Future of Work

Why organisations work with Shivvy Jervis A forecaster who has worked through Microsoft, the United Nations, Salesforce, Lenovo and the UK Government’s digital division, briefing each on where digital, AI and neuroscience advances are heading next. A second specialism in applied neuroscience, covering drive, stress and persuasion, which gives her sessions a behavioural dimension most technology speakers cannot offer. A broadcaster’s craft built across CNN, Reuters and a Discovery Channel documentary, so she can hold a leadership audience for a keynote and run the full event around it. Recognition from Forbes (Trailblazer), Management Today (Champion of Change) and Britain’s Women of the Year, anchoring her credibility outside the speaker circuit. Sustained focus on human-centred technology rather than tool demos, which lands with audiences asking how to deploy AI without losing the workforce in the process. Biography highlights Founder of FutureScape 248, a social innovation and forecasting consultancy launched in 2017. Former CNN broadcast journalist; presenter of a two-part Discovery Channel documentary on the future of cities. Forecasting work conducted for Microsoft, the United Nations, Salesforce, Lenovo and the UK Government’s digital division. Named a Trailblazer by Forbes, one of Britain’s Women of the Year, and a Champion of Change by Management Today. Two long-running streaming video series on technology and innovation with a reported audience of 14 million. Recognised by the World Economic Forum and cited by CNN as one of the most trusted voices on technology. Biography Most boards now sit between two pressures on technology. There is a brief to “do something with AI” arriving from above, and a workforce asking what any of it means for their job. The reading they need is editorial, not vendor-led. That is the gap Shivvy Jervis works in. As founder of FutureScape 248, the forecasting consultancy she launched in 2017, she has briefed Microsoft, the United Nations, Salesforce, Lenovo and the UK Government’s digital division on what is plausible, what is hype, and what is close enough to commit capital to. The frame is consistently human-centred: not what the technology does, but what it changes about how people work, decide and buy. A second strand of her practice draws on applied neuroscience, covering drive, stress and persuasion at work. That gives her keynote a behavioural dimension that most technology speakers cannot match, and it lands with audiences who are wary of pure futurism. The output is editorial in tone, built from years as a broadcast journalist with CNN, Reuters and Discovery Channel. Her recognitions sit outside the bureau circuit, including Forbes Trailblazer, Britain’s Women of the Year, and Champion of Change from Management Today. The reason senior buyers commission her is more specific than awards. She translates the noise around AI and emerging tech into the small number of shifts a leadership team needs to act on. Key speaking topics Artificial intelligence and human-centred deployment Forecasting and emerging technology Digital transformation and the future of work Applied neuroscience for performance and decision-making Cybersecurity, privacy and data ethics Innovation strategy in regulated industries Ideal for Boards and executive teams setting AI and digital strategy CHROs and transformation leads handling workforce response to AI Innovation, digital and customer experience leadership Industry conferences seeking a forecaster who can also host Audience outcomes A clear read on which AI and emerging-tech shifts will affect the audience’s industry on a near-term horizon. A behavioural lens on adoption, covering how people respond to AI in their work and what that means for change plans. Specific examples from her work with Microsoft, the UN, Salesforce, Lenovo and UK Government, used as reference points rather than case studies. A vocabulary leaders can use internally to separate hype from substance in vendor and pilot decisions.

Why organisations work with James Taylor A named, published model. The Eight Ps of SuperCreativity (Purpose, Personality, Practice, People, Process, Place, Product, Persuasion) gives leadership teams a common language for a problem most companies still discuss in abstractions. Field-tested with the buyers he is pitching to. Apple, Cisco, Deloitte, EY, Visa, IBM, McDonald’s, Sony and Johnson and Johnson have used his work with their teams, so the credibility problem is solved before the conversation starts. Primary research, not curation. Through the SuperCreativity Podcast he has interviewed hundreds of founders, researchers and creative directors, which gives his keynotes specific stories that bureau-written talks on AI cannot match. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts with a TED talk on augmenting human creativity, which signals institutional seriousness for boards that want more than a futurist pitch. Works in partnership as The Ethical Futurists with Alison Burns when briefs require joint treatment of AI, sustainability and ethical business practice. Biography highlights Author, SuperCreativity: Accelerating Innovation in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (Sirmione Publishing, 2026). Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA); MBA. TED speaker: SuperCreativity, Augmenting Human Creativity in the Age of AI. Host, SuperCreativity Podcast, featuring interviews with creative leaders, founders and AI researchers. Advisory and keynote client roster includes Apple, Cisco, Deloitte, EY, Visa, IBM, McDonald’s, Sony, Mercedes-Benz and Johnson and Johnson. Co-founder of The Ethical Futurists with Alison Burns, focused on sustainability, ethics and future of work. Biography The conversation in most boardrooms has moved on from whether to adopt AI to whether AI is producing anything genuinely new. Productivity gains are easier to claim than originality, and executives now want to understand what separates teams that use AI to compress existing work from teams that use it to generate ideas their competitors have not yet considered. That is the question Taylor has built his practice around. His book SuperCreativity, published by Sirmione Publishing in 2026, argues that the age of the lone genius is over and that creative advantage now belongs to leaders who can orchestrate collaboration between humans and machines. The Eight Ps framework at the centre of the book (Purpose, Personality, Practice, People, Process, Place, Product, Persuasion) is how he translates the argument into something a leadership team can act on. The evidence base is unusually direct. Through the SuperCreativity Podcast he has run long-form interviews with founders, researchers, and creative directors across Silicon Valley and beyond, building a library of primary material on how creative work is actually being done under AI conditions. That research feeds keynotes for Apple, Cisco, Deloitte, EY, Visa, IBM, McDonald’s, Sony, Mercedes-Benz and Johnson and Johnson. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, holds an MBA, and has delivered a TED talk on augmenting human creativity in the age of AI. With Alison Burns he also runs The Ethical Futurists, a dedicated partnership for briefs that sit at the intersection of AI, sustainability and corporate ethics. Key speaking topics Human-AI creative collaboration Innovation capability and the Eight Ps of SuperCreativity Creative leadership in AI-enabled organisations Applied artificial intelligence for business teams Ethics and responsibility in AI adoption Future of work and creative skills Ideal for C-suite and board sessions weighing the strategic return on AI investment beyond productivity Chief Innovation Officers, CTOs and transformation leads responsible for integrating AI into existing teams Leadership offsites for creative, marketing, product and R and D functions Industry conferences on AI, innovation and the future of work Audience outcomes A shared framework, the Eight Ps of SuperCreativity, that leadership teams can carry back into their own planning A clearer view of where AI augments human judgement and where it dilutes it Specific examples of how large organisations are using AI to raise creative output, not just operational speed A starting position on the ethical questions that follow any serious AI rollout Prompts for how to redesign roles, teams and workflows around human-AI collaboration

Why organisations work with Lisa Bodell She attacks the root cause most innovation programmes ignore. Her thesis is that complexity, not a lack of ideas, is what stops large companies from changing. She brings a tested operational toolkit, including the “Kill a Stupid Rule” exercise and the Why Simple Wins toolkit, that teams can run inside the business the week after the keynote. Her client list runs through hard-to-move organisations such as Pfizer, Lockheed Martin, Bloomberg, Google, SAP and Citigroup, where the simplification argument has to survive contact with regulated, matrixed environments. Her two Routledge books, Kill the Company (Axiom Best Business Book Award, 2014) and Why Simple Wins, give leadership teams a shared language and a structured method that outlasts the session. She is a working operator, not only a writer. She has run FutureThink for more than two decades and writes monthly for Forbes, so the material is being pressure-tested in the field continuously. Biography highlights Founder and CEO of FutureThink, an innovation and simplification training firm working with global enterprise clients since 2003. Author of Why Simple Wins (Routledge) and Kill the Company (Routledge / Bibliomotion), the latter an Axiom Best Business Book Award winner. Monthly contributor to Forbes; quoted or published in Fast Company, WIRED, The New York Times, Inc., Bloomberg Businessweek, Harvard Business Review, FOX News and CNN. TEDxNormal speaker, “How Simplification is the Key to Change”. Named to the Forbes “50 Leading Female Futurists” list in 2020. Has taught innovation at American University and Fordham University, and worked with clients including Pfizer, Lockheed Martin, Bloomberg, Google, SAP and Citigroup. Biography Most innovation problems inside large companies are not idea problems. The pipeline is full. The strategy decks exist. What is missing is room to act on any of it, because calendars, approval chains and legacy rules have absorbed the working week. This is the territory Lisa Bodell has built a career on. She is the founder and CEO of FutureThink, which she launched in 2003 to do something narrower and more useful than most innovation consulting. Rather than add another framework, FutureThink helps leadership teams remove. Remove low-value meetings, remove obsolete rules, remove the tasks that consume capacity without producing decisions. The argument is that simplification is the precondition for innovation, not a side benefit. That argument runs through her two books with Routledge, Kill the Company and Why Simple Wins. Kill the Company, which won the 2014 Axiom Best Business Book Award, is built around a simple inversion: instead of asking how to grow, ask how a competitor would put you out of business, and act on the answer. Why Simple Wins extends the method into a practical toolkit for stripping out the work that does not matter, with exercises like “Kill a Stupid Rule” that have been used inside companies including Pfizer, Lockheed Martin, Bloomberg and Google. Bodell writes monthly for Forbes and has been featured in Fast Company, WIRED, The New York Times, Harvard Business Review and Bloomberg Businessweek. Forbes named her to its 2020 list of 50 Leading Female Futurists. The reason senior teams keep booking her is narrower than that profile suggests. She gives leaders a defensible reason, and a method, for taking things off the plate. Key speaking topics Organisational simplification Innovation and disruption Killing complexity in large organisations Future of work and ways of working Change and culture transformation Provocative questioning as a leadership tool Creating capacity for higher-value work Ideal for CEOs and executive teams trying to free up capacity inside complex, matrixed organisations. Chief Strategy, Transformation and Innovation Officers running enterprise-wide change programmes. Operations and HR leaders auditing meetings, rules and processes that no longer earn their place. Leadership offsites and innovation summits where the brief is to provoke, not to inform. Audience outcomes A direct case for treating complexity, not idea generation, as the binding constraint on innovation. A set of named exercises, including “Kill a Stupid Rule” and the Why Simple Wins toolkit, that teams can run on Monday morning. A sharper question set for leadership meetings, modelled on the Kill the Company method. A shared language for distinguishing low-value busywork from work that produces decisions and outcomes. Permission, from a credible outside voice, to remove rather than add.

Why organisations work with Lecyca Curiel A first-person Gen Z voice grounded in anthropological field research, rather than a marketing-agency reading of survey data. Affiliation with WHETSTON, the Dutch strategic foresight house that briefs senior leaders across Europe, gives her work analytical weight beyond the usual “young person on stage” booking. Track record of putting the Gen Z question in front of buyers who are unusually demanding: Walmart international executives, Google marketing managers, the European Parliament Youth Outreach Unit, BDO Norway. Recognised by Het Financieele Dagblad in its 2019 list of 50 most promising young talents in the Netherlands, a credential that signals she was taken seriously inside Dutch business media before the speaking circuit picked her up. Brings an inclusion lens shaped by Indonesian and Dutch Caribbean heritage and a Humanity in Action fellowship, so DEI inside her sessions reads as substance, not decoration. Biography highlights Generation Z researcher and keynote speaker with WHETSTON, the strategic foresight think tank founded by Thimon de Jong. Selected by Het Financieele Dagblad as one of 50 promising young talents in the Netherlands, 2019. Studied Liberal Arts and Sciences with a Cultural Anthropology focus at Erasmus University College, Rotterdam. 2019 Amsterdam Fellow with Humanity in Action; co-author of an action project on inclusive Dutch national remembrance. Speaking clients include Walmart, Google, the European Parliament Youth Outreach Unit, BDO Norway, FRED Leadership Forum, and Institute for the Future. Working anthropologist and documentary filmmaker, with projects on cultural heritage, decolonisation, and intergenerational memory. Biography Generation Z is the first cohort that grew up entirely inside the platforms most companies are still learning to manage. The numbers are familiar to any CHRO. The interpretation of those numbers, almost without exception, is filtered through people who are not part of the cohort. Lecyca Curiel works on the other side of that filter. She joined WHETSTON, the Amsterdam-based strategic foresight think tank founded by Thimon de Jong, after he scouted her at age seventeen following a public talk at the IMC Weekendschool. She has been delivering keynote work and strategic research for the firm since, with clients that include Walmart international executives, Google marketing managers, the European Parliament Youth Outreach Unit, BDO Norway, and FRED Leadership Forum. Het Financieele Dagblad named her one of 50 promising young talents in the Netherlands in 2019. Her academic grounding is in Cultural Anthropology at Erasmus University College, and she works in parallel as a documentary filmmaker on questions of heritage, memory, and decolonisation. As a 2019 Amsterdam Fellow with Humanity in Action she co-led a project on whether Dutch national remembrance is genuinely inclusive. The combination matters in the room. When she discusses what young employees actually want from work, it lands as field observation, not opinion. The argument she brings to leadership teams is narrower and harder than the usual generational keynote. Stereotypes about Gen Z are inexpensive to repeat and expensive to act on. What organisations need, on her reading, is a working model of intergenerational collaboration that makes sense to a 58-year-old executive and a 24-year-old engineer in the same conversation. That is the work she does on stage and in the strategy rooms WHETSTON is invited into. Key speaking topics Generation Z in the workforce Intergenerational collaboration Diversity, equity and inclusion from a Gen Z perspective Mental health across generations Future of work and talent retention Strategic foresight on cultural and demographic change Ideal for CHROs and heads of talent designing retention and engagement strategy for a multigenerational workforce. Boards and executive committees stress-testing assumptions about younger consumers and younger employees. DEI leads moving from awareness programmes to operational change. Leadership development teams building cross-generational management capability. Audience outcomes A clearer, evidence-based picture of what Gen Z employees and consumers actually expect, sourced from inside the cohort. Specific entry points for retention and engagement work in organisations with four or five active generations. A working language for intergenerational conversations that does not collapse into stereotype. A sharper read on where DEI commitments stall between stated policy and daily management.

Why organisations work with Julia Hobsbawm She named the problem before most boards understood it. The Nowhere Office gave senior leaders a vocabulary and a framework for hybrid work at the moment they most needed one. Workplace social health is a category she effectively defined, and Bayes Business School made her its first Honorary Visiting Professor in the field. Her thinking is built from primary research and senior-leader interviews through Workathon, the invitation-only network she founded for decision-makers wrestling with workforce change. She translates a fast-moving debate into board-ready language. Her Bloomberg Work Shift column ran for two years through the period when work itself was being rewritten. She has a four-book arc, from Fully Connected to Working Assumptions, that gives buyers a coherent intellectual backbone, not a topic of the moment. Biography highlights OBE for Services to Business, 2015. Honorary Visiting Professor of Workplace Social Health, Bayes Business School (formerly Cass). Author of The Nowhere Office, The Simplicity Principle, Fully Connected and Working Assumptions. The Simplicity Principle won the American Book Fest Best Book Award 2020 and the NYC Big Book Award 2020; Fully Connected was shortlisted for the CMI Management Book of the Year. Bloomberg contributing columnist; author of the Working Assumptions column for Bloomberg Work Shift, 2022 to 2024. Founder and CEO of Workathon, and founder of the World Work Organisation, launched in 2025. Biography The office stopped being a single place in 2020 and never went back. The Nowhere Office, the 2022 book that gave the post-pandemic workplace its working name, set out the case that hybrid was not a phase to be managed but a structural shift to be designed for. Julia Hobsbawm wrote it from inside the conversation, drawing on a decade of research into how connectivity changes work. That research has a formal home. Bayes Business School made her its first Honorary Visiting Professor of Workplace Social Health in 2018, formalising a category she had been building since Fully Connected, the 2017 book shortlisted for the CMI Management Book of the Year. The Simplicity Principle followed in 2020 and won the American Book Fest Best Book Award and the NYC Big Book Award, extending the argument into how leaders think and decide under cognitive load. Her platform now runs in two directions. Workathon, founded in 2024, is an invitation-only network of senior decision-makers feeding her primary research on workforce change, and produced its first annual study, The United State of Work, in 2025. The World Work Organisation, launched the same year, is an attempt to give the future-of-work conversation a global institutional anchor. She writes for buyers as well as boards. The Working Assumptions column ran in Bloomberg Work Shift from 2022 to 2024, and her latest book of the same name reads as a field report on what leaders thought they knew about work before Covid and generative AI, and what they know now. She was awarded the OBE for Services to Business in 2015. Key speaking topics The future of work and the Nowhere Office Hybrid and flexible working models Workplace social health and connectivity Simplicity and decision-making in complex organisations Generative AI and the human side of work Productivity, presence and the redesign of office life Ideal for CHROs and people directors redesigning hybrid policy and workplace strategy CEOs and executive teams navigating return-to-office and workforce expectations Boards and investors assessing workforce risk and organisational design Real estate, facilities and workplace experience leaders rethinking the role of the office Audience outcomes A clearer language for hybrid work, anchored in named frameworks rather than slogans. A sharper read on what employees now expect from work and how that reshapes retention. A practical lens on workplace social health as a measurable component of performance. An honest account of how generative AI is changing the texture of daily work, not just the tooling.

Why organisations work with Herminia Ibarra She supplies the missing operating manual for executive transitions. Her research names the specific trap, clinging to a proven identity, that causes capable leaders to stall in bigger roles. She owns a published, citable framework. “Outsight”, the principle that leaders think their way into new behaviours by acting first, gives a leadership team a shared vocabulary it can actually use on a Monday morning. Her HBR article “The Authenticity Paradox” reframed a live boardroom debate. It is one of the few pieces of leadership writing that gives senior teams permission to experiment with styles that do not yet feel like “them”. She sits at the top of the field by external measure, not self-description. Fellow of the British Academy, multi-cycle Thinkers50 listee, 2013 Thinkers50 Leadership Award, Charles Handy Chair at LBS. She speaks to succession, sponsorship, and women’s advancement with the same empirical grounding, which matters for organisations running serious talent and inclusion agendas rather than performative ones. Biography highlights Charles Handy Professor of Organisational Behaviour, London Business School; prior faculty posts at INSEAD and Harvard Business School. Fellow of the British Academy (elected 2019). Multi-cycle Thinkers50 ranked thinker; winner of the Thinkers50 Leadership Award, 2013. Author of Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader (Harvard Business Review Press) and Working Identity (Harvard Business Press), translated into 16 languages. Judge, Financial Times Business Book of the Year Award; member, World Economic Forum Expert Network; Governor of London Business School. Ph.D. in Organisational Behaviour, Yale University (National Science Fellow). Biography Capable executives often stall in their first genuinely senior role. The research by Herminia Ibarra explains why: they try to think their way into the new job from the inside, when the only reliable route is the opposite. Act first, reflect later, and let the new behaviours gradually reshape how you see yourself. That argument, captured in her book Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader and in the “outsight” principle, is what most distinguishes her work. Her HBR article “The Authenticity Paradox” extended the case into one of the thorniest topics in executive development, how leaders can experiment with unfamiliar styles without feeling like frauds. Working Identity, her earlier book, has been translated into 16 languages and sits on the Thinkers50 Management Classics list. Ibarra holds the Charles Handy Chair at London Business School, with prior tenured posts at INSEAD and Harvard Business School. She is a Fellow of the British Academy, a multi-cycle Thinkers50 honoree, winner of the 2013 Thinkers50 Leadership Award, and a Governor of LBS. She also judges the Financial Times Business Book of the Year and sits in the World Economic Forum Expert Network. For a leadership team wrestling with succession, executive transitions, or the gap between the leader a company has and the leader it now needs, few academics anywhere offer a more precise diagnosis or a more usable set of moves. Key speaking topics Executive transitions and stepping up to bigger roles Leadership identity and the authenticity paradox Career reinvention and the “outsight” principle Leadership in the age of AI Sponsorship, succession, and women’s advancement Authentic leadership development Organisational reinvention under change Ideal for CHROs and chief talent officers redesigning executive development and succession pipelines CEOs and boards planning leadership transitions at the top team Senior leaders stepping into enterprise-wide or first-time general management roles Inclusion, sponsorship, and high-potential programmes for underrepresented senior talent Audience outcomes A clear diagnosis of why smart executives stall in bigger roles and what to do about it Language and examples for leading through a change in identity, not just a change in strategy A usable principle, “outsight”, that senior leaders can apply to their own weekly calendar A sharper view of authenticity that replaces “be yourself” with a more workable standard for growth Practical cues for building sponsorship and succession conversations that actually move careers

Why organisations work with Heather McGregor She has built the institutional machinery that other organisations cite. The Taylor Bennett Foundation, which she founded in 2008, remains a reference point for ethnic diversity in UK communications, and the 30% Club steering committee she helped found reshaped how FTSE boards talk about women’s representation. She speaks from the inside of a listed-company boardroom, not from the outside. She has served as Independent Non-Executive Director and Audit Committee member at IGT since 2017, which means her governance and risk arguments are tested against fiduciary duty. She runs a business school, having moved from Executive Dean of Edinburgh Business School to Provost and Vice Principal of Heriot-Watt University Dubai. Her view on executive development is shaped by curriculum decisions, not anecdote. She has 17 years of weekly Financial Times writing as Mrs Moneypenny behind her, plus three Penguin books on careers and personal finance. The clarity of argument is built in. A Dame and Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, with prior CBE for services to diversity. These are credentials that travel in board conversations where credibility is the constraint. Biography highlights Provost and Vice Principal, Heriot-Watt University Dubai; previously Executive Dean, Edinburgh Business School. DBE, 2023 New Year Honours, for services to education, business and heritage in Scotland; CBE, 2015, for services to business and diversity. Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Independent Non-Executive Director and Audit Committee member, International Game Technology PLC, since March 2017. Founder, Taylor Bennett Foundation; founding member, 30% Club steering committee. Financial Times columnist as Mrs Moneypenny for 17 years; author of three books published by Penguin and Portfolio. Biography The Taylor Bennett Foundation was set up in 2008 to address a specific failure: the UK communications industry was hiring from a narrow demographic and could not explain the pattern of its own succession. Heather McGregor founded it from inside her own executive search firm, alongside University of East London and Brunswick Group. It is now cited by more than 200 supporting organisations and remains one of the most concrete institutional answers to a problem most companies still describe as aspirational. That instinct to convert intent into operating practice runs through her career. She spent eight years as a sell-side analyst with ABN Amro across London, Hong Kong, Singapore and Tokyo, then bought and ran the executive search firm Taylor Bennett for seventeen years. Her Financial Times column under the name Mrs Moneypenny ran weekly for the same period, alongside three Penguin books on personal finance and women’s careers, including the bestselling Career Advice for Ambitious Women. In 2016 she moved into higher education as Executive Dean of Edinburgh Business School at Heriot-Watt University, and now serves as Provost and Vice Principal of the university’s Dubai campus. The portfolio also includes a non-executive directorship at IGT (now Brightstar Lottery), where she sits on the Audit Committee, and earlier work chairing Career Academies UK. The Royal Society of Edinburgh elected her a Fellow, and she was made a Dame in 2023 for services to education, business and heritage in Scotland. What she brings to a leadership room is the rare combination of practitioner, governor and educator on a single set of questions: how organisations actually promote, govern and allocate capital, and how those choices either widen the talent pool or quietly narrow it. Key speaking topics Inclusive leadership and women’s progression Board governance and audit committee priorities Executive development and the modern MBA Diversity as a measurable operating outcome Personal financial literacy and women’s wealth Leadership careers across sectors and geographies Ideal for FTSE and listed-company boards, nomination and audit committees CHROs and heads of talent owning succession and diversity targets Business school audiences, MBA cohorts, executive education programmes Senior women’s leadership networks and ambitious mid-career professionals Audience outcomes A sharper sense of what diversity programmes need to look like to survive board scrutiny A working view of how governance, audit, and remuneration shape who actually rises in an organisation Practical reference points from the Taylor Bennett Foundation and 30% Club on what has and has not worked A direct read on financial literacy as a leadership capability, not a personal-finance topic Confidence to make the case for the next promotion, board seat, or capital decision

Why organisations work with Georgie Barrat Seven years fronting The Gadget Show built a specific skill, making complex technology feel usable to a general audience, and she brings that directly into boardroom and all-hands settings where AI adoption is stalling. She runs The AI Method, her own programme for helping non-technical users integrate AI into their work, so the keynote is informed by what actually lands with finance, HR and operations staff rather than with engineers. She has hosted on-stage for Google, IBM, Sony, Huawei, Mastercard and BAFTA, which means the moderating craft is tested at the level of audience and panellist that senior events require. Her keynote circuit includes Web Summit, Mobile World Congress and Smart City Expo, the venues where the AI and future-of-work conversation is actually being shaped. She is a credible voice on women in technology and STEM inclusion through sustained work with Stemettes, the IET, Girls in ICT and Childnet, which makes her a natural fit for diversity-led tech events rather than a bolt-on. Biography highlights Presenter of Channel 5’s The Gadget Show for seven years from 2017. Regular contributor to BBC Morning Live and stand-in host for Jeremy Vine on 5. Founder of The AI Method, an AI adoption programme for non-technical users and solopreneurs. Keynote speaker at Web Summit, Mobile World Congress and Smart City Expo. Host and moderator for Google, IBM, Sony, Huawei, Mastercard and BAFTA. First-class degree in English Literature from King’s College London. Biography Most organisations have an AI strategy. Far fewer have a workforce that knows what to do with it. That translation problem, between a tool a leadership team has bought and the person on the payroll expected to use it, is the ground Georgie Barrat has worked for more than a decade. Her training is broadcast. Seven years as a presenter of Channel 5’s The Gadget Show taught her to make complex consumer and enterprise technology legible to a general audience without losing the point. That discipline now runs through her keynotes on AI, digital transformation and the future of work, delivered at Web Summit, Mobile World Congress and Smart City Expo, and at corporate audiences for Google, IBM, Sony, Huawei, Mastercard and BAFTA. Barrat founded The AI Method, a programme designed for women and solopreneurs using AI without a technical background. It gives her keynote material an unusual grounding. She is not theorising about adoption; she is testing what actually moves a non-engineer from curiosity to use. That edge matters for any leader whose AI rollout depends on marketing, finance, HR and operations staff, not data scientists. She is also a sustained advocate for women in tech and STEM inclusion, working with Stemettes, the IET, Girls in ICT and Childnet. On stage she hosts, moderates and keynotes. Off stage she still reports, with regular slots on BBC Morning Live and Jeremy Vine on 5, which keeps the material current rather than curated. Key speaking topics Artificial intelligence and workforce adoption Future of work in an AI-powered organisation Digital transformation and culture change Consumer and enterprise technology trends Women in technology and STEM inclusion Event hosting, moderation and on-stage interviewing Ideal for Leadership teams and all-hands audiences grappling with AI rollout across non-technical functions. CHROs, L&D leads and transformation directors planning workforce upskilling around AI. Tech, telecoms and consumer brands needing a broadcast-grade host or moderator for flagship events. Employee networks and diversity councils building credible women-in-tech programmes. Audience outcomes A clearer picture of where AI creates real productivity gains inside the business versus where the hype is running ahead of the use case. Practical language for leaders to use with non-technical staff so adoption feels less threatening and more achievable. A sharper view of which emerging technologies, from generative AI to spatial computing, warrant attention on a three-year horizon. Evidence-backed framing for women-in-tech and STEM inclusion work that goes beyond celebration days.

Why organisations work with Erica Dhawan She has a named thesis built for the AI moment. Use Your Brain, her forthcoming book, gives executive teams a method for the problem they now all face: moving fast with AI without sliding into cognitive autopilot. Her argument is that speed has become the commodity and judgment the real differentiator. She owns two further published frameworks, Connectional Intelligence and Digital Body Language, each with its own book, research base and Fortune 500 application record. Few speakers in this space operate from a body of work this specific. Thinkers50 recognition and a Wall Street Journal bestseller give her credibility with boards and executive committees that are sceptical of soft-skill keynotes. The work has been pressure-tested across unusually wide terrain: World Economic Forum, US Army, Coca-Cola, FedEx, Goldman Sachs, Walmart and Cisco. The frameworks travel across sector, hierarchy and culture. Biography highlights Author of the forthcoming Use Your Brain: How to Think Deeper in a World on Autopilot, on rebuilding judgment as AI accelerates everyday work. Wall Street Journal bestselling author of Digital Body Language: How to Build Trust and Connection, No Matter the Distance. Co-author of Get Big Things Done: The Power of Connectional Intelligence with Saj-nicole Joni. Named to Thinkers50; shortlisted for the Thinkers50 RADAR award for emerging management thinkers. Founder and CEO of Cotential, advising global organisations on 21st-century collaboration. TED speaker; talk on connection across distance has surpassed 2 million views. Contributor to Harvard Business Review, Fast Company and the Wall Street Journal. Education: Wharton (BS), MIT Sloan (MBA), Harvard Kennedy School (MPA). Biography Most organisations are racing to adopt AI. Far fewer are asking what it is quietly doing to the way their people think. When a tool can draft, summarise and recommend in seconds, the path of least resistance is to accept the output and move on. The real risk of the AI era, Erica Dhawan argues, is that people stop thinking for themselves while the machine does it for them. Her forthcoming book, Use Your Brain, is built for that problem. It gives leaders and teams a practical method for staying in the driver’s seat: catching the moment a team slips into cognitive autopilot, interrogating what AI hands them, and protecting the judgment no model can supply. The message lands because it is practical rather than alarmist. Speed is now the commodity, and judgment is the edge. That argument sits on more than a decade of work on how people connect and perform. Her Wall Street Journal bestseller Digital Body Language decoded the cues that replace tone, posture and eye contact when teams work across distance, channel and generation. Her earlier book with Saj-nicole Joni, Get Big Things Done, introduced Connectional Intelligence, the practical capability to combine networks, knowledge and ambition into outsized results. Thinkers50 has recognised her on this body of work, and her writing appears regularly in Harvard Business Review and Fast Company. The work has been stress-tested in unusually varied rooms. She has briefed the World Economic Forum, the US Army, and global teams at Coca-Cola, FedEx, Goldman Sachs, Walmart and Cisco. Her TED Talk on connection across distance has been watched more than two million times, rare reach for a topic most speakers struggle to make concrete. Key speaking topics Use Your Brain: judgment and human thinking in the age of AI High-performing teams in the age of AI Connectional Intelligence and cross-silo collaboration Digital Body Language and hybrid communication Trust and engagement across distributed workforces Multigenerational and cross-cultural communication Connectional Intelligence for sales and client relationships (optional, reinstated) Ideal for CEOs and executive teams setting the tone for how AI is adopted across the organisation. CHROs and heads of culture building human capability alongside AI rollout. Learning and leadership development heads building judgment and collaboration at scale. Cross-functional and cross-geography teams that need to think and decide together, faster. Sales and client-facing leaders translating Connectional Intelligence into stronger customer relationships. (optional, reinstated) Audience outcomes A shared language for using AI as an amplifier of human judgment rather than a substitute for it. Practical tools for recognising cognitive autopilot and interrogating what AI hands you. The Four Laws of Digital Body Language for cutting ambiguity and building trust across distance, channel and generation. A clearer read on where speed without judgment is quietly costing the organisation in decision quality. A sharper understanding of how AI changes, but does not replace, the work of human connection.

Why organisations work with Debbie Wosskow Three exits as founding CEO across PR, the sharing economy, and the women’s network category, giving boards a rare interlocutor who has personally taken capital, scaled a team, and sold the business. Co-Chair of the UK government’s Invest in Women Taskforce, which closed over £255m of committed capital for female founders in November 2024, the largest pool of its kind globally. Author of the 2014 government review “Unlocking the Sharing Economy”, the regulatory frame that legitimised platforms including Airbnb and Zipcar in the UK market. Operates inside the institutions that allocate capital and reputation: Senior Advisor at McKinsey, Non-Executive Director of Channel 4, Mayor of London’s Business Advisory Board. Co-author with Anna Jones of “Believe. Build. Become” (Penguin, 2019), the playbook that emerged from the AllBright Academy and continues to anchor her keynote material on women in leadership. Biography highlights Founder and exited CEO of three businesses: Mantra (sold to Loewy Group), Love Home Swap (sold to Wyndham Destination Networks, $53m, 2017) and AllBright (co-founded with Anna Jones, exited 2022). Co-Chair, Invest in Women Taskforce, appointed by Chancellor Rachel Reeves. Non-Executive Director, Channel 4, since January 2024. Senior Advisor, McKinsey & Company. OBE for services to business; Freedom of the City of London. Author of “Believe. Build. Become” (Penguin, 2019) with Anna Jones, and the UK government’s “Unlocking the Sharing Economy” review. Biography The UK economy loses roughly £250bn a year because women start and scale businesses at a fraction of the rate of men. Debbie Wosskow has spent two decades building inside that gap, first as a founder and now as the operator who sits at the table where institutional capital is reassigned. The Invest in Women Taskforce she co-chairs closed over £255m of committed funding for female founders in November 2024, the largest dedicated pool of its kind anywhere. Her authority on the topic is not theoretical. Wosskow founded and sold Mantra in her twenties, built Love Home Swap into a subscription business that Wyndham Destination Networks bought for $53m in 2017, and co-founded AllBright with Anna Jones in 2016, exiting in 2022. Each business was venture-backed and each exit was completed under her as CEO. Government and regulators use her as a translator between policy and operating reality. She wrote the 2014 review “Unlocking the Sharing Economy” for the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, the document that shaped how the UK regulates platforms including Airbnb and Zipcar. She now sits as Non-Executive Director of Channel 4, Senior Advisor to McKinsey & Company, and Executive Chair of The Better Menopause, with a board seat on the Mayor of London’s Business Advisory Board. For senior audiences, the proposition is specific: an operator who has built and sold three companies, written the rules for one of the largest new market categories of the last decade, and now controls one of the most consequential pools of growth capital aimed at women in the UK. Her co-authored Penguin title “Believe. Build. Become” remains the public expression of that argument. Key speaking topics Female entrepreneurship and access to capital Scaling and exiting venture-backed businesses The sharing economy and platform regulation Women in leadership and the AllBright thesis Investing in women as economic strategy Building and selling businesses at pace Boardroom voice for entrepreneurs Ideal for Boards and ExCos commissioning a serious operator voice on female founders, capital allocation, and the economics of inclusion. CEOs, CFOs and investment committees rethinking how growth capital reaches female-led businesses. Financial services, professional services and corporate venture audiences seeking a credible UK policy and operator perspective. Female leadership networks and executive development programmes within FTSE-listed and global organisations. Audience outcomes A clearer operator account of what scaling and exiting a venture-backed business actually requires, drawn from three completed exits. A working understanding of the £255m Invest in Women Taskforce model and what it signals for corporate capital strategy. The argument and the evidence base behind investing in female founders as a growth lever, not a CSR line. Practical perspectives from “Believe. Build. Become” on building career and leadership capital as a woman in a senior commercial role. A direct read on how Westminster, the City and corporate boards are currently moving on female entrepreneurship.

Why organisations work with Danah Zohar She gave the field two of its named ideas. Spiritual Intelligence (SQ) and Quantum Management are her frameworks, not borrowed labels, and they sit on a substantial body of published work. Her management thinking is built on physics and complexity science, not from organisational behaviour. That gives her a different starting point from most leadership voices, and a model that holds up when the operating environment becomes genuinely non-linear. The Haier group in China rebuilt its management system around her concept of “zero distance” between employee and customer, giving her work a named operating reference at one of the world’s largest appliance manufacturers. She brings credentials that are hard to assemble in one speaker: MIT, Harvard, Oxford’s Strategic Leadership Programme, Cranfield, Tsinghua, and induction into the Thinkers50 Hall of Fame in 2022. Biography highlights Inducted into the Thinkers50 Hall of Fame, 2022. Named in the 2002 Financial Times Prentice Hall Business Minds anthology of the world’s 50 greatest management thinkers. Teaches in the Oxford Strategic Leadership Programme at Oxford University’s Said Business School; Visiting Fellow at Cranfield School of Management. Visiting Professor at Tsinghua University School of Economics and Management and the China Academy of Art; entrepreneurial mentor at Haier. Author of The Quantum Self, ReWiring the Corporate Brain, SQ: Spiritual Intelligence, Spiritual Capital, The Quantum Leader, and Zero Distance: Management in the Quantum Age. Educated in Physics and Philosophy at MIT, with postgraduate work in Philosophy, Religion and Psychology at Harvard. Biography Newtonian management assumes that organisations behave like machines: predictable parts, fixed structures, control flowing from the top. The physics it is built on was superseded a hundred years ago. Danah Zohar has spent her career arguing that the management model needs to catch up, and showing senior leaders what a quantum and complexity-based alternative looks like in practice. Her two named contributions, Spiritual Intelligence (SQ) and Quantum Management, treat organisations as complex adaptive systems and treat people as carriers of meaning and purpose, not units of labour. The 12 Principles of SQ, set out in SQ: Spiritual Intelligence, the Ultimate Intelligence and developed further in Spiritual Capital, are drawn directly from the properties of living quantum systems. The work has been picked up where it matters. Haier, one of China’s largest industrial groups, restructured its management system around Zohar’s concept of “zero distance” between employee and customer, the basis of Zero Distance: Management in the Quantum Age (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). She teaches in the Oxford Strategic Leadership Programme, holds a visiting fellowship at Cranfield, and visiting professorships at Tsinghua and the China Academy of Art. For boards and executive teams, the practical question is how to lead a workforce and a strategy when the old assumptions of stability, hierarchy and pure financial logic no longer carry the weight they once did. Zohar offers a coherent answer, built from physics rather than rhetoric, and tested at scale inside one of the most ambitious corporate reorganisations of the last decade. Key speaking topics Quantum Management and the post-Newtonian organisation Spiritual Intelligence (SQ) and the 12 Principles Spiritual capital and purpose-driven leadership Complex adaptive systems applied to corporate strategy Meaning, motivation and the future of work Sustainable capitalism and the role of business in society Leading transformation at scale, with reference to the Haier model Ideal for CEOs and executive teams are redesigning operating models for higher autonomy and faster customer response Boards and senior leaders working through purpose, values and the social licence of the business Transformation leads and CHROs running culture and structure change in parallel Strategy and innovation leaders looking for a complexity-based alternative to classical planning Audience outcomes A working vocabulary for treating the organisation as a complex adaptive system, with concrete implications for structure, decision rights and information flow. A clearer link between purpose, meaning and commercial performance, beyond statement-of-values exercises. The Haier “zero distance” case as a worked reference for radical decentralisation at scale. Sharper questions for the executive team about where Newtonian assumptions still shape their planning, structure and incentives. An informed view of where Spiritual Intelligence sits alongside IQ and EQ in leadership development.

Why organisations work with Charlene Li Her central argument inverts the standard AI conversation: organisations do not need a separate AI strategy – they need AI deployed in service of the strategy already in place. That reframe moves boards from analysis paralysis to sequenced action, in a space where most external voices add complexity rather than remove it. The Disruption Mindset reverses thirty years of received innovation wisdom: disruption does not create growth – growth creates disruption. That distinction changes how leadership teams set strategy and allocate resources, not merely how they talk about change. Winning with AI (2025, co-authored with Dr. Katia Walsh, Harvard Business School’s inaugural Chief Digital Officer) is grounded in two years of research and 50+ executive interviews, and includes the Six-Quarter Walk planning tool – a practical sequencing instrument designed to be used without external consultants. Her research spans the full arc of technological disruption – internet, social media, digital transformation, generative AI – giving her longitudinal credibility when leadership teams are being asked to make bets on technologies whose business implications are still contested. As the founder of Altimeter Group, a firm built explicitly to compete with Gartner, Forrester, and IDC before being acquired by Prophet, Li has operated as both a researcher and an entrepreneur navigating the disruption she now advises on – a position most AI strategy voices cannot occupy. Biography highlights New York Times bestselling author of six books, including The Disruption Mindset, Open Leadership, Groundswell, and Winning with AI: The 90-Day Blueprint for Success (2025, co-authored with Dr. Katia Walsh) Founder of Altimeter Group (2008), a research and strategy firm that competed directly with Gartner, Forrester, and IDC; acquired by Prophet in 2015 Former Chief Research Officer at PA Consulting; currently leads Quantum Networks Group Graduate of Harvard College (magna cum laude, A.B.) and Harvard Business School (MBA) Named one of the 100 Most Creative People in Business by Fast Company; Top 50 Leadership Innovators by Inc.; LinkedIn Top 10 Voices on Company Culture (2022) Keynote speaker at the World Economic Forum, TED, and South by Southwest; regularly cited in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and Reuters; has appeared on 60 Minutes and CNBC Biography The most common failure point in AI transformation is strategic misdiagnosis. Charlene Li’s research – two years of fieldwork and more than 50 executive interviews for Winning with AI: The 90-Day Blueprint for Success (2025) – found that organisations treating AI as a strategy in its own right fall behind those that deploy it in service of the strategy they already have. That distinction, between AI as initiative and AI as instrument, is what separates pilot programmes from scaled competitive advantage. The same counterintuitive rigour runs through her earlier body of work. The Disruption Mindset (2019) challenged a core assumption of competitive strategy: disruption does not create growth – growth creates disruption. Companies that make disruption the goal, rather than the outcome of aggressively pursued growth opportunities, build the wrong culture and the wrong metrics. That argument, backed by research, has changed how board-level strategy conversations are framed, not just concluded. Li’s analytical credibility was built at Altimeter Group, the research firm she founded in 2008 as a deliberate competitor to Gartner, Forrester, and IDC – and which was acquired by Prophet in 2015. She subsequently served as Chief Research Officer at PA Consulting before founding Quantum Networks Group. Across those institutions, she has worked with organisations including 14 of the Dow Jones Industrial 30. She holds a Harvard MBA and an undergraduate degree from Harvard College, earned magna cum laude. Named one of the 100 Most Creative People in Business by Fast Company and one of Inc.’s Top 50 Leadership Innovators, Li has keynoted the World Economic Forum, TED, and South by Southwest, and is regularly cited by The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. What distinguishes her from others working the same ground is the research arc: she has tracked and advised on each major wave of technological disruption – internet, social media, digital transformation, generative AI – from inside analytical and advisory institutions, not from the outside looking in. Key speaking topics AI strategy and competitive deployment Disruptive transformation and growth strategy Leadership in the digital age Future of work and AI’s workforce implications Organisational culture and the disruption mindset Strategic decision-making under technological uncertainty Business model disruption and innovation Ideal for C-suite and board members responsible for AI investment and transformation decisions Chief Digital Officers, Chief AI Officers, and technology transformation leads Strategy and innovation leaders at established organisations facing competitive disruption Senior HR and people leaders managing workforce implications of AI adoption Audience outcomes A clear framework for aligning AI with existing business strategy – rather than building a parallel AI initiative Understanding of why most AI pilot programmes stall and what organisationally moves them into scaled production The Disruption Mindset distinction: why pursuing disruption as a goal is a strategic error, and what to pursue instead Practical tools for sequencing AI investments against business priorities, including the Six-Quarter Walk planning framework A more confident leadership posture for communicating AI strategy internally – to boards, to workforces, and across the organisation