial crime, fraud and compliance at banks, insurers and law firms Risk and customer-protection teams rebuilding fraud prevention programmes Internal audit, AML and onboarding functions facing mule-account and impersonation pressure Counter-fraud conferences, regulator-facing events and financial services leadership summits Audience outcomes A working view of how fraud is designed from the offender side, not the detection side Specific frames for spotting social-engineering and impersonation pressure earlier in the transaction path A read on where AI-enabled fraud and underworld banking are pushing the near-term threat surface A speaker whose BBC Radio 4 co-presenter role keeps the material current with national-level fraud reporting

Why organisations work with Gary Foote He is a current F1 Chief Information Officer, now at GM Performance Power Units, building the technology function for the Cadillac F1 power unit programme from the ground up. He ran the IT and digital operation at Haas F1 for a decade, taking the team from a start-up entry in 2016 to a competitive, data-driven constructor with global infrastructure. His remit at Haas covered IT, digital, facilities, operations, ESG and business continuity, which gives boards a realistic view of how sustainability and technology intersect inside a performance business. He has been named in the UK CIO 100 for five consecutive years and is a Fellow of the British Computer Society, so the credibility holds up in a room of sitting CIOs. His track record spans Cosworth, Honda Racing F1, Brawn GP and Mercedes Grand Prix, covering six motorsport world championships, which lets him speak to high-performance culture without leaning on abstract frameworks. Biography highlights Chief Information Officer, GM Performance Power Units, the General Motors and TWG Global company delivering the Cadillac F1 power unit. Former CIO and Director of Sustainability at MoneyGram Haas F1 Team, a role held for approximately ten years. Earlier senior technology roles at Mercedes Grand Prix, Brawn GP, Honda Racing F1 and Cosworth Technology. Fellow of the British Computer Society. Named in the UK CIO 100 five years running, 2021 to 2025. Trustee at Tove Learning Trust and active advocate for STEM education. Biography Haas F1 arrived on the grid in 2016 with two cars, a lean headcount and a blank technology estate. Gary Foote built the IT and digital backbone that made that entry possible, then spent a decade scaling it into the stack of a competitive constructor. His brief at Haas eventually covered IT, digital, facilities, ESG and business continuity, which is a wider surface than most corporate CIO roles carry. That is the frame he brings to boards: technology strategy shaped by the realities of logistics, carbon reporting, risk and culture inside one business. Today he is CIO at GM Performance Power Units, the General Motors and TWG Global company set up to build the Cadillac F1 power unit. He is doing again what most CIOs never get the chance to do once, which is stand up an elite-sport technology function from a clean sheet while the competitive clock is already running. The credentials back the story. He is a Fellow of the British Computer Society and has been listed in the UK CIO 100 five years in a row. He writes and speaks in named industry outlets including Computer Weekly, Infosecurity Magazine and Celonis, and he sits on the board of Tove Learning Trust. Key speaking topics Technology leadership in high-performance sport Artificial intelligence and data strategy in Formula 1 Cybersecurity in time-critical operations Digital transformation inside elite teams Sustainability and ESG in motorsport Scaling an IT function from start-up to championship contender High-performance culture and cross-functional operations Ideal for CIO, CTO and CDO audiences looking at AI, data and infrastructure investment decisions Boards and executive teams benchmarking their operating model against high-tempo performance businesses Sustainability and ESG leaders in industrial and logistics-heavy sectors Audience outcomes A working picture of how a Formula 1 team uses data, AI and cloud infrastructure to compete race by race. A sharper view of how technology, facilities and ESG sit inside one leadership remit rather than separate silos. Practical reference points for scaling an IT function quickly without accruing legacy risk. A candid read on cybersecurity and business continuity in an environment where downtime is visible to the world.

Why organisations work with James Barrat Twelve years of sustained, on-record argument about AI risk, beginning with Our Final Invention in 2013 and updated in The Intelligence Explosion in 2025. Few speakers can show that length of intellectual track record on the same question. Direct interview access to the people building frontier AI, used as primary source material rather than secondary commentary. Boards get a view from inside the labs, filtered through someone outside them. A documentarian’s craft for making technical material legible without diluting it. His PBS NOVA and National Geographic films were built for non-specialist audiences who still needed to understand the substance. Independent voice. Barrat is not selling a model, a consultancy methodology or a vendor stack. The argument is unencumbered by commercial alignment with any AI provider. Named by Time in 2014 as one of five serious thinkers on AI catastrophic risk, alongside figures including Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking. The framing has aged into mainstream policy debate. Biography highlights Author of Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era (St. Martin’s Press, 2013), named a Huffington Post Definitive Tech Book of 2013. Author of The Intelligence Explosion: When AI Beats Humans at Everything (St. Martin’s Press, 2025), endorsed by Max Tegmark and Gary Marcus. Named by Time magazine as one of “5 Very Smart People Who Think Artificial Intelligence Could Bring the Apocalypse.” Award-winning documentary filmmaker for National Geographic, PBS NOVA, BBC, Discovery Channel and History Channel; credits include The Gospel of Judas, Herod’s Lost Tomb, Extreme Cave Diving, Spillover: Zika, Ebola and Beyond and Facing Suicide. Featured commentator on AI for CNN, BBC World Service and the 2018 feature documentary Do You Trust This Computer? B.A. in philosophy, Davidson College. Biography The people closest to frontier AI systems are the most candid about not understanding them. That admission, repeated by senior researchers at the leading labs, sits uncomfortably alongside the pace at which boards are being asked to commit to AI strategies, hiring plans and disclosures. James Barrat has spent over a decade interviewing those researchers and translating what they say into language that non-specialists can act on. His 2013 book Our Final Invention was among the first serious mainstream works to argue that artificial general intelligence carried catastrophic as well as commercial implications. The argument was once treated as fringe. It is now the working assumption inside policy debates in Washington, London and Brussels. Time named him in 2014 as one of five public thinkers warning seriously about AI risk. Elon Musk recommended the book publicly. The 2025 sequel, The Intelligence Explosion: When AI Beats Humans at Everything, draws on fresh interviews with the engineers and ethicists working on recursively self-improving systems. Max Tegmark and Gary Marcus have endorsed it. The book lays out the technical pathways to AGI and the governance gaps that accompany them, written for citizens and policymakers rather than for the labs themselves. Underneath the AI work sits a long career as a documentary filmmaker for National Geographic, PBS NOVA, BBC, Discovery Channel and History Channel, with credits including The Gospel of Judas, Herod’s Lost Tomb and the PBS feature Facing Suicide. That craft is what allows him to take a board through capability overhang, alignment risk and regulatory exposure in a sitting, without losing the room. Key speaking topics Autonomous AI cyberattacks and the security and regulatory response Artificial intelligence risk and governance The path to artificial general intelligence AI policy and regulation AI ethics and corporate responsibility The capability and alignment problem in frontier models AI and the future of human work Ideal for Boards and executive committees commissioning or approving enterprise AI strategy Chief risk officers, general counsel and policy leads with AI oversight responsibility Government, regulatory and public-sector audiences shaping AI policy Investor and asset-allocator audiences with concentrated AI exposure Audience outcomes A working mental model of how today’s frontier AI systems behave and where the next capability jumps are likely to come from. A sharper view of the specific governance, legal and reputational exposures AI creates for the organisation. Direct exposure to what the people building these systems actually say in private about risk. A clearer reading of the regulatory direction of travel in the US, UK and EU. Confidence to ask harder questions of internal AI teams and external vendors.

Why organisations work with Seyi Akiwowo She built Glitch from a personal campaign in 2017 into a working UK charity on online gender-based violence, which gives her a different register from consultants who study the issue from outside. Her Penguin Life book How to Stay Safe Online is one of the few mainstream titles that treats online harm as a serious workplace and leadership concern, not a parenting issue, and gives executive audiences a reference text. She served as an elected councillor in Newham at 23 and addressed the 38th session of the UN Human Rights Council, which means she is comfortable in regulated, scrutinised, formal rooms, not just activist spaces. She has held trust and safety advisory roles with major platforms including TikTok, which gives her direct read on how the largest platforms handle abuse, moderation, and policy. She declined an MBE publicly in 2022. That decision and the way she framed it gives her unusual credibility with audiences who are sceptical of inclusion as institutional theatre. Biography highlights Founder of Glitch, the UK charity addressing online abuse and online gender-based violence, established out of the 2017 #FixTheGlitch campaign. Author, How to Stay Safe Online, Penguin Life, 2022. Elected councillor for Newham, East London, at the age of 23, the youngest Black woman councillor in the UK at the time. Speaker at the 38th session of the UN Human Rights Council on online gender-based violence; Amnesty International Human Rights Defender (2018). Digital Leader of the Year (2019); Marie Claire Future Shaper (2019); WIRED Changemaker cover (2021); TEDxLondon speaker (2019). Trust and safety advisory roles with platforms including TikTok; bachelor’s degree in social policy, London School of Economics. Biography In 2017, a recording of a speech delivered at the European Parliament went viral. The reaction was a flood of racist and misogynistic abuse, more than seventy reports filed with the platforms, and almost no response from them. The campaign that emerged from that experience, #FixTheGlitch, became the charity Glitch. Glitch is now a recognised voice on online abuse and online gender-based violence in the UK. It works with women, marginalised communities, parliamentarians, and platforms, and its evidence has been part of the policy conversation around the UK Online Safety Act. The work is operational, not theoretical: training, casework, lobbying, partnerships with platforms including TikTok where Akiwowo has held trust and safety advisory roles. Her credibility predates Glitch. At 23 she was elected a Labour councillor for Newham, the youngest Black woman councillor in the UK. She holds a bachelor’s degree in social policy from the London School of Economics. She has addressed the 38th session of the UN Human Rights Council on online gender-based violence and was named an Amnesty International Human Rights Defender in 2018. Penguin Life published How to Stay Safe Online in 2022. It is the rare mainstream book that treats online harm as a serious leadership and workplace concern. In the same year she was offered an MBE and chose not to accept it, a decision she explained publicly. For corporate audiences thinking about inclusion, employee safety, and values-based leadership, that combination, an elected politician’s record, an operating charity, a Penguin book, and a refused honour, is the substance she brings into the room. Key speaking topics Online safety as a workplace duty of care Online gender-based violence and digital harm Values-based and inclusive leadership Digital self-care and resilience for senior leaders Platform accountability and trust and safety Inclusion in a contested political climate Ideal for CHROs, Chief People Officers and Heads of DEI rebuilding the inclusion case for sceptical executive audiences Heads of internal communications, employee experience, and risk responsible for staff wellbeing in public-facing roles Trust and safety, policy, and product leaders inside platforms and regulated technology businesses Senior women’s networks, employee resource groups, and leadership development programmes Audience outcomes A working definition of online harm as a workplace and leadership issue, not a personal coping problem A direct read on how platforms actually respond to abuse, drawn from advisory work with companies including TikTok Practical content from the Penguin Life book How to Stay Safe Online that audiences can use the next day A confident position on inclusion and values-based leadership that holds up in the current political climate A senior voice that has chosen difficult institutional decisions, including declining an MBE, and can speak credibly about leadership under public scrutiny

Why organisations work with Carl Miller He coined the term SOCMINT (social media intelligence) in 2012 with David Omand and Jamie Bartlett, which means a room gets the person who defined the field of online influence analysis, not someone summarising it second-hand. His method is first-person and investigative. He has been on cyber-crime raids and spent five years tracing a dark-web murder-for-hire marketplace, so his account of how digital threats actually operate comes from inside them, not from a slide of statistics. He connects technology to power in terms a board can act on, explaining how a tweet moves a stock, how bots reach an electorate, and how disinformation lands on a brand before the communications team sees it coming. He has led more than forty research projects on extremism, electoral interference, and cyber-crime, giving him a span across the threats most organisations encounter only one at a time. Biography highlights Co-founder and Research Director, Centre for the Analysis of Social Media (CASM) at Demos, the first UK think tank institute dedicated to the digital world. Coined “social media intelligence” (SOCMINT) in 2012 with David Omand and Jamie Bartlett. Author of The Death of the Gods: The New Global Power Grab (Penguin Random House, 2018), joint winner of the 2019 Transmission Prize. Host of Kill List (Wondery/Novel), The Guardian’s best podcast of 2024 and Broadcast Press Guild Podcast of the Year 2025, reaching #1 in seven countries. Visiting Fellow, Department of War Studies, King’s College London; founder of CASM Technology. Contributor to The Economist, Wired, the Financial Times, The Sunday Times, and The Guardian; former presenter on the BBC’s Click. Biography More crime now happens online than offline, and most organisations are still structured to defend a perimeter that no longer exists. Carl Miller has spent over a decade documenting where control has actually moved. In 2012, working with David Omand and Jamie Bartlett, he coined the term social media intelligence, SOCMINT, and built the discipline that now sits behind how governments and companies read online influence. That work is grounded in an institution he helped create. He co-founded the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at Demos, the first UK think tank dedicated to the digital world, and has run more than forty research projects on extremism, electoral interference, radicalisation, and cyber-crime as its Research Director. What separates him from most technology commentators is that he goes to the places he writes about. His book The Death of the Gods: The New Global Power Grab traced power from a suburban cyber-crime raid to the engine rooms of Silicon Valley and won the 2019 Transmission Prize. The reporting is immersive, evidenced, and built from direct encounters with hackers, police units, and disinformation operators. His Kill List podcast came from a five-year investigation into a dark-web marketplace selling murder for hire, where he raced to warn targeted strangers while authorities hesitated. The series topped charts in seven countries and was named The Guardian’s best podcast of 2024. It is the clearest demonstration of his core argument: digital systems now hold real power over real lives, and the people who understand that power are rarely the ones in charge of it. Key speaking topics Disinformation and information warfare The transformation of power in the digital age Social media intelligence (SOCMINT) Digital crime and cyber-security Threats to democracy and elections Artificial intelligence and control The future of digital business risk Ideal for Boards and CEOs setting strategy under digital, reputational, and information risk CISOs and heads of security reframing cyber as a leadership issue, not a compliance one Communications, public affairs, and risk leaders facing disinformation and online influence Government, policy, and institutional audiences working on democracy, security, and tech governance Audience outcomes A clear map of where power has moved in the digital age and who now holds it A working grasp of how disinformation and online influence operations are built and deployed Front-line examples of how digital crime and cyber-threats actually function, drawn from direct investigation A sharper sense of which digital risks reach the balance sheet, and how early they become visible