Future of Technology

Why organisations work with Michael Lyon He has mentored more than 100 ventures through the Creative Destruction Lab since 2018, currently anchored in the Oceans stream at the Atlantic site. That is a working accelerator practice, not a retired one. He was Vice President and General Counsel of Space Adventures during the first private spaceflights to the International Space Station (Tito, Shuttleworth). When he talks about commercialising frontier technology, he is describing a market he helped invent. He served as Special Assistant to FDIC Chairman L. William Seidman during the Savings and Loan crisis and as an Assistant Director for Resolutions at the RTC. Few startup mentors have run a federal crisis at that level. His book Accelerating Startups: Lessons From Mentors, foreword by Professor Ajay Agrawal of the Rotman School and contributions including Professor Philip Kotler, gives boards and accelerator programmes a published reference point for what he teaches. He works comfortably in the Gulf Cooperation Council region and Asia, and has done business in more than 100 countries, which makes him useful for venture programmes thinking about international expansion from day one. Biography highlights Founder and CEO of Lyon Capital Services; mentor at the Creative Destruction Lab. Former Vice President and General Counsel, Space Adventures; leadership roles at Zero Gravity Corporation. Special Assistant to the Chairman of the FDIC and Resolution Trust Corporation during the Savings and Loan crisis; Assistant Director for Resolutions at the RTC. Former General Counsel and Director of Business Development at J.E. Robert Company; former attorney at Covington and Burling. Co-founder of Xtronaut Enterprises with the leader of the NASA OSIRIS-REx mission. Author of Accelerating Startups: Lessons From Mentors (foreword by Professor Ajay Agrawal, Rotman School of Management). J.D. cum laude, Harvard Law School; B.A. summa cum laude, Brandeis University; attended London School of Economics. Biography The hardest part of building a serious venture is not the idea. It is the cluster of decisions a founder makes about regulation, capital, geography, and timing in the first three years, almost always with too little information. That is the gap that Michael Lyon has spent two decades closing for founders, first inside the companies and now from the mentor’s seat at the Creative Destruction Lab. His commercial track record is in the part of the economy where regulation, capital intensity, and frontier technology meet. As Vice President and General Counsel of Space Adventures he helped organise the first private spaceflights to the International Space Station, the Tito and Shuttleworth missions. He held leadership roles at Zero Gravity Corporation and co-founded Xtronaut Enterprises with the lead scientist of NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission. Before the space sector he was Special Assistant to the Chairman of the FDIC during the Savings and Loan crisis and an Assistant Director for Resolutions at the Resolution Trust Corporation, working on failed thrifts of more than 500 million dollars in assets. He has also been General Counsel and Director of Business Development at the J.E. Robert Company and an attorney at Covington and Burling. The legal training is from Harvard, cum laude. Since 2018 he has mentored more than 100 ventures at the Creative Destruction Lab across the space, ocean, and emerging technology streams. His book Accelerating Startups: Lessons From Mentors carries a foreword by Professor Ajay Agrawal of the Rotman School of Management, who founded CDL, and a contribution from Professor Philip Kotler. It is the most direct expression of what a buyer is hiring when they put him in front of founders or a corporate innovation team. Key speaking topics Commercialising frontier technology in regulated markets Mentorship and founder decision-making inside accelerator programmes The commercial space sector and lessons from the first private orbital flights International market entry, with a focus on the Gulf and Asia Crisis resolution lessons from the Savings and Loan era Corporate innovation, intrapreneurship, and venture building Ideal for Founders and CEOs of early-stage ventures in space, ocean, and other regulated frontier sectors. Corporate innovation, R&D, and venture-building teams setting up accelerator or incubator programmes. Investors, family offices, and government innovation funds backing technology commercialisation. Universities, accelerators, and policy bodies running founder education at scale. Audience outcomes A working playbook for how founders extract real value from accelerators, incubators, and government innovation programmes. A grounded view of how commercial space and ocean ventures actually get built when regulation, capital, and timing are all moving at once. Lessons from the inside of a federal financial crisis applied to how founders and boards should think about risk and resolution today. Specific guidance on entering Gulf and Asian markets without burning the first eighteen months on the wrong structure.

Why organisations work with Mark Stevenson Two bestselling books, An Optimist’s Tour of the Future and We Do Things Differently, that don’t theorise innovation but document it on the ground across four continents. Senior leaders get evidence of what already works, not opinions about what should. Operating experience to back up the advice. Stevenson is Director of Strategy and Special Projects at soil health business Oath, writing from inside a venture of the kind he asks boards to study. Cross-domain advisory range from the UK Ministry of Defence on peace and national security, to Médecins Sans Frontières on climate strategy, to GSMA on purpose. Few advisors hold credibility across that spread of rooms. A working stance on uncertainty for leaders who can no longer rely on prediction. The “reluctant futurist” framing names the discomfort buyers feel about boardroom forecasting and offers something more useful in its place. Stagecraft from a comedy and music background that makes serious material land. He gets a sceptical or hostile room engaged without softening the argument. Biography highlights Author of An Optimist’s Tour of the Future (Profile Books, translated into 12 languages) and We Do Things Differently: The Outsiders Rebooting Our World Director of Strategy and Special Projects at soil health business Oath Co-founder of carbon removals firm CUR8 Global Ambassador for environmental law firm ClientEarth Former strategic advisor on peace, national security and climate change to the UK Ministry of Defence Has advised Médecins Sans Frontières (UK/Ireland) and the GSMA on long-term strategy Co-host of Jon Richardson and the Futurenauts podcast with comedian Jon Richardson and writer Ed Gillespie Biography Most boards still operate on a model of prediction. But the variables that shape strategy now move together and feed each other. Climate, geopolitics, technology and the failures of markets to price risk properly are not separate items on a register. They are aspects of the same problem. Mark Stevenson works the seam where senior leaders have to make confident decisions without the luxury of confident forecasts. His two books, An Optimist’s Tour of the Future and the bestselling We Do Things Differently, are field reports rather than theory. Both document the people and ventures actually rebuilding broken systems in education, energy, healthcare, food and finance. His advisory practice spans governments, NGOs, investors and multinational organisations, and covers ground few in this category can match. He has been strategic advisor on peace, national security and climate change to the UK Ministry of Defence. He is ‘Futurist without Borders’ for Médecins Sans Frontières (UK/Ireland), strategic advisor to the GSMA, and Global Ambassador for environmental law firm ClientEarth. Alongside that, he is Director of Strategy and Special Projects at soil health business Oath, working on systems change from inside a venture rather than commenting on it from the gallery. Some of this is lived. Stevenson’s understanding of leadership under uncertainty is also shaped by his own recovery from Complex-PTSD, an experience of leading through profound personal disorientation. It is part of why his keynotes treat the emotional and relational dimensions of change as seriously as the strategic ones, and why he is unusually direct about what it costs leaders to hold composure when the ground moves. Key speaking topics Systems change and systems literacy Strategic foresight under deep uncertainty Innovation in failing systems Future of technology and society Climate, democracy and market risk as connected challenges Storytelling and stagecraft for serious material Ideal for Senior leadership teams and boards Strategy, innovation and foresight functions Investors and capital allocators making long-horizon decisions Policy makers and public sector audiences Audience outcomes A way to look at climate, geopolitics, technology and trust in institutions as one problem rather than four Specific examples of innovators already rebuilding broken systems at scale, drawn from Stevenson’s own field research A working stance on uncertainty for leaders who can no longer rely on prediction-based planning A sharper view of where their organisation may be committing capital to outdated assumptions about how the world works

Why organisations work with Edvard Moser He gives an audience the rarest credential in the field, a Nobel Prize in medicine, attached to a discovery they can picture in one image: the brain runs an internal positioning system, built from grid cells he and May-Britt Moser identified in 2005. When DeepMind trained a neural network to navigate, it spontaneously reproduced the grid cells he discovered. That makes him a credible voice on the question every leadership team now faces: how close are machines to the way real intelligence actually works? His lab is still publishing frontier results, including a 2025 paper in Science on how the brain carves a continuous stream of experience into separate memories. A decade after the prize, the work is still moving. The brain circuits he mapped, in the entorhinal cortex, are the first to break down in Alzheimer’s disease. For audiences in health, pharma, and longevity, his work sits at the origin of one of medicine’s hardest problems. Biography highlights Shared the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, with May-Britt Moser and John O’Keefe, for discovering the brain’s positioning system. Discovered grid cells in the medial entorhinal cortex in 2005, the finding that defined the prize. Founding Director of the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience at NTNU, and co-founder of four Norwegian Centres of Excellence. Foreign member of the Royal Society, and of the US National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine. His discovery was independently echoed by AI: a DeepMind network trained to navigate reproduced grid-like representations, published in Nature in 2018. His lab continues to publish in Science and Nature, with a 2025 paper on how the brain organises memory. Biography In 2018, a neural network built at DeepMind taught itself to find its way through a virtual space. No one had told it how. To solve the problem, it spontaneously produced the same hexagonal firing patterns that Edvard Moser had found in the brains of rats thirteen years earlier. The machine had reinvented the grid cell. Those grid cells are the reason Moser shared the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Working with May-Britt Moser, he identified neurons in the entorhinal cortex that fire in a regular grid as an animal moves, giving the brain an internal coordinate system. Together with the place cells found earlier by John O’Keefe, they form what is often called the brain’s GPS. The discovery opened a wider programme. Moser’s lab at the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience, which he founded and directs at NTNU, now studies how the brain encodes space, time, and memory together. A 2025 paper in Science showed how it slices a continuous stream of experience into discrete events we can later recall. The same entorhinal circuits are the first to fail in Alzheimer’s disease, which gives the work a direct line to one of medicine’s hardest problems. Moser’s path was not the obvious one. He grew up on the west coast of Norway, took a first degree in psychology, and built his research from a standing start at a young university in Trondheim. From there he founded four national Centres of Excellence, the Kavli Institute among them, and was elected a foreign member of the Royal Society and the US National Academies of Sciences and Medicine. The brain is still the only system that has produced general intelligence, and he works on the actual cells that do it. Key speaking topics The brain’s positioning system Memory and how it forms Biological and artificial intelligence The neuroscience of space and time Grid cells and spatial navigation The brain in health and in Alzheimer’s disease The path to a Nobel Prize Ideal for AI, data science, and R&D teams curious about the biological intelligence their models are reaching toward Healthcare, pharmaceutical, and longevity organisations working on memory, ageing, and Alzheimer’s Innovation and technology audiences interested in how the brain’s intelligence compares with the artificial kind Flagship conferences and leadership summits seeking a Nobel laureate a non-specialist audience can follow Audience outcomes A clear, jargon-free picture of how the brain represents space, time, and memory A grounded sense of how far artificial intelligence still sits from biological intelligence, and where the two genuinely meet Why Alzheimer’s disease takes hold in the brain’s navigation circuits, decades before the first symptoms A first-hand account of how a Nobel-winning discovery actually unfolded

Why organisations work with Nikolas Badminton He brings a published, named foresight methodology to the room. The Positive Dystopia Canvas, set out in Facing Our Futures, is a structured tool for stress-testing strategy against scenarios leaders would rather not entertain. He has worked the discipline at scale, with leadership teams at NASA, JP Morgan, Disney, Rolls Royce, the United Nations, and the UK Home Office. The methods on stage have been tested in serious rooms first. He bridges AI capability and strategic foresight in a way few speakers can. Most AI speakers stop at adoption. Most foresight speakers treat AI as one signal among many. Badminton treats AI as the variable that breaks existing planning horizons, and shows leaders how to plan accordingly. He served as a key advisor to The Age of A.I. documentary series with Robert Downey Jr., and his work is regularly cited by the BBC, The Atlantic, Forbes, and Fast Company. The audience tends to recognise him before he is introduced. Biography highlights Chief Futurist at Futurist.com, the international strategic foresight consultancy founded by Glen Hiemstra in 1993. Author of Facing Our Futures (Bloomsbury Business, 2023), JP Morgan Private Bank’s Next Gen Pick on its Summer Reading List and a Top-50 Business Book of 2023 by The Next Big Idea Club. Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA) and a member of Chatham House. Advisor to The Age of A.I. documentary series with Robert Downey Jr. Research cited by the BBC, VICE, The Atlantic, Fast Company, Business Insider, Forbes, and Sunday Telegraph. Engagements with NASA, the United Nations, Google, Microsoft, JP Morgan, Disney, Rolls Royce, Procter & Gamble, the US Department of State, and the UK Home Office. Biography Most organisations cannot describe the future they are planning toward. They have a five-year strategy and a quarterly forecast, with very little real method in between. This gap is where Nikolas Badminton works. As Chief Futurist at Futurist.com, the strategic foresight consultancy founded by Glen Hiemstra in 1993, he advises executives and government leaders on how to build anticipatory capability into how they plan. His method is set out in Facing Our Futures (Bloomsbury Business, 2023). The book gives executives the Positive Dystopia Canvas, a structured tool for stress-testing strategy against scenarios leaders would rather not entertain. JP Morgan Private Bank named it a Next Gen Pick for its Summer Reading List, and The Next Big Idea Club listed it among the Top-50 Business Books of 2023. The client list reflects the demand for that work. NASA, Disney, JP Morgan, Microsoft, Rolls Royce, the United Nations, the US Department of State, and the UK Home Office have used Badminton’s foresight work to inform planning that runs longer than the political or quarterly cycle. A Fellow of the RSA and a member of Chatham House, he served as a key advisor to The Age of A.I. documentary series with Robert Downey Jr., and his research is cited by the BBC, The Atlantic, Forbes, and Fast Company. Key speaking topics Strategic foresight and futures design Artificial intelligence in the enterprise Anticipatory governance and long-range planning Innovation under disruption Energy transition and the future of resources Geopolitical scenarios and technology futures Ideal for CEOs and CSOs building foresight capability inside annual planning cycles. Boards and executive committees stress-testing strategy against long-range scenarios. Innovation, transformation, and R&D leaders responsible for moving beyond pilot stage on AI. Public-sector leaders and policymakers designing decisions with consequences beyond the political cycle. Audience outcomes A working understanding of the Positive Dystopia Canvas and how to apply it to current strategic decisions. Specific signals and scenarios in AI, energy, and geopolitics mapped onto the organisation’s actual planning horizon. The language to make the case for foresight capability inside a strategy function built around quarterly forecasting. Confidence to extend the planning conversation past 18 months without it becoming abstract or speculative.

Why organisations work with Marc Saltzman Three decades of daily working-journalist output across USA Today, AARP, Forbes Vetted, Reader’s Digest, Costco Connection and Yahoo, which means his read on what is real versus hype is grounded in actual product testing, not slide-deck futurism. Author of 17 books, including Wiley’s Siri, Apple Watch and Apple Vision Pro For Dummies titles, giving him a track record of translating frontier consumer tech into language a general audience can act on. Host of Tech It Out on 100+ U.S. radio stations via Radio America, plus Canada’s longest-running technology radio show, Tech Talk; broadcast craft that translates directly into keynote pacing for mixed audiences. Covers a working business stack in plain English: generative AI, cybersecurity, smart home and aging-in-place tech, retail and commerce, social media, automotive innovation, so a single booking can address multiple functions in the room. Regular on-camera commentator for CNN, NBC, CBS, FOX, CTV and Global, which means he is comfortable in front of a sceptical room and on stage with executives and media partners. Biography highlights Reporting on the technology sector since 1994 as journalist, author and broadcaster. Contributor to USA Today/Gannett (109 publications), AARP, Forbes Vetted, Reader’s Digest, Costco Connection, Yahoo, Toronto Star, Zoomer and Postmedia. Author of 17 books, including Siri For Dummies (Wiley, 2012), Apple Watch For Dummies (Wiley, 2015) and Apple Vision Pro For Dummies (Wiley, 2024). Host and producer of Tech It Out on 100+ U.S. stations via Radio America. Creator and host of Tech Talk, Canada’s longest-running technology radio show. On-air technology commentator for CNN, NBC, CBS, FOX, CTV, Global and CP24, with prior hosting credits on FOX Business and Bloomberg Television. Biography Most consumer technology coverage is written by people who do not actually use the products. Saltzman’s career is built on the opposite habit. Since 1994 he has reported on the technology sector as a working journalist, columnist and broadcaster, with a syndicated USA Today/Gannett column reaching 109 publications and regular bylines in AARP, Forbes Vetted, Reader’s Digest, Costco Connection, Yahoo and Postmedia titles. The output across formats is what makes the perspective useful to senior teams. He has written 17 books for general audiences, including Siri For Dummies, Apple Watch For Dummies and Apple Vision Pro For Dummies for Wiley, where the editorial constraint is to make a frontier consumer product usable by a non-technical reader on day one. That same constraint shapes his radio work: Tech It Out airs on 100+ U.S. stations through Radio America, and Tech Talk is Canada’s longest-running technology radio show. Television sharpens the discipline further. As a regular commentator on CNN, NBC, CBS, FOX, CTV, Global and CP24, with prior hosting credits on FOX Business and Bloomberg Television, he has spent years translating new categories, AI assistants, wearables, smart home, mixed reality, connected vehicles, into language a general audience can use within a four-minute segment. For organisations, the practical value is a single voice that can speak across consumer technology, generative AI, cybersecurity, retail and commerce, and the future of work, grounded in what products actually do today rather than what vendor decks claim they will do tomorrow. Key speaking topics Generative AI in everyday business and consumer life Cybersecurity and digital safety for organisations and customers The future of retail and commerce Smart home, wearables and connected devices Social media strategy for business Aging-in-place and consumer health technology Automotive and mobility innovation Emerging consumer technology trends Ideal for CMOs and customer experience leaders responding to AI, social and commerce shifts IT, security and risk leaders briefing non-technical executives and boards Retail, consumer goods and franchise leadership teams Conference programmers seeking a credible technology emcee, panel host or keynote across mixed audiences Audience outcomes A working filter for separating durable consumer technology shifts from short-lived hype A clearer view of how generative AI, cybersecurity threats and connected devices show up in customer behaviour Concrete examples of how retail, commerce and workplace tools are changing, drawn from current product testing Plain-English language that executives can repeat to staff, customers and boards without distortion Sharper questions to take back to vendors, agencies and internal technology teams

Why organisations work with Alex Goryachev He ran the function he now talks about. Cisco’s global innovation strategy, AI programme launch and innovation centres on five continents were built under his direction. He gives boards and executive teams a working playbook for moving AI past the pilot stage, drawn from Fearless Innovation and codified into the global ISO Standards on Innovation he helped shape. He addresses workforce resistance to AI directly, naming the cultural and behavioural blockers that stall enterprise AI programmes, rather than focusing only on the technology layer. He bridges enterprise practice and the next generation of leaders through his Executive-in-Residence role at Tulane’s Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, which keeps his frameworks tested against current operating reality. Biography highlights Wall Street Journal bestselling author of Fearless Innovation (Wiley, 2020). Former Managing Director and Global Head of Innovation Strategy, Cisco. Established Cisco’s Global Innovation Centers across five continents and led the launch of its AI innovation programme. Executive-in-Residence, Tulane University Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. Contributor to global ISO Standards on Innovation. Frequent contributor to Forbes, Fast Company, Entrepreneur and CEOWORLD; LinkedIn Top AI Voice. Earlier leadership roles at IBM, Dell and Pfizer. Biography Most enterprise AI programmes do not fail at the model. They fail at the handover, at the moment a promising pilot has to become a working capability inside a large operating company. That is the territory Goryachev spent two decades in. As Managing Director and Global Head of Innovation Strategy at Cisco, he established the company’s Global Innovation Centers across five continents and led the launch of its AI innovation programme. Earlier leadership work at IBM, Dell and Pfizer gave him an unusually broad view of how innovation actually moves through large, regulated organisations. That operating experience became the basis of Fearless Innovation (Wiley, 2020), a Wall Street Journal bestseller that lays out a practical discipline for converting innovation rhetoric into measurable results. The book sits alongside his contribution to the global ISO Standards on Innovation, where he helped codify the principles for how organisations build innovation capability at scale. He continues that work today as an Executive-in-Residence at Tulane University’s Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, and as a regular contributor to Forbes, Fast Company, Entrepreneur and CEOWORLD on the question that now dominates board agendas: how to move from AI as a slide-deck strategy to AI as an operating advantage. Key speaking topics Enterprise AI strategy and operational deployment Innovation as a managed discipline AI literacy and workforce readiness Digital transformation in large enterprises Leadership in an AI-first operating model Culture change and innovation behaviour Ideal for Boards and CEOs setting an AI agenda beyond proof-of-concept Chief Innovation, Strategy and Transformation Officers responsible for translating AI ambition into operating results CHROs and learning leaders rebuilding workforce capability for an AI-first business Executive teams in Fortune 500s, scale-ups and government bodies stalled at the pilot stage of AI Audience outcomes A clear view of the difference between AI experimentation and AI as an operating capability, with named markers of each. Specific patterns from inside Cisco’s innovation programme that audiences can map onto their own organisations. A direct read on where workforce resistance to AI typically appears, and what leaders can do about it. A working sense of what Fearless Innovation prescribes as the discipline behind sustained innovation results.

Why organisations work with Timandra Harkness A working statistician on the Council of Trustees of the Royal Statistical Society who can speak fluently to technical and non-technical audiences in the same room. Author of two books that bracket the AI conversation: Big Data: Does Size Matter? on what data actually does and does not tell us, and Technology Is Not the Problem on why our cultural anxieties about tech are misdirected. A mainstream BBC Radio 4 presenter on FutureProofing, How To Disagree and Steelmanning, which means she handles complex, contested material on air for general audiences and brings that craft to a corporate room. Speaks regularly at institutions that take rigour seriously, including the Royal Society, the Alan Turing Institute, and the Royal Academy of Engineering, so the substance survives scrutiny from technical buyers. Comfortable as keynote speaker, panel moderator, or event host, which makes her useful across the full shape of a leadership offsite or technology summit. Biography highlights Author, Big Data: Does Size Matter? (Bloomsbury Sigma, 2016) and Technology Is Not the Problem (HarperCollins, 2024). Council of Trustees, Royal Statistical Society; chair of the editorial board, Significance journal. Writer and presenter, BBC Radio 4 series including FutureProofing, How To Disagree, Steelmanning, and Political School. Resident reporter across eight series of BBC Radio 4’s The Human Zoo. Speaker and lecturer at the Royal Society, Alan Turing Institute, Royal Academy of Engineering, RSA, Cheltenham Science Festival, and the Abel Prize for Mathematics. Contributor to the Telegraph, Guardian, Sunday Times, WIRED, New Statesman, UnHerd and BBC Focus. Biography Most arguments about technology in the boardroom are arguments about something else. Trust. Identity. What kind of company we want to be. Timandra Harkness, a statistician and broadcaster whose work spans both BBC Radio 4 and the Royal Statistical Society, is unusually well placed to name what is actually being discussed. Her first book, Big Data: Does Size Matter?, published by Bloomsbury Sigma in 2016, took the data revolution seriously without inflating it. Her second, Technology Is Not the Problem, published by HarperCollins in 2024, makes the harder case: that our anxieties about AI and social media are anxieties about ourselves, and that locating the problem in the technology is what stops us from acting on it. She presents BBC Radio 4’s FutureProofing, How To Disagree, and Steelmanning, programmes that work because they take competing arguments seriously rather than flattening them. That habit transfers. In a leadership room, she is the speaker who can hold a senior team’s attention on the awkward middle of an AI question, where the technical position and the cultural position have to be reconciled. She sits on the Royal Statistical Society’s Council of Trustees and chairs the editorial board of Significance, the Society’s journal. She has spoken at the Royal Society, the Alan Turing Institute, and the Royal Academy of Engineering. The technical rigour is real, and it is what stops the cultural argument from drifting into commentary. Key speaking topics Big data and what it does and does not reveal The cultural and ethical questions raised by AI Statistics, evidence and decision-making Human agency in an automated environment Identity, recognition and the social media question Technology and trust Disagreement and constructive argument inside organisations Ideal for Boards and executive teams making AI, data, and digital infrastructure decisions Technology and innovation summits seeking a credible non-vendor voice Leadership offsites where the AI conversation has to bridge technical and cultural ground CDO, CTO, and CHRO audiences working through the human consequences of new systems Audience outcomes A sharper sense of what data and AI systems can and cannot do, written by someone who works with statisticians A clearer language for the cultural and ethical questions executive teams keep deferring A defensible way to think about agency, recognition and trust as the technology landscape shifts Better-quality internal disagreement on contested technology decisions

Why organisations work with Chris Heemskerk Operator credibility from inside Google, where he led Scaled Acquisitions for North America and advised the Sales Acceleration and Innovation Labs documented in the Harvard Business School case study by Linda Hill and Emily Tedards. A defined framework set, including The Innovation Scorecard and The Innovation Engine, that gives boards a way to assess innovation capability across culture, organisation, external posture and effectiveness, rather than relying on anecdote. Practical authority on AI deployment: he speaks as a practitioner who has built scaled sales and product operations, not as an external commentator on the technology. Faculty standing at the European Institute of Innovation for Sustainability, with formal innovation leadership credentials from Harvard Business School and design thinking certification from Stanford, supporting executive-level training and masterclass briefs. Biography highlights Founder and CEO, The Innovation Alliance Former Head of Scaled Acquisitions, Google North America Strategic advisor named in the Harvard Business School case “Innovation at Google Ads: The Sales Acceleration and Innovation Labs (SAIL) (A)” (Case 423-076) Faculty, European Institute of Innovation for Sustainability Author of The Innovation Scorecard and The Innovation Engine frameworks Executive Certification in Innovation Leadership, Harvard Business School; Design Thinking, Stanford University; MSc Marketing, London School of Business and Finance Biography Most large organisations now run innovation teams and AI working groups. Far fewer can name what those teams have shipped, retired, or scaled in the last year. The gap between activity and operating advantage is where senior leaders get exposed, and it is the gap Chris Heemskerk works in. His credibility on that question is operator credibility. As Head of Scaled Acquisitions for Google North America, he ran a large commercial operation inside one of the most studied innovation environments in business. He then helped initiate the partnership between Google Ads and Harvard Business School that produced the case “Innovation at Google Ads: The Sales Acceleration and Innovation Labs (SAIL) (A),” authored by Linda Hill and Emily Tedards, in which he is named as a strategic advisor on the bet-sourcing framework that vetted and accelerated new pipeline opportunities. That experience now sits behind two frameworks he uses with executive teams: The Innovation Scorecard, which assesses innovation capability across culture, organisation, external posture and effectiveness, and The Innovation Engine, which sets out the operating system for sustained innovation output. As Founder and CEO of The Innovation Alliance, and as faculty at the European Institute of Innovation for Sustainability, he works with senior teams on the same question he faced as an operator: how to turn ambition into a managed capability. For boards looking at their AI agenda, the value is specific. Heemskerk speaks as someone who has built scaled commercial operations and has the structured material to translate AI ambition into how a function actually runs, what it measures, and what it discards. Key speaking topics Innovation strategy Innovation culture AI deployment in large organisations Operating models for scaled innovation Digital transformation Executive masterclasses on innovation leadership Ideal for CEOs and C-suite leaders setting AI and innovation strategy Chief Innovation Officers and heads of strategy operationalising new capability Boards reviewing innovation governance and AI exposure Senior commercial and digital transformation leaders moving beyond pilots Audience outcomes A defined view of where the organisation sits on the four pillars of innovation capability Practical reference points from inside Google for how scaled operations adopt new technology A sharper distinction between innovation theatre and innovation that produces operating output Frameworks executives can return to after the keynote, including the Innovation Scorecard and Innovation Engine

Why organisations work with Dame Wendy Hall Direct line of sight into where AI rules are heading. Hall sat on the UN Secretary-General’s High-Level Advisory Body that wrote “Governing AI for Humanity”, and co-chaired the UK government’s 2017 AI Review with Jerome Pesenti. A framework for the geopolitics of digital infrastructure. Her book with Kieron O’Hara, “Four Internets”, sets out the competing Silicon Valley, Brussels, Washington and Beijing models that determine where data and AI capability can actually be deployed. Engineering credibility, not commentary. Her team at Southampton built the Microcosm hypermedia system in the mid 1980s, before the Web existed, which gives her arguments about platform design a foundation most policy voices lack. Standing inside the institutions that boards now have to follow. Fellow of the Royal Society and the Royal Academy of Engineering, former Chair of the Ada Lovelace Institute, founding co-director of the Web Science Research Initiative with Tim Berners-Lee. Biography highlights Regius Professor of Computer Science, University of Southampton, appointed by the Crown in 2017. Member, UN Secretary-General’s High-Level Advisory Body on Artificial Intelligence; contributor to “Governing AI for Humanity” (2024). Co-chair of the UK government’s independent AI Review with Jerome Pesenti, “Growing the artificial intelligence industry in the UK” (2017). Co-author, with Kieron O’Hara, of “Four Internets: Data, Geopolitics, and the Governance of Cyberspace”, Oxford University Press, 2021. Co-founder of the Web Science Research Initiative with Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Sir Nigel Shadbolt; Managing Director, Web Science Trust. Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire; Fellow of the Royal Society; Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering; first non-North American President of the Association for Computing Machinery. Biography The teams writing the rules for AI and digital infrastructure are small, and they sit inside a handful of governments and multilateral bodies. Most boards now have to operate within those rules without much access to the people drafting them. Dame Wendy Hall is one of those people. She co-chaired the UK government’s 2017 AI Review with Jerome Pesenti, “Growing the artificial intelligence industry in the UK”, which set the structure of the country’s AI strategy. In 2023 the UN Secretary-General appointed her to the High-Level Advisory Body on Artificial Intelligence, which delivered “Governing AI for Humanity” in 2024. She chaired the Ada Lovelace Institute from 2020 to 2023. The policy work rests on three decades of original computer science. Her team at Southampton built Microcosm, a hypermedia system, in the mid 1980s, before the Web existed. In 2006 she co-founded the Web Science Research Initiative with Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Sir Nigel Shadbolt, and she now serves as Regius Professor of Computer Science at Southampton, a title conferred by the Crown. Her book with Kieron O’Hara, “Four Internets” (Oxford University Press, 2021, with a foreword by Vint Cerf), is the clearest available map of the four competing value systems, Silicon Valley, Brussels, Washington and Beijing, that now determine where data flows, where AI can be trained, and where products can be sold. That is the document senior teams come back to when they have to make a capital decision about where to put a data centre or a model. Key speaking topics Artificial intelligence policy and governance The geopolitics of data and digital infrastructure Web Science and sociotechnical systems AI strategy for national and corporate competitiveness Internet governance and platform regulation Women in technology and the AI skills pipeline Ideal for Boards and executive committees making capital allocation decisions on AI, data and digital infrastructure Chief technology, chief data and chief AI officers responsible for defensible deployment Government, regulator and multilateral audiences working on AI and Internet governance University and research leadership shaping national AI strategy and skills Audience outcomes A working map of the four competing models of Internet governance and what each means for cross-border data and AI A sharper read of where UN, EU, UK, US and Chinese AI rules are converging and diverging A view of AI strategy that connects technical reality, regulation and national competitiveness A first-hand account of how independent AI reviews and advisory bodies are drafted and how to influence them

Why organisations work with Claudia Bechstein A working chair for high-stakes technology and AI conversations, with the subject fluency to interrogate engineers, regulators and CEOs in the same panel without losing the room. Around 150 live appearances per year across IAA Mobility, GreenTech Festival, Bitkom AI & Data Summit and the German Federal Government Digital Summit, which means she walks into a tech main stage already knowing the room and the operators in it. Bilingual delivery in German and English at the level required for a Bundesregierung digital summit and an English-language CEO panel on the same brief, with no drop in confidence between the two. Co-creator of the KI Palooza Festival, the Stuttgart AI platform for mid-market companies, which gives her a working view of where AI is actually being deployed below the FAANG and DAX 40 level. A trained business psychologist, so the moderation is built around how people answer under pressure, not around a presenter script. Biography highlights MSc in Business Psychology, FOM University of Applied Sciences Berlin and University of San Diego (2020). Co-creator of KI Palooza, a Stuttgart AI festival for mid-market companies. Moderates approximately 150 live events per year, in German and English, across congresses, fireside chats, press conferences and hybrid formats. Recurring chair for IAA Mobility, GreenTech Festival Berlin, Bitkom AI & Data Summit, the German Federal Government Digital Summit, ABB Robotics and the Lobster Data Hero Summit. Worked with Bosch, Salesforce, Porsche, BMW, Dell Technologies, Vodafone, Telekom, Volkswagen, Samsung, Hyundai, Volvo, Mercedes-Benz, UBS, Julius Bär, Handelsblatt and ZDF. Investor in HealthTech and shareholder in a media production company. Biography The chair of a serious technology conference is doing real work. They are deciding which question gets asked, which answer gets pushed back on, and which CEO is allowed to retreat into talking points. Claudia Bechstein has built a fifteen-year career around that specific craft, in German and English, at the level of IAA Mobility, the GreenTech Festival, the Bitkom AI & Data Summit and the German Federal Government Digital Summit. Her route into the role is unusual. She trained as a business psychologist, completing an MSc at FOM Berlin and the University of San Diego in 2020, and the discipline shows in how she runs a panel. She is interested in how people answer under pressure, where they get vague, and where the room stops believing them. That is a different toolkit from broadcast presenting, and it is the reason she is booked repeatedly for technical panels where executives have rehearsed answers and operators have unrehearsed ones. The subject base is technology, AI, mobility and the energy transition. She is co-creator of KI Palooza, a Stuttgart festival built around how mid-market German companies actually deploy AI, and an active investor in HealthTech. The work for Bosch, Salesforce, Porsche, BMW, Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz, Dell, Vodafone, Telekom, ABB Robotics, Volvo and Hyundai is in the same territory: industrial, automotive, data, transformation. For organisations running an AI conference, a transformation summit or a board-level mobility conversation, the practical question is whether the chair can hold the room. Bechstein’s commercial proposition is that she has done so, in two languages, at roughly 150 events a year, for the German industrial economy and a growing list of international clients. Key speaking topics Conference and panel moderation for technology and AI events Artificial intelligence and digital transformation Future of mobility and the automotive industry Sustainability, climate and the energy transition Industry 4.0 and industrial transformation Innovation in mid-market and DAX companies Data and digitalisation HealthTech and FinTech Ideal for Conference organisers running technology, AI, mobility or sustainability summits who need a working chair, not a presenter DAX and mid-market communications and event leads commissioning bilingual (German and English) main-stage hosting Industry associations and federal bodies running policy-and-industry events where the chair has to credibly interrogate ministers and CEOs Boards and executive teams running internal AI, transformation or leadership conferences that include external operators and regulators Audience outcomes A conference programme that runs to time and reads as a strategic conversation, not a series of vendor pitches Panels where the senior speakers are pushed past their prepared answers without the room losing them Bilingual coverage of the same brief, in German and English, without a drop in pace or precision A working AI, mobility or sustainability discussion that the in-house team can use as source material after the event

Why organisations work with Susi O’Neill She translates frontier technology into language non-technical executives can act on, drawing on years running global brand content for Kaspersky, the world’s largest privately owned cybersecurity firm. Her practice is built around the adoption gap, not the technology itself, which is why she resonates with leaders whose AI rollouts have stalled at proof-of-concept. She brings a builder’s track record in tech storytelling, including the Platinum MarCom Award winning Insight Story podcast for Kaspersky and Editor-in-Chief roles on Secure Futures magazine and the Tomorrow Unlocked channel. Through EVA and her Rethinking the Hype Cycle newsletter, she works with leaders on inclusive AI adoption, including the lag in women’s engagement with AI tools and what closing it changes about who benefits from the technology. Biography highlights Founder and Executive Director of EVA, a London-based technology and communications consultancy. Former Head of B2B Brand Content (Global) at Kaspersky. Editor-in-Chief of Kaspersky’s Secure Futures magazine and Tomorrow Unlocked cyberculture channel. Creator and host of the Platinum MarCom Award winning Insight Story podcast. Named in Pepper Content’s Top 50 Global Women in Content 2023. Author of the Rethinking the Hype Cycle newsletter on AI and frontier technology adoption. Biography The hard part of AI is rarely the model. It is the distance between an executive sponsor and the team being asked to use a new tool by Friday. O’Neill has spent her career working that distance, first inside one of the world’s largest cybersecurity firms, now from the outside through her consultancy EVA. At Kaspersky, she ran global B2B brand content and edited Secure Futures, the company’s business-leader magazine, alongside the Tomorrow Unlocked cyberculture channel. She commissioned and hosted Insight Story, a podcast unpacking tech trends for executives that won a Platinum MarCom Award in 2023. The work taught her how senior buyers actually absorb information about complex technology, and where the standard tech-marketing playbook fails them. EVA, the practice she founded next, takes that experience into client work on AI strategy, responsible technology and adoption. Her newsletter Rethinking the Hype Cycle puts the same question to a wider audience: what does a serious organisation do once the AI announcement is out and the cultural work begins. She also writes and speaks on inclusive adoption, including the documented lag in women’s use of generative AI tools and what it costs organisations that ignore it. Earlier brand-content programmes for EY, GSK and Unilever, and a recognition in Pepper Content’s Top 50 Global Women in Content, sit behind that current work. The throughline is consistent. Technology only changes a business when the people inside it are willing to use it, and most organisations are still under-investing in the communications and trust work that makes that happen. Key speaking topics AI adoption and the hype cycle Responsible and trusted technology Frontier and emerging technologies for business Inclusive AI and women in technology Tech communications and thought leadership Cybersecurity culture and digital trust Ideal for CIO, CTO and Chief Digital Officer audiences whose AI programmes have stalled in pilot. CMO, communications and brand leaders building tech credibility with non-technical buyers. Boards and executive teams setting AI governance and responsible-use principles. Diversity, talent and L&D leaders working on inclusive AI capability across the workforce. Audience outcomes A clearer reading of where their organisation actually sits on the AI hype cycle, and which moves are worth making next. A practical sense of how to bring sceptical or hesitant employees with them, instead of around them. Specific examples of how serious organisations are translating frontier tech into adoption, not just announcements. A sharper view of inclusive AI as a capability question, including who is using these tools and who is being left behind.

Why organisations work with Daniel Hulme He runs AI inside a FTSE 100 holding company. When he talks about deployment at scale he is describing decisions he is currently making across WPP’s operating businesses, not modelling them from the outside. He sold the AI consultancy he founded, Satalia, to WPP after building it across clients including Tesco, Unilever, PwC, BT and the BBC. The deployment track record is operational, not slideware. As founder of Conscium, the first commercial research organisation on machine consciousness, he can address AI safety and the frontier governance questions that boards are starting to ask, without retreating into philosophy. His UCL credentials are substantive, an EngD in AI, the former directorship of the Applied AI MSc, and a current Entrepreneur-in-Residence role. The science behind the commercial advice is real. He signed the 2017 open letter to the United Nations on autonomous weapons alongside Musk, Hinton, Russell and Hassabis. He has been in the public AI governance conversation for almost a decade, well before it became fashionable. Biography highlights Chief AI Officer, WPP plc, coordinating AI strategy across the group since the 2021 acquisition of Satalia. Founder and former CEO of Satalia, the UK AI company named to Gartner’s Cool Vendors list for data science in 2016. Founder and CEO, Conscium, a London-based commercial research organisation studying machine consciousness and neuromorphic AI, founded 2024. EngD and Master’s in Artificial Intelligence, University College London. Computer Science Entrepreneur-in-Residence at UCL. Faculty member, Singularity University, on AI, ethics, innovation and organisational design. Founding Fellow, Academy for the Mathematical Sciences (2026). Co-author, Stories from 2045 (Economic Singularity Foundation, 2019). Signatory, 2017 open letter to the United Nations on lethal autonomous weapons. Biography WPP acquired Satalia in 2021 and made its founder its Chief AI Officer across the group. That move put one person in charge of AI strategy across a FTSE 100 advertising and marketing holding company, with operating brands that touch most of the world’s largest consumer businesses. The job is what most boards are now wrestling with on a smaller scale. Daniel Hulme founded Satalia in 2008 out of his AI research at University College London, where he earned his EngD and went on to direct the Applied AI MSc programme. Satalia’s work for clients including Tesco, Unilever, PwC, BT and the BBC sat at the unglamorous end of AI, optimisation, decision intelligence and operational decision-making, which is where deployment usually succeeds or fails. In 2024 he co-founded Conscium, a commercial research organisation focused on machine consciousness and neuromorphic AI. The work matters commercially because the next set of AI governance questions, around verification, autonomy and accountability, are not solved by the current generation of large language models. He was a signatory to the 2017 open letter to the United Nations on autonomous weapons, alongside Musk, Hinton, Russell and Hassabis, which placed him in the public AI safety conversation long before it reached boardrooms. He remains UCL’s Computer Science Entrepreneur-in-Residence, holds Singularity University faculty status, and was elected a Founding Fellow of the Academy for the Mathematical Sciences in 2026. The combination matters for one practical reason. When he discusses how AI is being deployed inside a FTSE 100 company, the technical claims are coming from someone with a research apparatus underneath them. Key speaking topics Applied AI in large enterprises AI strategy and the Chief AI Officer role AI ethics, safety and governance Machine consciousness and frontier AI research Decision intelligence and optimisation The future of work under AI Organisational design through technology Ideal for Boards and executive committees making AI investment and governance decisions Chief AI Officers, CTOs, CIOs and Chief Data Officers shaping enterprise AI strategy Risk, audit and compliance leaders working out AI accountability Innovation, transformation and digital leaders moving AI beyond pilots Audience outcomes A clearer view of what AI can realistically deliver inside their own organisation in the next 18 months, separated from vendor narrative. Working language for the governance and safety questions their board will be asked, including where the limits of current AI sit. A more honest read on which AI use cases are commercially defensible and which are not yet. Exposure to frontier research questions, including machine consciousness, that will shape the next wave of AI regulation.