Digital Transformation

Why organisations work with Shameen Prashantham Owns a defined intellectual territory, corporate-and-startup partnering, that almost no other senior strategy academic has built a 15-year body of fieldwork around. Wrote the practitioner book on the subject. Gorillas Can Dance (Wiley, 2021) sets out a tested framework of synergy, interface and exemplar drawn from work with Microsoft, SAP, Bayer, Bosch, BMW, Cisco, Ford, IBM, Intel, Unilever, Walmart and others. Brings genuinely first-hand China and emerging-market perspective to Western boards. Based at CEIBS in Shanghai, with active fieldwork across Bangalore, Lagos, Nairobi, Accra, Tel Aviv and Silicon Valley, he can discuss what Chinese firms actually do, not what Western analysts assume. Writes for the audience he speaks to. Recent contributions to Harvard Business Review, including a June 2024 piece on safe engagement with China, give a buyer confidence the keynote will land at board level rather than in academic register. As CEIBS Associate Dean (Africa) and former MBA Director, he is one of a small group of strategy academics with substantive operating insight into both China and Africa, the two markets large corporations most often handle badly. Biography highlights Professor of International Business and Strategy, China Europe International Business School (CEIBS), Shanghai. Associate Dean (Africa), CEIBS. Previously Associate Dean and MBA Director, 2020 to 2024. Author of Gorillas Can Dance: Lessons from Microsoft and Other Corporations on Partnering with Startups (Wiley, 2021). Author of Born Globals, Networks, and the Large Multinational Enterprise (Routledge). Research published in Journal of International Business Studies, Journal of Business Venturing, Journal of Management Studies, Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, and Organization Studies. Contributor to Harvard Business Review, Financial Times and the Brightline-Thinkers50 volume Strategy@Work. Biography Microsoft, SAP, Bayer, BMW, Walmart and Unilever have all built programmes to partner with startups. Few of those programmes work as designed. The reason is rarely strategy. It is the operating asymmetry between a $200 billion balance sheet and a 30-person company, and almost no one has studied that asymmetry as carefully or for as long as the author of Gorillas Can Dance. Based at CEIBS in Shanghai, Shameen Prashantham has spent more than fifteen years inside this question. His fieldwork runs across Silicon Valley, Bangalore, Tel Aviv, Beijing, Berlin, Lagos, Nairobi and Accra. The book sets out three pillars, synergy, interface and exemplar, that distinguish corporate partnership programmes that produce real innovation from those that produce press releases. His academic credibility is straightforward. PhD from the University of Strathclyde. Research in the Journal of International Business Studies, the Journal of Business Venturing, the Journal of Management Studies, Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, and Organization Studies. The work translates into Harvard Business Review, where his June 2024 piece on safe engagement with China ran in the print edition. What buyers tend to value most is the geography. He sits in Shanghai, runs CEIBS engagement in Africa, and has serious working knowledge of Indian and Israeli innovation ecosystems. For a Western board trying to decide whether and how to partner in or from emerging markets, that combination is rare and expensive to replicate. Key speaking topics Corporate-startup partnerships Innovation strategy in large corporations Doing business in and with China Emerging-market growth strategy Africa as a strategic market Corporate entrepreneurship Sustainable Development Goals partnerships Ideal for CEOs, chief strategy officers and chief innovation officers running corporate venturing or startup-engagement programmes. Boards reassessing China exposure or considering operating commitments in Africa or India. Heads of M&A, partnerships and corporate development designing the next phase of inorganic growth. Executive audiences inside multinationals where emerging-market strategy is on the agenda. Audience outcomes A clear test for whether an existing corporate-startup partnership programme is structurally set up to produce results. Three operating levers, synergy, interface and exemplar, to apply to live partnership decisions. A grounded read on what is actually happening inside Chinese firms and Chinese innovation, beyond Western commentary. A working frame for sequencing entry, partnership and growth decisions in emerging markets. Concrete examples drawn from named programmes at Microsoft, SAP, Bayer, Unilever, Walmart and others.

Why organisations work with Adrian Joseph He has run an AI and data function of roughly 1,600 people inside a FTSE 100 company, so his advice to boards reflects what it takes to deliver at that scale, not what a strategy deck suggests. He sits on the boards of Direct Line, Allwyn and Great Ormond Street Hospital, giving him a current view of how AI lands in insurance, gaming and healthcare rather than a single-sector perspective. As an Expert Member of the UK AI Council he contributed to the National AI Strategy, so he reads regulation and policy as someone who has been inside the room, not as an outside observer. He holds an OBE for services to equality and diversity in business and was named the UK’s most influential minority ethnic technology leader by the Financial Times and Inclusive Boards, which sharpens his credibility on the workforce side of AI transformation. His career path through Google, EY and BT gives audiences a rare triangulation: the hyperscaler view of what the technology can do, the consulting view of how to sell change internally, and the operator view of what actually breaks. Biography highlights Former Chief Data and AI Officer, BT Group, leading approximately 1,600 data and AI professionals. Former Senior Partner and Head of UK Data and Analytics for Financial Services at EY. Over ten years in senior leadership roles at Google across cloud, digital and data science. Non-Executive Director at Direct Line Insurance Group, Allwyn UK and Great Ormond Street Hospital NHS Foundation Trust. Expert Member of the UK Government’s AI Council and former Non-Executive Director at the Home Office. OBE for services to equality and diversity in business; named the UK’s most influential BAME technology leader by the Financial Times and Inclusive Boards. Biography Running an AI and data function of 1,600 people inside BT Group taught Adrian Joseph OBE what most board conversations about AI miss. The commercial case is not won in the model. It is won in the operating model, the talent pipeline and the patience of the leadership team to let value compound. That operator’s view is what he brings into the room. Before BT, he spent over a decade at Google in senior cloud, digital and data science roles, then led the UK Data and Analytics practice for Financial Services at EY as a Senior Partner. The path gives him three lenses on the same problem. Hyperscalers built the infrastructure. Consultancies sold the transformation story. Incumbents have to actually run the thing in production under regulatory scrutiny. He currently holds non-executive director roles at Direct Line Insurance Group, Allwyn UK, the National Lottery operator, and Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children NHS Foundation Trust, and sits on the Technology Advisory Board at NatWest Group. As an Expert Member of the UK Government’s AI Council he contributed to the National AI Strategy, and served as a Non-Executive Director at the Home Office from 2015 to 2020. He was awarded an OBE in the 2019 New Year’s Honours for services to equality and diversity in business, and the Financial Times and Inclusive Boards named him the UK’s most influential Black, Asian and ethnic minority technology leader. That recognition is not decoration on the CV. It sharpens his argument that the AI advantage large organisations seek is inseparable from who they let build and govern the systems. Key speaking topics Enterprise AI strategy and commercial return Responsible AI and governance Data and AI operating models at scale Digital and cloud transformation in regulated industries AI policy and the National AI Strategy Diversity and inclusion in technology leadership Board-level oversight of AI risk Ideal for CEOs, CFOs and boards under pressure to show commercial return from AI and data spend Chief Data Officers, CIOs and CTOs building or restructuring AI and data functions Financial services, insurance, healthcare and public sector leaders navigating AI in regulated environments CHROs and transformation leads addressing the talent and inclusion dimension of AI adoption Audience outcomes A sharper line between AI activity that produces commercial return and AI activity that produces slides A realistic view of what an AI and data operating model looks like at enterprise scale, from someone who ran one Current reading of UK AI policy and regulation from inside the AI Council and National AI Strategy work Practical signals for boards on where to probe AI risk, governance and delivery maturity Language for connecting AI capability to workforce, talent and inclusion strategy

Why organisations work with Jennifer Vessels The P.E.A.C.E. Framework gives transformation a structured language and methodology: not abstract change theory, but a tested roadmap built from live engagements inside organisations including Adobe, Cisco, and Novartis She brings Silicon Valley operational experience applied globally, having led transformation programmes across EMEA and Asia, she translates insider knowledge of how the world’s most innovation-intensive organisations actually work into practical approaches for complex, multinational businesses She is an active CEO running transformation programmes concurrently with her speaking engagements, meaning her insights reflect current deployments, not retrospective case studies Her work on generational integration: aligning Gen Z talent, AI capability, and experienced human capital, addresses a workforce tension that most change and transformation speakers do not tackle with equivalent specificity Through the Executive Growth Alliance (EGA), she connects audiences to a live community of F100 leaders navigating the same challenges, giving organisations access to a peer learning network beyond the event itself Biography highlights CEO of Next Step, Silicon Valley consulting firm leading business transformation for global enterprises since 2006 Founder, Executive Growth Alliance: a global peer community of Fortune 100 leaders focused on future-of-work and AI adoption Creator of the P.E.A.C.E. Framework (Purpose, Exploration, Action, Collaboration, Empowerment), deployed across organisations including Adobe, Cisco, Google, IKEA, Microsoft, Novartis, and Schneider Electric Awarded «Best Technology Speaker ’24» (IOFM, Diversified Communications) Author of «No Clue, No Fear: Navigating Storms of Change» and «How Leaders are REALLY Winning with Technology» Featured by EFMD, the World Economic Forum, the Institute of Directors, the San Jose Mercury News, and The New York Times MBA, San Jose State University; MS Occupational Psychology, University of London Early career: international business development at Tandberg (acquired by Cisco); Director of Global Sales Operations at Tandem Computers Biography Leadership thinking built for the Industrial Age is not built for what organisations are experiencing now. Most change programmes assume that if the strategy is sound and the technology is right, transformation will follow. It does not. The missing variable is almost always how leaders are thinking, and what they are willing to let go of. Jennifer Vessels has spent two decades inside that gap, working as CEO of Next Step across Silicon Valley, EMEA, and Asia. Her client list includes Adobe, Cisco, Google, IKEA, Microsoft, Novartis, and Schneider Electric: organisations navigating business model change, AI adoption, and leadership redesign at scale. From that operational experience, she developed the P.E.A.C.E. Framework: a structured methodology giving leaders a repeatable roadmap through disruptive change rather than a case for why change is necessary. What distinguishes her position is its currency. She is not drawing on past engagements. As an active CEO running transformation programmes alongside her speaking work, the examples she brings to audiences reflect live challenges rather than archived successes. She also founded the Executive Growth Alliance, a community of F100 leaders using collaborative challenge-resolution as a vehicle for building future-readiness collectively. Her forthcoming book, «Emergence: How Leaders Break Free from Outdated Thinking,» extends her framework into a broader argument about the leadership models that are no longer fit for purpose, and what replaces them. Key speaking topics AI Adoption and Human-Centred Integration Change Leadership and Organisational Transformation Future of Work and Generational Integration P.E.A.C.E. Approach for Leading Through Change Silicon Valley Innovation Applied to Global Business Business Model Redesign in an AI Era Ideal for CEOs and senior leadership teams navigating business model transformation or AI adoption programmes CHROs and people leaders managing generational integration, workforce redesign, and future-of-work strategy Transformation leads and change management functions inside large multinational organisations Leadership conference audiences where the appetite is for operational credibility over academic theory Audience outcomes A structured framework (P.E.A.C.E.) that gives teams shared language and a repeatable approach to leading through uncertainty Clearer understanding of why AI adoption and transformation programmes stall at the leadership level – and specific approaches to address it Practical tools for integrating generational diversity: particularly Gen Z talent alongside experienced human capital and AI capability A more precise view of how Silicon Valley’s most transformation-intensive organisations actually drive change, applied to the audience’s own context Mindset shift from managing disruption defensively to positioning it as a source of competitive advantage

Why organisations work with Maria Santacaterina A published Wiley thesis (Adaptive Resilience) that gives boards a structured way to integrate AI and frontier technology without dismantling the human capability the enterprise still runs on. A formal AI ethics and risk role at ForHumanity, which means her view on governance is grounded in audit standards, not opinion. A humanities-and-international-relations frame that translates directly into how regulators, customers, and employees actually experience AI decisions, useful in rooms where the technology team cannot read the political weather. Recognised in Computer Weekly’s Most Influential Women in UK Tech longlist, with a profile across HBR-adjacent and AI research podcasts (MLST, Love & Philosophy) that signals credibility to technical audiences as well as commercial ones. Working language fluency in English, French, Italian, and Spanish, which matters for European boards running AI programmes across jurisdictions with diverging regulatory regimes. Biography highlights Author of Adaptive Resilience: How to Thrive in a Digital Era, Wiley, 2023. ForHumanity Fellow, Ethics and Risk, contributing to AI audit and governance standards. Founder and CEO of Santacaterina, a UK board advisory firm focused on strategic leadership and digital transformation. Named in Computer Weekly’s Most Influential Women in UK Tech longlist. Featured on Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST) and Love & Philosophy on the human-AI relationship. M.A. in International Relations, with prior study in modern languages, philosophy, and political sociology. Biography AI deployment has run ahead of AI governance. Boards have signed off on programmes whose failure modes, regulatory exposure, and human consequences they would struggle to articulate under questioning. Santacaterina’s argument starts there: technology is a means, the operating model is the constraint, and human judgement is the asset most easily eroded in the rush to automate. Her book Adaptive Resilience: How to Thrive in a Digital Era (Wiley, 2023) sets out how to integrate frontier technology into the enterprise without hollowing out the people, ethics, and oversight that make it defensible. The argument draws on her humanities training, an M.A. in International Relations, and twenty-five years advising senior leaders through digital transformation programmes. That position is reinforced institutionally. As a ForHumanity Fellow in Ethics and Risk, she works on the audit standards that AI systems are now being assessed against. As founder and CEO of Santacaterina, she advises boards on strategy, transformation, and the governance posture that follows. Computer Weekly has named her among the most influential women in UK tech. What she brings into a room is the connection most AI conversations miss: between the technical decision, the governance frame, and the human cost of getting either wrong. She has been a featured voice on Machine Learning Street Talk, where the audience is technical, and on board-facing platforms, where it is not. The same argument holds in both rooms. Key speaking topics AI strategy, ethics, and board oversight Adaptive resilience in the digital enterprise Human-AI complementarity and the future of work Responsible innovation and AI governance frameworks Digital transformation and operating-model redesign Sustainable value creation in a frontier-technology era Ideal for Boards and audit committees commissioning AI governance and assurance CEOs and CTOs moving AI from pilot to operational deployment CHROs and transformation leads redesigning the workforce around AI capability Risk, ethics, and compliance leaders building defensible AI policy Audience outcomes A board-level vocabulary for governing AI decisions that stand up to regulatory and stakeholder scrutiny A clearer view of where human judgement remains the binding constraint on AI deployment, and where it does not Specific reference points from Adaptive Resilience for stress-testing the organisation’s digital strategy A grounded sense of how European AI regulation and ethics standards translate into operating choices

Why organisations work with Dror Gill Coaches leadership teams through the practical decisions of generative AI adoption: tool selection across ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, and Claude, prompt design, hallucination control, and workflow redesign for real business processes. Brings engineering credibility most generative AI speakers cannot match: 37 granted patents, a 2021 Technology and Engineering Emmy for perceptual video encoding at Beamr, and three decades inside companies shipping production technology. Runs hands-on workshops, not lecture sets. Executives leave with prompts, chatbots, and analyses they built themselves during the session. Demonstrates what is possible at the frontier with live builds, including a signature session in which he creates a startup from scratch using ChatGPT alone, covering ideation, business model, investor deck, and go-to-market. Updates his material continuously. The pace of model and tooling change makes most static keynote decks stale within months; he rebuilds against the current state of the field. Biography highlights 2021 Technology and Engineering Emmy Award (National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences) for content-adaptive video encoding at Beamr. Co-inventor on 37 granted patents in video and image processing. First employee and long-serving CTO, VP Product, and VP Marketing at Beamr (NASDAQ: BMR). IBM Research Lab in the mid-1990s, pioneering media streaming and voice-over-IP, including collaboration with Sun Microsystems on the Java Media Framework. Founder of Gamdala, a generative AI consultancy advising executives on adoption, prompt engineering, and workflow integration. B.Sc. Electrical Engineering, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. Speaking engagements at DLD Munich, AI Global Summit Italy, IBM, Samsung, Microsoft for Startups, and Amdocs. Biography The current generative AI conversation inside most companies sits between two failure modes. Either the technology is treated as a productivity gimmick to be tolerated, or it is over-promised as a strategy in itself. Neither produces operating advantage. The work of turning general-purpose models into specific, repeatable improvements in how a business actually functions sits in between. That work needs someone fluent in both the underlying technology and the practical question of what executives can do on Monday. Dror Gill is that profile. He spent three decades inside companies shipping production technology, most recently as the long-serving CTO of Beamr (NASDAQ: BMR), where he led the development of the perceptual video encoding technology that won the 2021 Technology and Engineering Emmy. He is a co-inventor on 37 granted patents. Earlier, he was at IBM Research in the mid-1990s pioneering streaming over IP and voice-over-IP, and at Emblaze Semiconductor chairing the Wireless Multimedia Forum. Today he runs Gamdala, a generative AI consultancy. The shift is consistent: he is again working at the frontier of a general-purpose technology, only now the audience is executives rather than engineers. His sessions are workshop-led. Participants leave having built prompts, chatbots, and analyses themselves. His signature live build creates a startup from scratch using ChatGPT alone, covering ideation, business model, investor deck, and go-to-market inside a single session. What makes his keynote work uncommon is the engineering pedigree behind the executive coaching. He has shipped the kind of technology he now teaches leaders to deploy. The Technion degree, the Emmy, and the patent record are not credentials worn for show. They are the reason the operating advice translates. Key speaking topics Generative AI adoption for executives Prompt engineering and hallucination control ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, and Claude in business workflows Generative AI for product, marketing, and operations AI in education and corporate learning Live demonstrations of generative AI for business creation Workflow redesign around large language models Ideal for CEOs, COOs, and executive committees seeking to move generative AI from pilots to operating use. CHROs and learning and development leaders designing AI fluency programmes for senior managers. Product and engineering leadership teams evaluating where to embed generative AI in customer-facing and internal workflows. Founders, investors, and innovation teams who want a working understanding of the current state of the tools, not last year’s. Audience outcomes A clearer view of which generative AI tools fit which business problems, and where each one breaks. Practical prompt patterns participants use in their own work the same week. A working sense of how to control hallucination, including chain-of-thought prompting and verification techniques. Awareness of what is now possible end-to-end with generative AI, demonstrated live rather than described in slides. Confidence to lead an organisational conversation on generative AI adoption without needing a translator.

Why organisations work with Limor Ziv She closes the gap between AI governance theory and AI commercial performance, with named client work at Google, KPMG, Bright Data, SolarEdge, and Medison Pharma. Humane AI was selected by Meta among 2025’s most promising AI startups; she sits on the Scientific Council of the Israeli Association for Ethics in AI. Her peer-reviewed research with 74 senior AI and data professionals (MDPI, 2025) gives boards a working diagnostic for the breakdowns that destroy AI value, from data and governance to context and business alignment. She works the practitioner seam between academic credibility and commercial deployment, the same person teaches the lecture and runs the workshop afterwards. Operator credibility on the women-in-AI question, with public roles in Israel’s data and ethics communities, without converting that into a separate keynote category. Biography highlights Founder and CEO, Humane AI, selected by Meta among 2025’s most promising AI startups. Postdoctoral fellowship in Human-AI Interaction; Ph.D., Tel Aviv University, where she was named to the “100 Outstanding Lecturers” list. Co-author, “Behind the Algorithm: International Insights into Data-Driven AI Model Development” (MDPI, 2025), based on interviews with 74 senior AI and data professionals. Scientific Council member, Israeli Association for Ethics in AI (IAEAI). Named keynote and consulting work for Google, KPMG, Bright Data, SolarEdge, Medison Pharma, government ministries, and municipalities including Tel Aviv. Biography AI investments are returning less than executive committees expected, and regulatory scrutiny is rising in parallel. The two pressures meet at the same operational layer, where most AI deployments quietly fail. Dr. Limor Ziv built Humane AI to work at that seam. The company was selected by Meta among 2025’s most promising AI startups. In a keynote, she takes apart the hidden risks built into everyday algorithms and gives senior audiences practical ways to govern AI systems and to lower the exposure they create. She works with organisations to capture the upside of AI and avoid the failure modes that come with deploying it. The research underwrites the consulting. Her 2025 paper with Maayan Nakash in MDPI’s Machine Learning and Knowledge Extraction draws on interviews with 74 senior AI and data professionals across countries and sectors. The recurring breakdowns it surfaces are the same ones that destroy commercial performance: weak data quality, missing context, governance gaps, and business misalignment. Her client base spans government ministries and municipalities, universities, and technology companies, including Google, KPMG, Bright Data, SolarEdge, and Medison Pharma. She lectures in graduate programmes at universities and was named to Tel Aviv University’s list of 100 Outstanding Lecturers. The brief is consistent across them: make AI deployments that earn their investment and hold up when someone audits the decisions. Key speaking topics Responsible AI and AI ethics AI risk management and compliance AI governance and regulatory readiness Data quality and data-centric AI Human-AI interaction and human-centred design Realising value from AI investment AI in regulated sectors, including healthcare and finance Operationalising responsible AI in the enterprise Ideal for Boards and executive committees accountable for both the return on AI investment and the defensibility of the AI systems they sign off. Chief AI officers, chief data officers, and CISOs operationalising responsible AI policy while showing it earns its cost. Regulated-industry leadership in healthcare, financial services, and public sector wrestling with AI deployment under compliance pressure. Heads of AI, innovation, and transformation under pressure to show a return on AI spend without creating regulatory exposure. Audience outcomes A working definition of AI risk that distinguishes data risk, model risk, and decision risk, and a sense of where each lives in the organisation. A view of what AI deployment actually demands of operating teams, drawn from her empirical research with 74 senior practitioners across countries and sectors. A grounded read on the live regulatory and ethical debates, from a Scientific Council member of the Israeli Association for Ethics in AI. An honest read on the gap between what AI investments cost and what they return, and on the operating work that decides whether the gap closes.

Why organisations work with Hubertus Porschen He speaks to mid-market boards from inside the same world. As the elected federal chairman of Die Jungen Unternehmer from 2015 to 2018, he represented Germany’s young Mittelstand owners directly to policymakers and to ASU/Die Familienunternehmer. He has built and run digital businesses, not just advised on them. App-Arena and iConsultants give him a working vocabulary for what actually breaks when a traditional company tries to digitise a business model. His book Digitaler Suizid frames digital inertia as an existential risk to German firms, an argument that lands with audiences who have heard the optimistic version too often. He works in German and English with equal credibility, which matters for groups whose senior leadership sits across DACH and the wider European market. Biography highlights Federal Chairman, Die Jungen Unternehmer (BJU), 2015 to 2018, the young-entrepreneurs body within the ASU/Die Familienunternehmer association. Doctorate in economics, University of Marburg, with a dissertation on the academic entrepreneur. Author of Digitaler Suizid, on the digitalisation gap in the German economy. Founder and operator of multiple digital ventures including App-Arena GmbH; partner at iConsultants GmbH. Lecturer at Niederrhein University of Applied Sciences and the University of Cologne. Listed in Top 100 Speakers Excellence 2026 by Speakers Excellence. Biography The German Mittelstand is one of the most successful industrial structures in Europe. It is also one of the slowest to absorb new technology. That tension defines the working subject matter of Hubertus Porschen. He spent three years, from 2015 to 2018, as federal chairman of Die Jungen Unternehmer, the young-entrepreneurs wing of the ASU/Die Familienunternehmer association. The role put him in regular contact with policymakers in Berlin and with several thousand owner-managers running mid-sized German firms. The work that followed, as a speaker and as a founder, builds directly on that constituency. His operating experience is the second pillar. App-Arena, an online marketplace for social media applications, and iConsultants, a digital advisory practice, gave him direct exposure to the gap between digital strategy decks and the messy reality of changing how a 150-person company actually works. His book Digitaler Suizid develops the argument: German firms that treat digitisation as a marketing project rather than an operating one are quietly removing themselves from their own future. Today his keynote work concentrates on artificial intelligence: specifically the question of how a board moves from “AI-interested” to “AI-ready” without paralysing the operating business in the process. He lectures at Niederrhein University of Applied Sciences and the University of Cologne, holds a doctorate from the University of Marburg, and is listed in Speakers Excellence’s Top 100 for 2026. Key speaking topics Artificial intelligence in mid-market operations Digital transformation in family-owned and Mittelstand businesses Entrepreneurship and founder leadership Innovation and disruption in traditional industries Change management across generational workforces Digital business model design Ideal for Boards and executive teams of family-owned and Mittelstand firms in DACH CEOs, COOs and digital leaders confronting an AI adoption gap Industry associations and chambers of commerce convening member firms Founder networks and entrepreneurship programmes in German-speaking markets Audience outcomes A clearer sense of where their organisation sits on the line between AI-interested and AI-ready A working argument for why digital inertia is a strategic, not operational, risk Specific examples of how German mid-market companies have moved digital initiatives out of pilot Vocabulary to talk to a sceptical board about AI without leaning on vendor language

Why organisations work with Ian Khan He gives executive teams a diagnostic rather than a forecast. The Future Readiness Score, built from his research across hundreds of organisations, turns “are we ready for AI” into a scored view across seven operating pillars. His writing carries commercial weight. Undisrupted won the Bronze Medal at the 2025 North American Book Awards and the Non-Fiction category at the Goody Business Book Awards 2025; Metaverse For Dummies is a Wiley title. He reports on the future as a working journalist, not only a consultant. As executive producer and host of The Futurist on Amazon Prime Video, he has interviewed hundreds of global leaders on the record, which keeps his keynote content closer to evidence than to speculation. He separates AI hype from AI advantage in front of technical and non-technical rooms. His AIRS assessment gives boards a common language for where they sit on vision, use cases, data, governance, and adoption. Biography highlights USA Today bestselling author of Undisrupted, which introduces the Future Readiness Score across seven organisational pillars. Author of Metaverse For Dummies, published by Wiley. Executive producer and host of The Futurist, a streaming series on Amazon Prime Video across more than 45 regions. Director of the documentary Blockchain City and producer of additional films on AI and the future of work. Thinkers50 Future Readiness Award finalist and Thinkers360 Distinguished honoree. Media contributor and on-record commentator featured by CNN and Forbes. Biography Most AI strategy conversations stall at the same point. The executive team agrees the technology matters. Nobody can agree on what to do on Monday. Khan’s contribution is a working answer to that problem, built from research across hundreds of organisations and codified in his book Undisrupted and the Future Readiness Score that sits inside it. The Score moves the question from opinion to diagnostic. It measures an organisation across seven pillars, including engagement, learning, collaboration, culture, innovation, and execution, and returns a prioritised picture of where readiness is thin. His AIRS framework does the equivalent for AI specifically, covering vision, use cases, data, governance, and adoption. Boards use both as a shared map before they approve the next investment. Khan works across the commercial and editorial sides of technology. He is the author of Metaverse For Dummies, published by Wiley, and of additional titles on prompt engineering and value creation. As executive producer and host of The Futurist on Amazon Prime Video, he has interviewed hundreds of founders, scientists, and policy leaders on the record. Commentary work with CNN and Forbes sits alongside that. His keynote practice reflects that dual background. Audiences get a filmmaker’s feel for narrative and a consultant’s insistence on instrumentation, applied to the decisions leadership teams are actually trying to make about AI, automation, and emerging technology. Key speaking topics Artificial intelligence and generative AI strategy Future readiness and organisational diagnostics Digital transformation and enterprise technology adoption Emerging technology and disruption AI governance and responsible deployment Leadership in an AI-driven operating environment Ideal for CEOs, CIOs, and CTOs sponsoring AI strategy across business units Boards and executive committees setting technology investment priorities Transformation and digital leaders responsible for moving pilots into production Government and public-sector leaders assessing AI readiness and governance Audience outcomes A shared vocabulary for assessing where the organisation actually stands on AI and digital readiness. A prioritised view of which technology bets are worth compounding and which to retire. Sharper criteria for AI governance decisions, from data to adoption. Concrete patterns drawn from hundreds of documented executive interviews, not abstract predictions.

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 Dr Ted James His concurrent roles – co-directing a Harvard Medical School executive programme and leading enterprise transformation across an 8-hospital health system – mean the frameworks he delivers are being tested in live operational conditions, not drawn from retrospective case studies. He holds a Master of Science in Healthcare Management from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health alongside a surgical oncology career, which means he translates between clinical and executive registers without simplifying either. His advisory work with biotech and medical device companies, including a fractional CMO role at Perimeter Medical Imaging AI guiding FDA strategy for AI-enabled surgical technology, gives him a vendor-facing perspective that most health system speakers cannot offer. He built an NIH-funded research portfolio while simultaneously holding senior clinical governance roles at a Harvard-affiliated academic medical centre. His Harvard Global Health Care Leaders Program draws participants from more than 200 countries, which means his analysis of healthcare leadership is genuinely comparative rather than US-centric. Biography highlights System Physician Executive, Endeavor Health Cancer Institute, leading clinical strategy and care transformation across an 8-hospital integrated health system Co-Director, Global Health Care Leaders Program, Harvard Medical School Executive Education which draws participants from more than 200 countries Faculty, Harvard Medical School; former Associate Professor of Surgery Former Chief of Breast Surgical Oncology, Vice Chair of Academic Affairs in Surgery, and Medical Director of the Breast Center, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center Fractional Chief Medical Officer, Perimeter Medical Imaging AI, guiding medical and regulatory strategy for AI-enabled breast cancer surgery technology Master of Science in Healthcare Management, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health Co-author, The OAS CAHPS Compendium: A Guidebook for Improving Patient Experience and Outcomes Across the Ambulatory Surgery Continuum Biography Ted James spent the first part of his executive career doing something most physician leaders are never asked to do at the same time: running a nationally accredited multidisciplinary breast programme, leading academic affairs for a surgery department, and building an NIH-funded research portfolio – all within a Harvard-affiliated academic health system. That compression of roles at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center is the biographical fact most relevant to why health organisations bring him in. He has worked the intersection of clinical governance, academic leadership, and service-line management from the inside. He is now System Physician Executive for the Endeavor Health Cancer Institute, responsible for clinical strategy and enterprise-wide care transformation across eight hospitals. Alongside that operational role, he co-directs the Global Health Care Leaders Program at Harvard Medical School: a flagship executive education programme with a global participant base spanning more than 200 countries. His Harvard-based work focuses on the mechanics of how healthcare leaders design care models, adopt digital health technology, and lead transformation in systems that resist it. His commercial advisory work adds a third register. As fractional Chief Medical Officer at Perimeter Medical Imaging AI, he is helping advance AI-enabled surgical imaging technology toward FDA approval; work that gives him first-hand knowledge of how healthcare technology moves from clinical concept to operational deployment. It is a vantage point most hospital executives simply do not have. His co-authored book, The OAS CAHPS Compendium, anchors the academic dimension of his work in something measurable: patient experience and outcomes in ambulatory surgery. The through-line across all three roles is the same question: how do you build organisations in which clinical excellence and operational performance reinforce each other rather than compete? Key speaking topics Healthcare transformation and system leadership Physician and clinical leadership development Organisational culture in complex health systems Digital health strategy and technology adoption Cancer care innovation and oncology strategy Patient experience and quality improvement Clinician resilience and workforce performance Ideal for Hospital and health system CEOs, CMOs, and boards navigating transformation programmes Physician and clinical leaders developing executive capability Biotech, medical device, and digital health organisations seeking clinical strategic credibility Academic medical centre leadership teams managing the tension between research, education, and care delivery Audience outcomes A diagnostic framework for identifying where clinical culture is enabling or blocking organisational change Practical tools for developing physician leaders within complex, resource-constrained systems Clarity on evaluating and deploying digital health and AI-enabled technology against real clinical workflows An understanding of how academic, operational, and innovation goals can be aligned within a single leadership approach Approaches for addressing clinician burnout while maintaining performance standards

Why organisations work with Andrew Ng His AI Transformation Playbook – a named, five-step framework derived directly from building AI teams at Google and Baidu – gives organisations a structured implementation path, not principles. It is the difference between a direction and a plan. He has operated on both sides of the AI adoption challenge: as the person responsible for making two of the world’s largest technology companies into AI-first organisations, and as the founder of platforms that have trained more than 8 million people in AI skills. The failure modes at both ends are not theoretical to him. His “AI is the new electricity” thesis reframes AI as general-purpose infrastructure rather than a feature or a product – a distinction that changes how boards allocate capital and how leadership teams structure accountability. Named to Time’s inaugural Time100 AI list (2023) – recognising active, current influence in the field – and to Amazon’s board of directors. The former signals peer standing; the latter signals boardroom credibility. Through AI Aspire, developed in partnership with Bain & Company, he advises enterprises moving from AI experimentation to scalable transformation – giving organisations access to a perspective tested across venture building, hyperscale operations, and mass education. Biography highlights Co-founded Google Brain – the research team credited with reshaping Google’s approach to artificial intelligence VP and Chief Scientist at Baidu, leading a 1,300-person AI team responsible for the company’s global AI strategy Co-founder and Chairman of Coursera (NYSE: COUR), now serving 150 million+ registered learners globally Founder of DeepLearning.AI – over 8 million people have completed AI courses through his programmes Named to Time100 Most Influential People (2012), Fast Company’s Most Creative People (2014), and Time100 AI (2023) Member of Amazon’s board of directors (appointed April 2024) Author of the AI Transformation Playbook and Machine Learning Yearning, both in wide circulation Holds a BSc from Carnegie Mellon, MSc from MIT, and PhD from UC Berkeley; co-authored over 200 research papers Biography Most AI pilot projects never become AI companies. Andrew Ng has spent years examining why – first as the founding lead of Google Brain and then as VP and Chief Scientist at Baidu, where he built a 1,300-person AI team. The gap between isolated AI experimentation and enterprise-wide capability is the problem he has studied from the inside. His AI Transformation Playbook – drawn directly from that experience – sets out a five-step framework for taking AI adoption from initial momentum to company-wide infrastructure. It circulates widely because it treats AI transformation as an operational challenge, not a technology question. His thesis that AI is infrastructure the way electricity was infrastructure gives boards a strategic frame that holds across industries and business models. Ng co-founded Coursera, which now serves over 150 million registered learners, and founded DeepLearning.AI, through which more than 8 million people have trained in AI skills. Building AI literacy at that scale – and measuring what works – gives him a concrete, tested perspective on what workforce transformation in practice actually requires. Few speakers can point to comparable operational evidence. He holds degrees from Carnegie Mellon, MIT, and UC Berkeley, has co-authored over 200 research papers, and sits on Amazon’s board of directors. Named to Time’s inaugural Time100 AI list in 2023 – recognising current influence rather than historical contribution – he continues to co-found AI companies through AI Fund and advise enterprises on AI strategy through AI Aspire, a firm he built in partnership with Bain & Company. Key speaking topics Enterprise AI adoption and transformation AI strategy for boards and C-suite leaders Agentic AI and the next phase of AI systems AI workforce development and capability building Responsible AI development and regulation Machine learning fundamentals and applied AI The economics of AI as general-purpose infrastructure Ideal for C-suite executives and boards setting AI strategy and capital allocation Chief Technology Officers and Chief Digital Officers leading enterprise AI programmes CHROs and people leaders responsible for AI upskilling and workforce transformation Transformation leads and innovation teams moving from AI pilots to scaled deployment Audience outcomes A structured framework for diagnosing where enterprise AI adoption is stalling and what to do next Clarity on how to build internal AI capability – teams, workflows, and governance – rather than relying on isolated project-by-project approaches A board-level frame for AI as infrastructure, with implications for investment, talent, and competitive positioning Practical understanding of what large-scale AI workforce development requires, drawn from programmes that have trained millions A more grounded view of responsible AI development – distinguishing credible risk from speculative concern – from a practitioner who has argued these positions in public and in policy

Why organisations work with Richard Foster-Fletcher Brings a structured research practice, run through MKAI and Reality & Reason, that publishes instruments organisations can use to test the integrity of management information once AI is in the loop. Has examined AI’s effect on disclosure and decision processes through a study of 150 SEC 10-K filings across 50 US public companies, giving a quantitative spine to claims most AI keynotes leave at the anecdote. Advises across an unusually wide institutional surface: UK Parliament, the United Nations Environment Programme, governments including Tunisia, and Fortune 500 boards, so the perspective is not single-sector. Treats AI ethics as an operating problem for governance, audit, and the executive, rather than a values statement, which is the brief most boards now actually need. Holds standing as a Favikon UK Top 20 AI Researcher and Entrepreneur and a LinkedIn Top Voice in AI, both reflecting sustained public output rather than a one-off ranking. Biography highlights Founder and Executive Chair of MKAI.org, a global responsible-AI organisation established in 2019. Founder of Reality & Reason, publisher of the Management Information Integrity Addendum and the Residual Logic Scanner. Author of the weekly essay series “What Still Matters,” with a subscriber base of over 6,000 senior readers. Former AI and CX Director at Oracle; earlier career at the BBC. Member of the United Nations Environment Programme Resilience Frontiers Advisory Group. Lecturer at LSE, UCL, Oxford, Imperial College London, Cranfield, and Henley Business School. Named in the UK’s Top 20 AI Researchers and Entrepreneurs by Favikon; LinkedIn Top Voice in AI. Qualifications from MIT Sloan (Implications of AI for Business Strategy) and the University of Michigan (Data Science Ethics). Biography Most organisations now have generative AI inside their writing, analysis, and decision flows. Few have a clear view of what that is doing to the quality of the reasoning the board ultimately sees. That gap is the territory Foster-Fletcher works in. Through MKAI, the responsible-AI organisation he founded in 2019, and Reality & Reason, his editorial and research body, he publishes practical instruments for senior teams. The Management Information Integrity Addendum and the Residual Logic Scanner sit alongside a study of 150 SEC 10-K filings across 50 US public companies, looking at how AI-shaped language enters formal corporate disclosure. His advisory footprint covers UK Parliament, the United Nations Environment Programme Resilience Frontiers Advisory Group, governments including Tunisia, and Fortune 500 boards. He lectures at LSE, UCL, Oxford, Imperial College London, Cranfield, and Henley Business School, and earlier in his career held senior roles at Oracle and the BBC. The signature contribution is a framework on the structural dynamics of enterprise AI adoption, which sets out seven recurring patterns including private accumulation of capability, erosion of human capacity through routine offloading, and the narrowing of visible strategic alternatives under model-led framing. That framework is what senior buyers are usually responding to when they commission him. Key speaking topics Responsible AI governance for boards and executive teams AI strategy beyond pilots and proof-of-concept AI in management information, reporting, and disclosure The future of work in the age of generative AI AI ethics as an operating capability Decision-making and human judgement when models are in the loop Leadership in an AI-shaped organisation Ideal for Boards, audit committees, and CROs wrestling with AI as a governance and disclosure question CIOs, CDOs, and Chief AI Officers moving from experimentation to operating deployment CEOs and executive teams in regulated sectors where AI is entering decision processes Government and policy audiences responsible for AI regulation, public-sector adoption, or capability building Audience outcomes A working language for what AI is doing to the integrity of internal information and decision papers A clear map of recurring failure modes in enterprise AI adoption, drawn from the seven-pattern framework A defensible point of view on AI governance suitable for board, audit, and disclosure conversations Concrete next moves on where AI should and should not be in the reasoning chain A grounded sense of the future of judgement, expertise, and human capability inside AI-shaped organisations