Entrepreneurship speakers

Why organisations work with Neil Sahota He was an operator inside the IBM Watson Group when cognitive computing first met enterprise budgets, which gives him a deployment vocabulary most AI speakers lack. As co-founder of the UN’s AI for Good Initiative, he has helped scope and govern AI projects across the Sustainable Development Goals, giving boards a credible reference point on responsible deployment. His book “Own the A.I. Revolution,” named a Soundview Best Business Book of 2019 and published by McGraw Hill, sets out a buyer-side framework for AI investment that holds up in front of a commercial executive committee. He sits at the intersection of enterprise AI and capital allocation through Tech Coast Angels and advisory roles with Miramar and CerraCap, so he reads AI strategy through an investor lens as well as an engineer’s. As Chief Innovation Officer at UC Irvine’s Samueli School of Engineering, he keeps a continuous line into university research, which means his keynote content moves with the field, not behind it. Biography highlights IBM Master Inventor and former World Wide Business Development Leader, IBM Watson Group United Nations Artificial Intelligence Advisor and co-founder of the UN’s AI for Good Initiative Chief Innovation Officer, Samueli School of Engineering, UC Irvine Author of “Own the A.I. Revolution” (McGraw Hill), Soundview Best Business Book of 2019 Forbes contributor; featured in the Wall Street Journal, BBC, Wired, Fast Company and Business Insider CEO of ACSI Labs; member of Tech Coast Angels; advisor to Miramar Ventures and CerraCap Ventures Co-host of the “AI for All” podcast Biography Inside the IBM Watson Group, in the years between the Jeopardy! Grand Challenge and Watson’s first commercial healthcare deployments, a small group of business development leaders had to teach Fortune 500 buyers what cognitive computing was actually for. Neil Sahota was one of them. That experience, building enterprise AI cases when the category did not yet exist, is the foundation of everything he now offers a senior audience. He carried that operator perspective into the United Nations as an AI Advisor and co-founder of the AI for Good Initiative, where the work shifted from selling AI capability to governing it. The Initiative now coordinates AI projects against the Sustainable Development Goals, and Sahota’s role gives him a working view of how AI behaves at scale, across jurisdictions, and under public scrutiny. Few keynote speakers in the AI category hold both an enterprise deployment credential and a multilateral governance seat. His book “Own the A.I. Revolution,” published by McGraw Hill and named a Soundview Best Business Book of 2019, sets out an investment logic for AI that a commercial executive committee can actually use: where to play, how to assemble the team, how to evaluate vendors and partners. As Chief Innovation Officer at UC Irvine’s Samueli School of Engineering, and as a contributor to Forbes and a regular voice in the Wall Street Journal, BBC and Wired, he keeps that argument current as the technology and the regulatory perimeter both move. The buyer test is simple. A leadership team that wants a serious conversation about turning AI ambition into operating advantage, with someone who has built it, governed it, and written the framework, gets one in the room. Key speaking topics Enterprise AI strategy and deployment Responsible AI and governance Generative AI and the future of business AI for social impact and the UN Sustainable Development Goals Innovation, entrepreneurship and emerging technology The future of work in the age of AI Ideal for Boards and executive committees setting AI investment priorities CIOs, CTOs and Chief AI Officers moving from pilot to production Heads of innovation and corporate venture leads scoping AI partnerships Public sector and multilateral audiences working on AI governance and public-good applications Audience outcomes A clearer read on where AI investment produces commercial advantage and where it produces sunk cost A practical view of AI governance from someone who has helped shape it at the United Nations Specific reference cases drawn from IBM Watson-era enterprise deployments and current UN AI for Good projects A sharper internal language for AI strategy that a board, a finance committee and an engineering function can all use

Why organisations work with Neri Karra Sillaman Her eight-principle longevity framework in Pioneers (Wiley, 2025) is built on original academic research rather than case-study observation – it provides strategic leaders with a testable, applicable structure for long-term competitive positioning, not an anecdote collection. Pioneers was named Thinkers50 Best New Management Book of 2025 and a Financial Times Readers’ Choice – the two most credible independent signals in management thinking, giving buyers a defensible basis for the engagement beyond the speaker bureau description. She runs a manufacturing business with 25 years of partnerships with leading Italian fashion labels, recognised as both a B Corp and a Positive Luxury venture. The argument she makes about sustainable, values-driven longevity is one she has applied and revised under commercial pressure. Her Cambridge doctoral research used her own family business as a primary case study – an insider position on immigrant entrepreneurship that no other management scholar in this space holds, and which is the source of her most counterintuitive findings: that constraint, outsider perspective, and community cohesion function as durable competitive advantages. Her academic research has been published in the Journal of Business Venturing, Strategic Organization, and Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, while her practitioner work has appeared in Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, and the Financial Times – giving her credibility across board, executive, and academic settings. Biography highlights Professor of Practice and Entrepreneurship Expert at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford PhD from the University of Cambridge; doctoral research on born-global firms and immigrant entrepreneurship Author of Pioneers: 8 Principles of Business Longevity from Immigrant Entrepreneurs (Wiley, 2025) – Thinkers50 Best New Management Book of 2025, Financial Times Readers’ Choice, and Next Big Idea Club Must Read Named to the Thinkers50 Radar Class of 2024 and recipient of the Thinkers50 Radar Award 2025 Co-founder of Neri Karra, a luxury leather goods brand with 25+ years of manufacturing partnerships with leading Italian fashion labels, recognised as a B Corp and Positive Luxury venture Founder of Moda Métiers, a fashion and luxury business consultancy Academic research published in Journal of Business Venturing, Strategic Organization, and Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice Contributed articles to Harvard Business Review and Fast Company; covered by the Financial Times, BBC, CNBC, Newsweek, Monocle, Bloomberg, and Vogue Business Biography The question of why some companies survive for decades while others peak and fade is one of the most commercially consequential questions in strategy – and one of the least rigorously studied. Neri Karra Sillaman spent two decades approaching it through an unusual lens: the immigrant entrepreneurs behind brands including Chobani, WhatsApp, Duolingo, and PayPal, who built iconic and enduring businesses while starting with limited capital, no institutional networks, and no margin for failure. That research, rooted in her Cambridge doctoral work and developed across her faculty career at Oxford’s Saïd Business School, produced Pioneers (Wiley, 2025) – an eight-principle framework for business longevity drawn from the structural choices that explain immigrant entrepreneurial success. The book was named Thinkers50 Best New Management Book of 2025 and a Financial Times Readers’ Choice. She holds roles as both Professor of Practice in Strategy and Entrepreneurship Expert at Oxford, and was named to the Thinkers50 Radar Class of 2024. The practitioner dimension matters here. She is co-founder of Neri Karra, a luxury leather goods business with 25+ years of manufacturing partnerships with leading Italian fashion labels, recognised as a B Corp and a Positive Luxury venture. The principles she applies in the boardroom and lecture hall – around purpose, constraint, community, and sustainable growth – are ones she has had to test, revise, and defend commercially over the same period she was researching them. Her writing appears in Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, and Newsweek. Her academic research has been published in the Journal of Business Venturing, Strategic Organization, and Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice. She has contributed commentary to the Financial Times, BBC, CNBC, Monocle, Bloomberg, and Vogue Business, and has delivered TEDx talks on creativity, resilience, and entrepreneurship. Born in Bulgaria, she fled as a child refugee to Turkey before making her way through the University of Miami and Cambridge to the research that has defined her career – and which gives her a lived understanding of the very principles she argues make businesses last. Key speaking topics Business longevity and long-term competitive strategy Immigrant entrepreneurship and outsider advantage Sustainable growth and purpose-driven enterprise Fashion and luxury entrepreneurship Iconic brand building and brand durability Creativity and innovation in organisations Resilience as a strategic asset Ideal for CEOs, founders, and boards engaged in long-term strategy and business durability reviews Chief Strategy Officers and senior commercial teams seeking research-grounded frameworks for sustainable growth Fashion, luxury, and consumer goods executives navigating brand longevity, sustainability pressures, and global expansion Executive education and MBA audiences at business schools Audience outcomes A concrete eight-principle framework for what drives business longevity, applicable across sectors not limited to fashion or luxury A reframed understanding of constraint, outsider perspective, and community as structural competitive advantages rather than liabilities Specific strategic principles drawn from the companies behind Chobani, WhatsApp, Duolingo, and PayPal – examined analytically, not biographically Clearer language for board and leadership conversations about the gap between short-term performance and lasting competitive advantage A research-grounded basis for evaluating whether current strategic decisions are building for durability or optimising for the next cycle

Why organisations work with Nick Ayton More than four decades inside computer science and ten founded start-ups give him a working operator’s view of where deep tech actually breaks, not a consultant’s slide on where it might. He translates AI, quantum, and longevity science into capital allocation questions a CFO or investment committee can act on, which is rare among futurists who stop at the trend. His book The Slow Bleed sets out Cash Conversion Velocity, a diagnostic he uses to show CEOs why a profitable business is draining cash and what to fix first, in days rather than quarters. His Living to 150 book and ongoing work on AI-assisted healthcare give him a specific, defensible position on longevity, a topic most technology speakers cannot credibly hold. He chairs global summits where deep tech meets investor capital, including the Family Office Summit in Abu Dhabi, so the audience he speaks to most often is the one buyers are trying to reach. Biography highlights Author, The Slow Bleed: A CEO Field Guide to Cash Conversion Velocity (Redline Press, 2026), with a foreword by Ian Wright, founder of VirtualNonExecs. Author, Living to 150: A New Era in Personalised AI Healthcare (2024). Founder of Crix.io, a regulated crypto-exchange, and Chainstarter Ventures, advising family offices on deep tech investment. Named Blockchain Visionary of the Year by Cointelegraph (2018); founding writer of the “Sage of Shoreditch” column. Named Top Futurist Speaker at the Family Office Summit, Abu Dhabi (2023). Has delivered keynotes and faculty addresses at MIT, Harvard, LSE, and Berkeley, alongside more than 100 global summits, working between the UK and the UAE. Biography Most futurist commentary on AI, quantum, and longevity stops at the trend line. Ayton’s work starts where the boardroom question starts: what does this technology mean for the next ten-year capital decision? After more than four decades in computer science and ten founded companies, he speaks to investors and operators in their own language. His early move into blockchain produced Crix.io, one of the first regulated crypto-exchanges, and the Cointelegraph column that named him Blockchain Visionary of the Year in 2018. The work has since broadened into quantum computing, synthetic biology, and longevity science. His book Living to 150 argues for personalised AI healthcare as the next investable frontier, and he advises family offices on how to position capital around it. A second strand of his work asks why profitable businesses quietly fail. His 2026 book The Slow Bleed sets out Cash Conversion Velocity, a way to measure the real health of an operating model in days, and a structured programme to fix it in months rather than years. The same instinct runs through his keynotes on why digital transformation so often optimises dysfunction instead of removing it. What separates Ayton from the futurist field is the audience he was built for. Family offices, founders, and the investment committees behind frontier-tech bets do not want a vision deck. They want someone who has built companies in the category, taken the losses, and can name which signals matter and which numbers lie. Key speaking topics Artificial intelligence and the next decade of enterprise value Quantum computing and its commercial timeline Data sovereignty and the post-cloud era Biological computing and synthetic biology Longevity sciences and personalised AI healthcare Frontier technology investment for family offices Cash Conversion Velocity and operating-model diagnosis Why digital transformation fails Ideal for Boards and investment committees making long-horizon capital decisions on AI, quantum, or biotech Family offices and private capital allocators positioning around frontier technologies Founders and CTOs in deep tech who need a credible external voice on category direction CEOs, PE operating partners, and family office principals who suspect a profitable business is quietly losing cash Audience outcomes A clearer read on which deep tech signals carry commercial weight and which are noise A working vocabulary for AI, quantum, and longevity that holds up in front of technical and capital audiences Specific examples of where capital is already moving in frontier tech, drawn from family office and founder networks A way to tell whether a profitable business is actually healthy, using cash conversion rather than the backward-looking metrics on the board pack A sharper sense of which technology bets compound over a decade and which expire within two

Why organisations work with Nick Brackenbury A working answer to the visibility problem in physical retail. NearSt connects to point-of-sale systems and surfaces live in-store stock inside the platforms where shoppers already search, including Google and Facebook. Operating scale to back the argument. NearSt’s technology integrates with over 130 stock management systems and reaches over 800,000 retail locations globally, with Google as a named platform partner. Investor and partner credibility from inside retail and tech. Backers include Grosvenor Group, YYX Capital, Will Hobhouse of Heal’s and Jack Wills, and senior engineers from DeepMind and Google Research. A concrete view on where the high street competes and where it loses. Useful for retailers, landlords, and brands deciding how much to spend on stores versus marketplaces. Biography highlights Co-founder and CEO of NearSt, founded 2015, headquartered in London. Named platform partnership with Google connecting in-store inventory into Search and Maps. Total funding of approximately five million pounds across two rounds, led by YYX Capital and joined by Grosvenor Group, True Global, and Moscar Capital. Former Account Director at Ogilvy, working on Jaguar Land Rover, Nestle, and BP’s London 2012 Olympic sponsorship. Speaking platforms include RetailWeek Live, Wired Retail, eCommerce Expo, the British Retail Consortium, and Accenture events. Awards include RetailEXPO Innovation Award 2019, Get in the Ring Western Europe, RetailWeek Startup of the Week, and a London Book Fair Innovation Award. Biography A shopper looking for a specific product in 2026 starts in the same place: a search bar. The shop five minutes away has the item on the shelf. The shopper does not know that, so the order goes to a warehouse. NearSt was built to close that gap, by piping live in-store inventory directly into Google Search, Google Maps, and other consumer platforms. The company was co-founded in 2015 by Nick Brackenbury and Max Kreijn, both former Ogilvy account leads. Brackenbury was one of the agency’s youngest account directors, working across digital programmes for Jaguar Land Rover, Nestle, and BP’s London 2012 Olympic Games sponsorship. NearSt began as a same-hour delivery platform for London high street shops and pivoted into the infrastructure layer beneath the search engines themselves. That pivot is the substance of the speaking material. NearSt’s technology now plugs into more than 130 stock management systems and reaches over 800,000 retail locations globally. Investors include Grosvenor Group, YYX Capital, True Global, and Moscar Capital, alongside angels from Heal’s, Jack Wills, DeepMind, and Google Research. Awards from RetailEXPO, RetailWeek, Get in the Ring, and the London Book Fair sit on top of that operating record. For senior retail and brand audiences, the value is a working commercial argument. Physical stores hold inventory that online retailers cannot match for speed of fulfilment or sustainability of footprint. The constraint has been discoverability, not stock. Brackenbury talks about that constraint from inside the system that is removing it. Key speaking topics The future of high street retail Local commerce and in-store inventory visibility Customer experience in physical retail Retail technology and platform partnerships Entrepreneurship and scale-up leadership Pivoting a business model under pressure Ideal for Retail leadership audiences: CEOs, CMOs, and heads of stores at multi-site retailers and brands. Property and landlord audiences with high street and shopping centre exposure. Marketing and customer experience leaders weighing physical store investment against marketplace spend. Entrepreneurship and scale-up audiences interested in pivoting from B2C to platform infrastructure. Audience outcomes A clearer view of why local stock is the most under-used competitive asset in physical retail. Specific examples of how integrating store inventory with Google and Facebook changes footfall and conversion. A founder’s account of pivoting from a consumer-facing app to an infrastructure business, with the commercial reasoning. A working framework for evaluating retail technology investments against measurable in-store outcomes.

Why organisations work with Nick Hutchinson He has spent seven years studying, at scale, what separates readers who change their behaviour from readers who do not. The pattern recognition is specific and rare. He brings the operating reality of a top 2% global podcast, with named guests including Grant Cardone, Lewis Howes, and Alex Hormozi, into a keynote on what actually transfers from reading to results. His framework in “Rise of the Reader” gives audiences over a hundred concrete reading and implementation habits, not motivational generalities. He built BookThinkers from zero to a seven-figure agency reaching over a million people a month, organically. The credibility on action-from-information comes from having done it. Biography highlights Founder of BookThinkers, a book marketing agency serving mission-driven authors, built organically to a reported reach of over one million people per month. Author of “Rise of the Reader: Strategies For Mastering Your Reading Habits and Applying What You Learn”, published by The Reading Revolution in 2023. Host of BookThinkers: Life-Changing Books, ranked in the global top 2% of podcasts, featuring guests including Grant Cardone, Lewis Howes, and Alex Hormozi. Founder of the BookThinkers Live event series, gathering authors and readers in the personal development community. Featured in Authority Magazine and Kirkus Reviews, and across podcasts including The Chris Voss Show and Laurie Ruettimann’s show. Has personally read more than 400 personal development books, the experience that produced the implementation framework behind his work. Biography Most professionals finish more personal development books than they apply. The shelf gets longer, the podcast queue refills, the behaviour stays the same. BookThinkers was built around this specific gap. The company connects authors with readers who actually want to act on the ideas, and the business case for the agency is that information without implementation does not change anything. The platform now reaches a reported one million people a month, built without paid acquisition, over roughly seven years. The podcast, BookThinkers: Life-Changing Books, sits in the global top 2% and has hosted Grant Cardone, Lewis Howes, and Alex Hormozi. The vantage point is unusual: hundreds of long-form interviews with the authors whose books are most often bought and least often acted on. “Rise of the Reader”, published by The Reading Revolution in 2023, distils that vantage point into a framework. Over a hundred specific habits across reading selection, retention, and implementation. The argument is that reading is a professional discipline, not a leisure category, and that the practical machinery of applying ideas can be taught. For organisations, the relevance is in workforce capability rather than motivation. Teams that read intentionally and act on what they read compound differently. The work he brings to a keynote audience is the operating substance of that compounding, evidenced by the agency he built using the same method. Key speaking topics Reading as a professional discipline Translating personal development content into action Building an audience and a business organically Personal productivity and habit design Self-leadership and continuous learning Author and creator economy operating practice Ideal for L&D and talent development leaders building reading and learning cultures inside their organisations Sales and business development teams whose performance is tied to ongoing self-development Founder communities, entrepreneur networks, and scale-up leadership cohorts Conferences and offsites where the brief is to convert inspiration into specific next actions Audience outcomes A concrete method for selecting books and content that match a defined professional goal A retention and note-taking practice that survives contact with a normal working week A short list of immediate behaviours to test in the week after the session A reframing of reading from leisure habit to professional capability A clearer view of how disciplined consumption of ideas compounds into commercial and career outcomes

Why organisations work with Niluka Kavanagh She co-founded KPMG’s Behavioural Science Unit, giving her a practitioner’s understanding of how psychological insight can be embedded in organisational design: not cited in a presentation, but built into real structures inside a global firm. The KPMG FutureThinkers initiative she co-founded, convening speakers from the BBC, HSBC, and others, gives her direct insight into how large organisations signal innovation internally, and where those signals fall short. Through The Modern CEO, her leadership framework for organisations, she takes the multigenerational engagement debate out of HR theory and into the specifics of daily leadership communication, psychological safety, and behavioural design across teams. She has operated inside large organisations and built independent businesses, so she can speak to the intrapreneurship and autonomy conversation from both sides of the corporate boundary. Operating experience across fourteen countries, with a community of more than a thousand independent founders behind her, gives her a working understanding of what trust, engagement, and team performance look like when conventional structures of co-location and hierarchy do not apply. Biography highlights Opened the 2026 Learning Technologies conference programme on the human side of the future of work, at Europe’s largest workplace learning event Co-founded KPMG’s Behavioural Science Unit and the KPMG FutureThinkers initiative during nearly five years as a consultant and project lead at the firm Advised organisations including Mastercard, Tesco, the London Stock Exchange Group, and Lloyds Bank Published in The World Financial Review on the application of behavioural science to customer experience design, and featured in MSN’s “Top 10 Leading Speakers to Follow” (2025) Member of the UN Innovation Network (UNIN) Graduate of the University of Oxford (English, Somerville College) and an Alumni Ambassador for the college; has guest lectured at Trinity College Dublin and the University of Edinburgh Founder of ImagineThat, a global community for entrepreneurs with more than 1,000 members across multiple countries Biography Most organisations still use presence as a proxy for productivity and hierarchy as a proxy for trust. Neither assumption holds for the workforce that is now entering and increasingly leaving corporate life. Niluka Kavanagh’s work sits precisely at that fault line: the widening gap between how organisations are designed and what the people inside them now expect. Her grounding in this is practical. At KPMG, she spent nearly five years consulting for organisations including Mastercard, Tesco, and the London Stock Exchange Group, co-founding both the firm’s Behavioural Science Unit and its FutureThinkers initiative. Both projects were about the same thing: applying psychological and behavioural insight to how organisations lead change, design experiences, and engage the people doing the work. She now takes that thinking to the stage. In 2026 she opened the Learning Technologies conference, Europe’s largest workplace learning event, on the human side of the future of work, and she is a member of the UN Innovation Network. Her writing on behavioural science and customer experience has appeared in The World Financial Review. That work rests on an unusual operating base. Three businesses, fourteen countries of operating experience, and a community of more than a thousand independent founders gave her the empirical foundation for The Modern CEO, a leadership framework focused on engagement, communication, psychological safety, and intrapreneurship across multigenerational teams. She works with senior leaders to move organisations beyond outdated management models towards cultures built on clarity, trust, and sustainable performance. Key speaking topics Future of work and workforce transformation The Modern CEO framework for multigenerational leadership Behavioural science in organisational design Multigenerational leadership and team engagement Intrapreneurship and internal innovation Human-centric leadership and trust structures Leadership communication and psychological safety Ideal for CHROs and people leaders managing generational shifts in workforce expectation and culture CEOs and senior leadership teams seeking to align organisational structure with modern ways of working Transformation leads and change teams working on culture, engagement, and talent retention Professional services and entrepreneurial firms navigating the shift to more autonomous, distributed, or flexible operating models Audience outcomes A working understanding of how generational values are reshaping expectations around autonomy, leadership, and work design, and where the organisational cost is already showing up The Modern CEO framework as a practical model for engagement, intrapreneurship, communication, and psychological safety across multigenerational teams Concrete approaches to unlocking intrapreneurial thinking in teams, drawn from real experience building innovation initiatives inside a global consultancy A clearer sense of how behavioural science applies to culture and leadership challenges beyond the theoretical, grounded in organisational practice Practical questions to apply to their own organisation’s structure, communication norms, and talent strategy

Why organisations work with Norliza Pavlakos Her resilience frameworks are built on a documented commercial track record: she turned a single struggling tailoring store into a five-location franchise serving the Australian Open, Melbourne Grand Prix, and Marriott Hotels – constraint tested under real conditions, not studied from a distance. Three named frameworks – The Conviction Effect, The One-Day Reset, and The Power of Nothing – give organisations structured tools for decision-making under pressure, rapid performance recovery, and reframing resource constraint as a strategic asset. She built the mental health infrastructure before the speaking career. The Support Pages (formerly Mind Hub) is a mental health directory used by GPs across Australia, where clients can review therapist profiles before booking support. The depth is operational, not rhetorical. The 2021 Toastmasters Golden Gavel – awarded annually since 1959, with previous recipients including Stephen Covey, Tony Robbins, and Muhammad Yunus – is an independently verified platform credential, not a bureau-issued ranking. Dell, Microsoft, Zurich, Emirates Airlines, and Coca-Cola have booked her for leadership sessions, not general motivation events – consistent evidence that the frameworks land at a corporate, not personal-development, level. Biography highlights 2021 Toastmasters International Golden Gavel recipient – the organisation’s most prestigious annual honour, previously awarded to Stephen Covey, Tony Robbins, and Muhammad Yunus Built Finest Alterations from a single struggling store to a five-location tailoring franchise, with clients including the Australian Open, Melbourne Grand Prix, and Marriott Hotels Founder of The Support Pages (formerly Mind Hub), a mental health directory used by GPs across Australia to refer patients to vetted therapists Founded Australia’s first Miss India International Pageant from zero start-up capital at age 23, drawing 4,000 attendees Founder of the Liza Pavlakos Foundation, a registered Australian charity Author of Conviction (memoir, 2023) and The Indefatigable Entrepreneur (business memoir, 2026) Biography The assumption built into most resilience training is that someone has studied pressure from a safe distance. Pavlakos built five businesses from zero capital, including a tailoring franchise that grew from one struggling store to five locations serving the Australian Open and the Melbourne Grand Prix. Toastmasters International awarded her the 2021 Golden Gavel, the organisation’s most prestigious annual honour, previously given to Stephen Covey, Tony Robbins, and Muhammad Yunus. The award recognises communication and leadership, not survival. It reflects what she does with the experience, not simply that she has it. Her mental health work is structural. The Support Pages, formerly Mind Hub, is a mental health directory used by GPs across Australia, where clients can review therapist profiles before booking support. The platform exists because she built it, not because she talked about the need for one. From that experience, she developed three named frameworks: The Conviction Effect, which addresses analysis paralysis when pressure compresses time and information; The One-Day Reset, a rapid recovery protocol when burnout or setback threatens performance continuity; and The Power of Nothing, which reframes severe resource constraint as decision-making advantage. Dell, Microsoft, Zurich, and Emirates Airlines have booked her for leadership sessions, not general motivation events. Key speaking topics Decision-making and leadership conviction under pressure Resilience and performance recovery Mental health infrastructure and workplace wellbeing Entrepreneurial leadership and operating under constraint Personal narrative and organisational mindset High-performance team culture Ideal for Senior leadership teams and executive programmes where decision quality under sustained pressure is a live operational concern CHROs and wellbeing leads building psychological resilience into the leadership pipeline Women in leadership conferences where the intersection of commercial achievement and extreme adversity carries specific weight High-performance teams in fast-moving industries where recovery speed after setback is a measurable business outcome Audience outcomes A named model for eliminating analysis paralysis and making faster, cleaner decisions under conditions of incomplete information (The Conviction Effect) A practical 24-hour recovery protocol for maintaining performance through setbacks without extended downtime (The One-Day Reset) A concrete reframe of resource constraint and underestimation as leadership advantage, with specific application to uncertain operating conditions (The Power of Nothing) Clearer understanding of where and how decision quality degrades under sustained pressure, and what structural responses are available Awareness of what genuine mental health infrastructure looks like in practice, from a founder who built it

Why organisations work with Ola Ahlvarsson He has built, scaled, and exited businesses across two decades of European internet history, from Boxman in the late 1990s through Star Stable Entertainment and Epicenter, so his counsel on scale-up decisions is operating advice rather than commentary. He runs SIME, the Stockholm summit that has gathered C-level executives, founders, and investors annually since 1996, which gives boards a direct line into where Nordic and global tech is moving next. He co-founded Epicenter, a Nordic innovation hub now spanning Stockholm, Oslo, and Helsinki, with industry clusters in AI, longevity, food systems, and real estate, providing a current view of how corporates are partnering with startups. His advisory client list includes Google, Microsoft, Samsung, IBM, Ericsson, Telenor, and Schibsted, which signals comfort sitting with senior teams in regulated, large-cap environments. He works equally well as a keynote and as a moderator, which is rare; for boards designing high-stakes innovation summits, that dual capability is genuinely useful. Biography highlights Co-founder and former CEO of Result, the Stockholm-based business builder behind Spray, Spraydate, Sellbranch, and Keynote Media Group. Co-founder of Star Stable Entertainment, the Stockholm-based MMO studio behind one of Europe’s most successful children’s online games. Co-founder of Epicenter, the Nordic innovation hub operating across Stockholm, Oslo, and Helsinki. Curator and host of SIME, running since 1996 in Stockholm. Named «Top Ten Leading European Internet Entrepreneurs» by The Wall Street Journal in 1999 and a World Economic Forum Global Leader for Tomorrow. Author of Mission Possible (Midas, 2005), Silicon Valhalla (2016), Happy Business (Aniara), and Mindchange (Fritanke, 2024). Biography European internet history runs through a small group of operators who built it from the inside. Ola Ahlvarsson is one of them. From Boxman in the late 1990s to Star Stable Entertainment in 2010, he has co-founded more than twenty companies and watched several through to acquisition, including Spray to Snowfall and Spraydate to Match.com. Result, the Stockholm builder he co-founded in 1999 and led as CEO until 2008, was the engine behind much of that portfolio. Through it, and later through Keynote Media Group, he assembled a working knowledge of what scale, exit timing, and corporate partnership actually require. The Wall Street Journal named him among Europe’s top ten internet entrepreneurs the year Result launched. In 2014 he co-founded Epicenter, now a Nordic innovation hub with sites in Stockholm, Oslo, and Helsinki and clusters in AI, longevity, sustainable food systems, and real estate. He also curates and hosts SIME, the digital business summit he has run in Stockholm since 1996, which gives him a continuous view of how the industry’s centre of gravity moves. His written work brings a softer edge to the operator profile. Mindchange (2024) draws on his career and his parallel life as a karate and kickboxing competitor to argue that emotional control is a strategic asset for senior leaders. He has presented at the World Economic Forum, DLD Munich, World Knowledge Forum in Seoul, and Le Web in Paris, and advised Google, Microsoft, Samsung, IBM, Ericsson, Telenor, and Schibsted. Key speaking topics Entrepreneurship and scale-up leadership Digital transformation Innovation and corporate venturing Future of technology Business model innovation Self-leadership and performance under pressure Nordic and European tech ecosystems Ideal for Boards and CEOs designing innovation strategy or new venture units Chief Innovation, Chief Strategy, and Chief Digital Officers leading scale-up partnerships with startups Executive teams running annual summits or leadership offsites that need a substantive moderator as well as a keynote Audience outcomes A working understanding of how serial founders judge timing, capital, and exit, drawn from twenty-plus years of operating decisions. A current read on the Nordic and European tech landscape, including how innovation hubs and corporates are partnering today. Practical handles for installing founder-style decision-making inside a corporate operating model. A perspective on emotional control and self-leadership that connects athletic discipline to executive performance.

Why organisations work with Oliver Peyton He pioneered the model of high-quality restaurant and café concessions inside cultural institutions, with sites at the National Gallery, Royal Academy of Arts, Wallace Collection and Kew Gardens, and can describe the operating logic from the inside. He has presided over both the building and the public administration of Peyton & Byrne, and discusses commercial failure and reinvention as someone who has lived it. He has applied a single operating philosophy, hospitality as a service discipline, across nightclubs, restaurants, bakeries, drinks brands and the funeral sector with Exit Here. Fifteen years as a judge on the BBC’s Great British Menu has given him sustained scrutiny of how performance operations function under pressure, and a vocabulary that translates for audiences outside hospitality. He has consulted for Sodexo, British Airways, Virgin and Pernod Ricard, organisations large enough to expose any thin theory of consumer-facing operations. Biography highlights Founder of Peyton & Byrne, with restaurants and cafés inside the National Gallery, Royal Academy of Arts, Wallace Collection, Kew Gardens, the British Library and the Wellcome Collection. Judge on BBC Two’s Great British Menu from 2006 to 2021. Honorary OBE for services to catering, presented in 2012. Founder of Exit Here, a contemporary funeral business in Chiswick and Crouch End, opened in 2019. Founder of Unknown Pleasures, a premium canned cocktail brand launched in 2021. Author of two cookbooks; columnist for GQ Magazine; consulting client list includes Sodexo, British Airways, Virgin and Pernod Ricard. Biography Hospitality is a public discipline. Every cover is a transaction watched in real time, and a single bad year can take a brand that took fifteen years to build. Few operators have spent longer testing what that requires than Oliver Peyton. He opened nightclubs in Brighton and London in the early 1980s. He moved into restaurants with the Atlantic Bar & Grill in 1994, then launched a string of London venues including Coast, Mash and Isola. In 2005, he founded Peyton & Byrne, which placed restaurant and café concessions inside major London cultural institutions, including the National Gallery, the Royal Academy of Arts, the Wallace Collection and Kew Gardens. The trajectory has not been linear. In October 2016, Peyton & Byrne entered administration after losing contracts, including Kew Gardens and the British Library. It was acquired by Sodexo, where Peyton stayed on as creative director. In 2019, he founded Exit Here, a contemporary funeral business in Chiswick, now also operating in Crouch End. It applies the hospitality model to a sector he describes as largely unchanged since the Victorian era. In 2021, he launched the premium canned cocktail brand Unknown Pleasures. Alongside the operating career, Peyton spent fifteen years as a judge on BBC Two’s Great British Menu, from 2006 to 2021. He has also presented and contributed to programmes on restaurant turnaround. He was awarded an honorary OBE for services to catering in 2012 and has consulted for Sodexo, British Airways, Virgin and Pernod Ricard. His career makes a practical point. Consumer-facing operations are a portable discipline. Operators who have lived through public failure and started again carry an authority that strategists rarely match. Key speaking topics Hospitality and consumer-facing operations Restaurant and catering entrepreneurship Brand building inside cultural and visitor attraction venues Commercial reinvention after public failure Operating discipline in service businesses Cross-sector application of hospitality models Ideal for Hospitality, retail and consumer-facing operators looking at growth or repositioning CEOs and founders of brands operating inside host environments such as museums, galleries, transport hubs and public venues Boards weighing turnaround, recovery or reinvention strategy after operational failure Senior leaders in catering, foodservice and customer-facing service industries Audience outcomes An operator’s account of how restaurants and consumer venues actually generate margin, and where it leaks Specific case material on building brands inside the National Gallery, Royal Academy, Kew Gardens and similar host venues A direct read on how Peyton & Byrne entered administration, what was lost, and what came next A view of how hospitality discipline transfers into adjacent sectors, drawn from the funeral business, Exit Here and drinks brand Unknown Pleasures

Why organisations work with Omar Christidis He has spent a decade mapping the MENA digital economy at a depth no global consultancy replicates: 30+ Arabnet conferences, 15+ original research reports and direct visibility into more than 650 regional startups. He sits inside the deal flow as Partner and Board Member at Flat6Labs Beirut, so his read on what is actually getting funded in the region is operational, not commentary. His advisory work with the Middle East Institute’s Strategic Foresights Program and the Aspen Institute UK gives him a policy-grade frame on technology that translates well to boards weighing geopolitical exposure alongside digital strategy. He is one of the few speakers who can hold a serious technology conversation in both English and Arabic for a regional C-suite audience, with the Yale and Booz analytical pedigree to back it up. Biography highlights Founder and CEO of Arabnet, the MENA-focused digital events, media and research company, founded in Beirut in 2009. Partner and Board Member, Flat6Labs Beirut, a $20m accelerator with 33 investments in Lebanese startups. Advisory Board Member, Strategic Foresights Program, Middle East Institute, Washington DC. Faculty Member and Moderator, Aspen Institute UK. BA and MBA, Yale University; former consultant at Booz & Co. MENA. Named Global Finance Magazine Top Innovator for the Middle East (2018); featured in Forbes, CNN, CNBC Arabia and Sky News Arabia. Biography The MENA digital economy is no longer an emerging-market footnote. Over the past decade it has produced unicorns, regulatory frameworks for fintech and e-commerce, and a regional venture industry that now writes cheques large enough to keep founders at home. Few people have shaped that shift more practically than the founder of Arabnet. Arabnet was launched in Beirut in 2009, after Omar Christidis left a role in private wealth management in New York during the financial crisis and a stint at Booz & Co. in the MENA. The company has since organised more than thirty regional tech conferences, published over fifteen original research reports on the Arab digital ecosystem, and supported 650+ startups, becoming the standing forum where founders, corporates and investors meet. His credibility is built on access, not opinion. As Partner and Board Member at Flat6Labs Beirut, a $20m accelerator with 33 Lebanese investments, he sees what is being funded. As an Advisory Board Member of the Middle East Institute’s Strategic Foresights Program in Washington and a Faculty Member at Aspen Institute UK, he sees how regional technology decisions are being read in policy circles. The result is a speaker who can tell a Gulf board what the next wave of digital challengers actually looks like, where capital is moving, and which corporate innovation playbooks travel and which do not. Global Finance Magazine named him Top Innovator for the Middle East in 2018; the World Economic Forum named Arabnet a Top 100 Arab World Startup the year before. Key speaking topics MENA digital economy and startup ecosystem Corporate innovation strategy Digital disruption and emerging business models Tech investment and venture capital in the Arab world Future of media and advertising Fourth industrial revolution Banking and fintech in the Middle East Ideal for Boards and C-suites of regional incumbents in banking, telco, media and retail facing digital challengers Global corporates entering or scaling in MENA who need a regional read on customer behaviour and competitive risk Investors, family offices and sovereign funds allocating to MENA technology and venture Government and policy audiences shaping digital, fintech and innovation regulation in the region Audience outcomes A current, named view of where MENA digital capital is flowing and which sub-sectors are concentrating A working frame for distinguishing genuine regional disruptors from imported business models that will not survive local conditions Specific examples of how incumbents in banking, retail and media have responded to digital challengers in MENA, and what worked A sharper read on how Gulf and Levant regulators are shaping the operating environment for technology businesses

Why organisations work with Ozwald Boateng He rebuilt Savile Row’s relevance to a younger global market without abandoning its craft. Few living designers have shifted a 200-year-old category that decisively. He was the first black designer to lead menswear at Givenchy under LVMH, a working case study in taking a personal aesthetic into a heritage luxury house. He co-founded the Made in Africa Foundation and helped launch the $2bn Africa50 infrastructure fund with the African Development Bank, giving him a track record few creative figures can match on capital and continental development. His commercial collaborations span Coutts, Johnnie Walker, Virgin and British Airways, alongside film work for Marvel’s Black Panther. The brand reach is unusually broad for a fashion founder. Biography highlights First English tailor to present a catwalk show at Paris Fashion Week (1994). Creative Director of Menswear at Givenchy, LVMH (2003 to 2007). OBE for services to the clothing industry (2006). Best Menswear Designer, Trophees de la Mode, Paris (1996); Best Menswear Designer, British Fashion Awards (2000). Subject of a V&A Fashion in Motion event (2005), one of a small group including Vivienne Westwood, Stella McCartney and Alexander McQueen. Co-founder, Made in Africa Foundation; co-launched the $2bn Africa50 infrastructure fund with the African Development Bank. Biography Savile Row was a closed system when Boateng arrived. The category meant heritage, sober colour, and a customer his father’s age. He kept the cut and changed almost everything else. By 1994 he was the first English tailor to stage a catwalk show at Paris Fashion Week. By 1995 he had a boutique on Vigo Street, the south end of the Row, and a younger clientele was buying suits again. The category shift mattered commercially. In 2003, LVMH appointed him Creative Director of Menswear at Givenchy, a role he held until 2007. He was the first black designer to lead menswear at the house. The OBE followed in 2006 for services to the clothing industry. A new flagship at 30 Savile Row, co-designed with the architect David Adjaye, opened in 2008. The second act is less expected. Boateng co-founded the Made in Africa Foundation in 2011 to finance large-scale African infrastructure. With the African Development Bank he helped launch Africa50, a $2bn fund aimed at closing the continent’s infrastructure gap. He has worked with several African governments on industrial and development policy, and the work has been covered by CNN, Bloomberg and Pan African Visions. The collaborations sit alongside the official roles. Coutts, Johnnie Walker, Virgin Atlantic and British Airways have commissioned him; Ruth E. Carter put one of his teal mohair suits on screen in Black Panther. The throughline is consistent: a craft practice used as a lever on much bigger systems, from a London street to LVMH to continental capital allocation. Key speaking topics Luxury brand building and reinvention Creative entrepreneurship at scale Heritage brand leadership African economic development and investment Design, identity and cultural representation Diversity in luxury and creative industries Ideal for CEOs and CMOs of heritage brands considering category reinvention Boards and leadership teams of luxury, retail and consumer goods businesses Organisations with significant African market or investment exposure Senior creative and design leaders in fashion, hospitality and lifestyle Audience outcomes A working view of how one founder shifted a 200-year-old category and what that took commercially. A frank account of running a personal aesthetic inside a heritage LVMH house. A specific, named perspective on African infrastructure investment from someone who has helped raise it. A model for building cross-sector collaborations that compound a creative practice over decades.

Why organisations work with Pedro Moneo Structural early sight of emerging technology. As publisher of MIT Technology Review in Spanish and Portuguese since 2008, he sees breakthrough research before it reaches mainstream corporate strategy. A working model for moving innovation out of pilot. Opinno has executed digital transformation, AI, and innovation programmes for large enterprises across Europe and Latin America since 2008. The work shows what survives contact with the corporate operating model. Engineering rigour applied to commercial decisions. His training as a nuclear engineer at the French Atomic Energy Commission, followed by reactor research at Argonne National Laboratory, gives him a system-design lens on technology adoption. Direct exposure to innovation markets outside the usual US-UK circuit. Opinno operates from offices across Spain, Italy, France, Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Chile, and Argentina, giving him client experience that few speakers can offer. Biography highlights CEO and founder of Opinno, a global innovation consultancy with more than 230 consultants and twelve offices across Europe and Latin America. Publisher of MIT Technology Review in Spanish and Portuguese since 2008; former online publisher of Harvard Business Review in Spanish. Senior Advisor to NASA on cross-industry innovation summits. World Economic Forum Young Global Leader (2016), Eisenhower Innovation Fellow (2014), and Aspen Institute Adler Fellow (2016). Co-founder of the Madrid chapter of the XPrize Foundation. Member of the Board of Advisors at ESCP Business School. Featured as a published case study at IESE Business School. Biography Opinno was founded in Silicon Valley in 2008, the week Lehman Brothers collapsed. Pedro Moneo’s bet was that the crisis would force every large company to reckon with technologies they had been avoiding. He was right. The firm now operates from twelve offices across Europe and Latin America, working in the gap between emerging technology and the corporate operating model. His route to that role is less obvious than the bio of most innovation consultants. He trained as a mechanical engineer at the Polytechnic University of Madrid, then as a nuclear engineer at the French Atomic Energy Commission. He started his career on reactor research at Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago. Strategy consulting at Accenture and a deputy directorship at FEDIT, Spain’s largest private R&D network, followed before he started the company. Two adjacent roles anchor his view of emerging technology. Since 2008 he has been the publisher of MIT Technology Review’s Spanish and Portuguese editions. The role gives him sustained early sight of the research that eventually reaches corporate strategy. Since 2016 he has advised NASA on cross-industry innovation summits. The World Economic Forum named him a Young Global Leader in 2016, and the Eisenhower Foundation made him an Innovation Fellow in 2014. Inside a corporate boardroom, the question he keeps asking is the one most innovation programmes avoid. What does the operating model need to look like for this technology to generate revenue? The answers come from Opinno’s enterprise work across Spain, Italy, France, Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Chile, and Argentina. Key speaking topics Innovation as a managed corporate discipline Digital transformation in established enterprises Artificial intelligence in the operating model Open innovation and ecosystem design Emerging technology and corporate strategy The Iberian and Latin American innovation landscape Ideal for Boards and CEOs trying to operationalise AI and emerging technology beyond pilot stage Chief Innovation Officers, CTOs, and transformation leads inside large corporates Executive teams in Spanish and Portuguese-speaking markets who need a credible local voice Industry bodies and ecosystem builders shaping national innovation policy Audience outcomes Which emerging technologies are close to commercial maturity, and which are not The specific reasons most corporate innovation programmes fail at the transition from lab to operating model Worked examples from Opinno’s enterprise engagements across Europe and Latin America The texture of corporate innovation in Spanish and Portuguese-speaking markets, where most US and Northern European speakers cannot offer first-hand evidence