Future of Work

Why organisations work with Allister Frost A named, proprietary framework, the ReadyAlready Growth Cycle, that gives audiences a shared language for working through change fatigue, rather than a generic motivational message. Operator credibility from inside Microsoft’s first digital marketing strategy function, including the “I’M A PC” campaign and global Windows and Office launches, applied directly to the human side of technology adoption. Two decades of brand and transformation work at Kimberly-Clark and Microsoft, recognised by a Cannes Silver Direct Lion and twice by the Lester Wunderman Award for Outstanding Creative Work. A track record of large all-hands and culture-led audiences at BBC, Vodafone, 3M, Cisco, Pfizer, Hyundai, GE HealthCare and Reckitt, where the brief is energy and adoption, not abstract futurism. Recognition by his own profession: Chartered Marketer, Elected Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing, twice UK Digital Marketing Personality of the Year, and Winner at The Speaker Awards 2023. Biography highlights Microsoft’s first Head of Digital Marketing Strategy, responsible for global Windows and Office launch campaigns, including “I’M A PC”. Former Kimberly-Clark marketing leader for Andrex, Kleenex and Huggies. Author of ReadyAlready: The Future-Ready Mindset to Keep Up, Stand Out, and Shape What’s Next. Cannes Silver Direct Lion winner; twice winner of the Lester Wunderman Award for Outstanding Creative Work. Chartered Marketer and Elected Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing. UK Digital Marketing Personality of the Year, 2013 and 2019; Winner, The Speaker Awards 2023. Biography Most large organisations have not run out of change programmes. They have run out of people willing to engage with the next one. Years of restructure, platform migration and now AI rollout have left workforces more fatigued than resistant, and that is the harder problem to solve. Frost spent two decades inside that problem before he started speaking about it. At Kimberly-Clark he led marketing for Andrex, Kleenex and Huggies. He then moved to Microsoft as the company’s first Head of Digital Marketing Strategy, where he ran global launch campaigns for Windows and Office and the “I’M A PC” work. The work earned a Cannes Silver Direct Lion and two Lester Wunderman Awards for Outstanding Creative Work. Since 2012 he has built a speaking practice around a single framework, the ReadyAlready Growth Cycle, set out in his book ReadyAlready: The Future-Ready Mindset to Keep Up, Stand Out, and Shape What’s Next. The argument is that the gap holding back most transformation programmes is not strategy or technology, it is the human appetite to engage. The framework gives audiences a working language for that gap. His audiences reflect the brief. He has worked with BBC, Vodafone, 3M, Cisco, Pfizer, Hyundai, GE HealthCare, Reckitt, Bloomberg and Network Rail, typically at all-hands events, culture forums and senior leadership retreats. The Chartered Institute of Marketing has elected him a Fellow, and the UK industry named him Digital Marketing Personality of the Year in 2013 and again in 2019. He won at The Speaker Awards 2023. Key speaking topics Future-Ready Mindset Change fatigue and workforce adoption The human side of AI and digital transformation Employee engagement at scale Culture in technology-led change Leadership communication during transformation Marketing and brand reinvention Ideal for CHROs, Chief People Officers, and internal communications leads planning all-hands and culture moments Transformation and change leaders preparing workforces for AI and digital adoption C-suite and senior leadership teams running annual kickoffs, town halls, and strategy retreats CMOs and brand leaders rebuilding marketing function capability in an AI-shaped market Audience outcomes A shared vocabulary for naming and working through change fatigue inside a team The ReadyAlready Growth Cycle as a usable framework, not just a model on a slide A clearer view of which human capabilities still matter as AI absorbs more of the work Practical prompts to turn passive consumers of change into active contributors Re-energised commitment to the next phase of transformation, anchored to specific personal habits

Why organisations work with Marcel Pesch He runs a structured AI executive education programme, MMAI, with practitioner faculty drawn from Deutsche Bahn, E.ON, Strategyzer, and academic and legal specialists. Few keynote speakers come with their own curriculum. His material covers the full operating stack: generative AI, data science, AI Act compliance, automation and agents, and leadership in the AI era. Audiences leave with a managerial map, not a tour of tools. He treats fairness, bias, and equality of opportunity as operating problems for organisations deploying AI, not as a separate ethics conversation. Fifteen years of coaching practice underpins the keynote register. Sessions translate into how managers behave on Monday, not just what they understood on Friday. Active member of the German AI Association (KI Bundesverband), with a stated engagement in AI standards and ethical guidelines. Biography highlights Founder of academy4.ai, an AI education and training organisation Designer of the MMAI (Master Management with AI) programme, a nine-module cohort-based course covering AI strategy, compliance, and deployment Faculty network on MMAI includes Prof. Dr. Johannes Stübinger (HS Coburg), Dr. Kristina Schreiber (LOSCHELDER), and practitioners from Deutsche Bahn, E.ON, and Strategyzer Member of the German AI Association (KI Bundesverband) Over 15 years of professional coaching experience with individuals and organisations Keynote topics include “AI on Steroids”, “AI & Diversity and Inclusion”, “AI & Inequality of Opportunity”, and “AI & the Workforce of Tomorrow” Biography Most companies have already bought into AI. The harder question is whether their managers can use it well: govern its decisions, interrogate its outputs, and redesign work around it. That is the gap Marcel Pesch built academy4.ai to close. Through the MMAI (Master Management with AI) programme, Pesch and his faculty take working professionals through nine modules covering generative AI, data science, AI Act compliance, marketing and sales applications, automation and agentic systems, sustainability, project management, and leadership in the AI era. Faculty draw on academic specialists, legal experts at LOSCHELDER, and practitioners from Deutsche Bahn, E.ON, and Strategyzer. Alongside the curriculum, Pesch speaks publicly on the harder political content of AI deployment: bias in algorithmic systems, equality of opportunity, and the way AI is reshaping who gets which jobs. He is a member of the German AI Association (KI Bundesverband), engaged in standards and ethical guidelines for the field. Fifteen years of coaching shape his keynote register. Sessions are designed to leave senior audiences with a managerial map of where AI changes their work, where it does not, and where the next governance and fairness decisions will sit. Key speaking topics AI literacy for managers and executives Operationalising AI beyond pilots AI Act and regulatory compliance for business leaders Bias and equality of opportunity in algorithmic systems Automation and agentic systems in the workplace The AI-era workforce and future skills Leading teams in AI-augmented organisations Ideal for C-suite teams and senior managers preparing to deploy AI across operations Heads of HR, transformation, and learning planning AI workforce upskilling Boards seeking a structured view of AI governance, compliance, and risk DEI and ethics leads working with technical teams on algorithmic fairness Audience outcomes A practical map of where AI changes managerial work and where it does not Sharper language for governing AI decisions, model outputs, and vendor claims A clearer view of bias and equality-of-opportunity questions in algorithmic systems A workable next step for AI literacy across leadership and team levels

Why organisations work with Zack Kass He built the commercial engine inside OpenAI that translated frontier research into deployed products, which is a different vantage point from any external futurist or consultant. His “Unmetered Intelligence” framework gives boards a concrete way to plan for AI as infrastructure, not as a vendor decision, and it travels into capital allocation conversations rather than staying inside the IT function. He works directly with the leadership teams of named global organisations, including Coca-Cola, Morgan Stanley, Microsoft, Deloitte, and Amgen, so the room recognises that the playbook has been pressure-tested against companies they compete with. His Wiley book, The Next Renaissance, is a USA Today, Publishers Weekly, and LA Times bestseller, which gives a CHRO or CIO a coherent reference for their executive team and not only a keynote. He is a recurring voice on Bloomberg and CNBC on AI risk, capital, and workforce impact, so the credibility check a buyer does after the call confirms the brief. Biography highlights Former Head of Go-To-Market at OpenAI; built the sales, partnerships, and customer success teams. Author of The Next Renaissance: AI and the Expansion of Human Potential (Wiley, 2026); USA Today, Publishers Weekly, and LA Times bestseller. Executive-in-Residence, University of Virginia McIntire School of Commerce. Founder of ZKAI LLC; author of the “Unmetered Intelligence” white paper. Advisor to Fortune 1,000 leadership teams including Coca-Cola, Morgan Stanley, Microsoft, Deloitte, PayPal, MetLife, TikTok, Amgen, and The Hartford. Recurring AI commentator for Bloomberg and CNBC; bylined contributor to Fortune. B.A., University of California, Berkeley. Biography OpenAI’s research only became a market because someone had to translate model weights into contracts, support, and adoption inside the world’s largest companies. That commercial scaffolding was built by the team Kass led as Head of Go-To-Market, and it is the unusual seat that shapes what he now offers to boards. The proposition is operational. Most leadership teams have approved AI pilots. Few have made the harder decisions about where intelligence sits in the workflow, who is accountable for outcomes, and what gets reorganised when cognitive capacity stops being scarce. Kass writes about that shift in his Wiley book, The Next Renaissance, and codifies it in his “Unmetered Intelligence” framework, which treats AI as infrastructure on the order of electricity rather than as a product category. The advisory base is concrete. Coca-Cola, Morgan Stanley, Microsoft, Deloitte, PayPal, MetLife, TikTok, Amgen, and The Hartford have all worked with him directly, and the case studies that surface in his keynotes are drawn from those rooms. Bloomberg and CNBC use him as a recurring voice on AI risk and capital allocation, and his Fortune writing pushes the same argument into wider business debate. He is also Executive-in-Residence at UVA McIntire, which keeps the research and the boardroom work on the same circuit. What boards take from him is a sharper read on the next two to three years of AI deployment, written in the language of operating decisions rather than technical features. The choices around workforce, capital, and capability sequencing are no longer theoretical for most executive teams, and Kass is one of the few voices who has watched them get made from the inside of the company that triggered them. Key speaking topics Applied AI strategy for Fortune 1,000 leadership teams The Unmetered Intelligence thesis AI deployment beyond pilots Workforce redesign in the age of AI The Next Renaissance: AI and human potential AI risk, regulation, and board governance Capital allocation and AI infrastructure Ideal for CEOs, CIOs, CTOs, and CHROs setting enterprise AI strategy Boards and audit committees pressure-testing AI risk and governance posture Senior leadership offsites focused on AI deployment and workforce redesign Industry conferences for financial services, technology, healthcare, and consumer goods Audience outcomes A clearer line between AI experimentation and the operating decisions that follow it A board-ready framing for AI as infrastructure, drawing on the Unmetered Intelligence thesis Specific reference points from named Fortune 1,000 deployments rather than generic case studies A defensible position on AI risk, capital allocation, and workforce impact to take back to executive teams

Why organisations work with Katie Hilborn She has spent two decades making high-stakes calls in environments where missing a signal carried immediate human cost, so her account of judgment under pressure is operational, not theoretical. The Architect’s Read gives leaders a repeatable way to trace a problem from surface event to root structure, rather than a set of principles to admire and forget. As founder of Regenerative Infrastructure Holdings, she is building AI infrastructure in practice, which makes her credible on the human judgment the technology cannot replace. Recognition includes a Silver Anthem Award in the same cycle as the Dalai Lama and Jane Goodall, multiple Telly Awards, and the President’s Volunteer Service Award for Lifetime Achievement. Biography highlights Founder and CEO, Compass Rose International, the nonprofit behind the Girls INpowerment Center in Nepal, which holds the GuideStar Platinum Seal of Transparency. Founder of Regenerative Infrastructure Holdings, developing AI data centres powered by renewable energy and governed by community trusts, with a first site under way in Nepal. Led 13 aid missions in Nepal after the 2015 earthquake; uncovered and reported a child-trafficking ring during relief operations. 10x award-winning humanitarian, including a Silver Anthem Award in the same cycle as the Dalai Lama and Jane Goodall, multiple Telly Awards, and the President’s Volunteer Service Award for Lifetime Achievement (AmeriCorps); member of the Forbes Nonprofit Council. Has spoken at RegenWorld, EarthX, the Global Family Office Investment Summit, and Northern Illinois University; featured in New York Magazine, NBC, and ABC. B.A., Colorado Mesa University; M.Ed., Grand Canyon University; certified secondary teacher. Biography The 2015 Nepal earthquakes flattened entire villages in minutes. Katie Hilborn flew in with no organisation behind her, led 13 aid missions across remote districts, and read what the relief effort had dismissed as chaos for what it was: a child-trafficking network preying on displaced girls. Spotting it was the easy part. Tracing it to the structure producing it, and building something that addressed it at the source, became the work of the next decade. That skill has a name in her work: pattern recognition under pressure. It is the ability to catch the weak signal everyone else rationalises away and to act while acting is still cheap. As organisations hand routine decisions to AI, this is the judgment that does not automate, and the one leaders need most when the stakes are highest. Hilborn now applies the same read at infrastructure scale. As founder of Regenerative Infrastructure Holdings, she is developing AI data centres powered by renewable energy and governed by community trusts, with a first site under way in Nepal. She continues to lead Compass Rose International, the nonprofit behind the Girls INpowerment Center, which holds the Guidestar Platinum Seal of Transparency. Her flagship keynote, Seeing What Others Miss, turns this into The Architect’s Read: a method for catching a problem at the surface, tracing it to the structure beneath, and acting where it resolves. The credibility behind it is a field record built under real operational stakes. She is a Silver Anthem Award winner recognised in the same cycle as the Dalai Lama and Jane Goodall, holds multiple Telly Awards and the President’s Volunteer Service Award for Lifetime Achievement, and sits on the Forbes Nonprofit Council. Key speaking topics Purpose-driven culture and leadership Heart-centric leadership through change Resilience and decision-making under pressure Social entrepreneurship and impact at scale Intuition and leadership judgment Employee engagement and meaning at work Humanitarian leadership lessons for business Ideal for CHROs and people leaders rebuilding engagement after restructure or mission drift CEOs and executive teams setting culture through integration, transformation, or strategic reset Foundations, family offices, and impact investors framing purpose for portfolio leadership teams All-hands and emerging-leader audiences where the brief is conviction and resilience, not content depth on a technical topic Audience outcomes A working definition of purpose that survives contact with budget, headcount, and reorganisation decisions A specific lens, drawn from frontline humanitarian operations, for making heart-led decisions that still hold up to scrutiny Renewed belief among leaders that conviction is a strategic asset, not a soft skill, with examples to back it up A vocabulary for talking about meaning at work that does not collapse into cliche when senior leaders use it Practical takeaways from Compass Rose’s operating record on building and sustaining mission-led teams

Why organisations work with Greg Orme A book-length, award-winning thesis behind every keynote. The Human Edge won Business Book of the Year 2020 and gives senior audiences a single, memorable framework, the four “superpowers”, they can apply to their own teams the next morning. London Business School pedigree as a builder, not just a teacher. He founded LBS’s Centre for Creative Business and ran executive programmes there for seven years, so the content has been pressure-tested on senior cohorts before it reaches a client stage. Recognised by peers in the people function. HR Magazine named him among its Most Influential Thinkers in 2022, which matters to CHROs sponsoring leadership and capability work. Translates the AI conversation into something a workforce can act on. Where most AI speakers describe the technology, Orme tells leadership teams what human behaviours their organisation now has to develop deliberately. Biography highlights Author of The Human Edge: How Curiosity and Creativity are Your Superpowers in the Digital Economy (Pearson, 2019), named Business Book of the Year 2020 and translated into Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese. Author of The Spark: How to Ignite and Lead Business Creativity (FT Publishing, 2014). Founding CEO of London Business School’s Centre for Creative Business; programme director and lecturer at LBS for seven years. Named to HR Magazine’s Most Influential Thinkers 2022. Forbes contributor writing on leadership, creativity and the digital economy. Clients include Microsoft, Accenture, BMW, EY, Sky, Virgin Media O2, ING, Novo Nordisk, the International Olympic Committee and the World Economic Forum. Biography The arrival of generative AI has forced a question that most leadership development programmes were not built to answer. If machines can now write, summarise, analyse and code, what exactly should an organisation expect from its human workforce? Greg Orme’s work is a direct response to that question. His book The Human Edge, published by Pearson and named Business Book of the Year 2020, argues that four human capabilities, consciousness, curiosity, creativity and collaboration, become more commercially valuable as routine cognitive work is absorbed by technology. The thesis has travelled. The book has been translated into Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese, and the framework now sits behind his keynote and executive education work. That work has institutional roots. Orme founded London Business School’s Centre for Creative Business and spent seven years there as a programme director and lecturer, building and running executive education for senior cohorts. He holds an LBS MBA. HR Magazine named him among its Most Influential Thinkers in 2022, a recognition that matters in the people function where his content is most often commissioned. What separates him from other voices in the AI conversation is the audience he is talking to. He is not selling tooling, and he is not forecasting. He is telling leadership teams what their organisations have to develop in their people, deliberately and at scale, so that an AI strategy produces advantage rather than displacement. Key speaking topics Human capability in the age of AI Leadership in the digital economy Creativity and innovation as organisational disciplines Curiosity and learning culture Purpose-driven leadership Influence and storytelling for senior leaders Ideal for CHROs and chief people officers redesigning leadership and learning around AI. Executive committees setting the human capability agenda alongside a digital or AI strategy. Senior leadership offsites where the brief is to reset behaviours, not roll out tools. Boards and partner groups in professional services confronting AI’s impact on talent value. Audience outcomes A shared vocabulary, the four superpowers, for what the organisation now needs from its people. A clearer view of where AI raises the value of human judgment and where it erodes it. Specific behavioural prompts senior leaders can model in their own teams the following week. A sharper sense of which leadership development investments still pay back in an AI-enabled organisation.

Why organisations work with Bobby Umar He treats connection as a teachable skill, not a personality trait. The 5 C’s of Connection framework, drawn from his TEDxUWO talk, gives leaders and employees a structured way to build trust, credibility and influence inside and outside the organisation. His background is unusually broad for the topic: engineering at Bombardier, brand marketing at Kraft and Unilever, and Second City improv training. That mix shows up in how the work lands, structured enough for senior audiences, performative enough to hold a room. He is a recognised authority on LinkedIn as a professional channel. Multiple LinkedIn Top Voice designations, including an early Presentation Skills badge, mean leaders learn from someone who has built an audience the way they are being asked to. Inc. Magazine Top 100 Leadership Speaker and five-time TEDx speaker, which gives senior audiences confidence that the craft and delivery will match the content. Biography highlights Five-time TEDx speaker, including “The 5 C’s of Connection” (TEDxUWO) and “School: Learning to Fly” (TEDxUTSC). Inc. Magazine Top 100 Leadership Speaker, listed alongside Richard Branson and Brené Brown. LinkedIn Top Voice, with early badges for Presentation Skills, Thought Leadership and Personal Branding. Author of How to Network Anytime, Anywhere, With Anyone (#1 on three Amazon bestseller lists). Founder of DYPB (Discover Your Personal Brand), described as North America’s largest personal branding event, with 60 experts and over 300 delegates. Career background spans Bombardier (engineering), Kraft and Unilever (brand marketing) and Second City (performing arts). B.Eng., McGill University; MBA, McMaster University. Biography Most leadership development still treats connection as a soft skill that either comes naturally or does not. Bobby Umar’s work argues the opposite. His 5 C’s of Connection framework, popularised through a viral TEDxUWO talk, breaks authentic relationship-building into components that can be taught to engineers, sales teams, senior executives and entry-level employees alike. That argument is grounded in an unusual professional path. Before becoming a speaker, Umar trained as an engineer at McGill, ran brand marketing for Kraft and Unilever, took an MBA at McMaster and studied improv at Second City. The result is a practitioner who can move between the analytical and the performative without losing either audience. His credentials inside the speaking and creator economy are deep. Five TEDx talks. Inc. Magazine Top 100 Leadership Speaker. LinkedIn Top Voice across several categories. Author of How to Network Anytime, Anywhere, With Anyone, a #1 Amazon bestseller. Founder of DYPB, the personal branding conference that became the largest of its kind in North America. What makes him commercially useful to organisations is the translation step. Personal branding, networking, social audio, vulnerable storytelling: these are not pitched as marketing tactics but as the connective infrastructure of modern professional life. For organisations trying to develop influential leaders, engaged employees and externally visible experts, Umar offers a practical, structured account of how connection actually works. Key speaking topics Authentic networking and relationship-building Personal branding for leaders and employees LinkedIn presence and professional digital reputation Vulnerable storytelling and leadership communication Heart-centred leadership Employee advocacy and internal brand-building Connection skills in hybrid and remote teams Ideal for CHROs, talent and L&D leaders investing in employee engagement, advocacy and internal communication. Marketing, communications and executive leaders building external thought leadership programmes for senior teams. Sales and business development functions where individual networking capability drives revenue. Conference organisers building agendas on leadership, future of work, employee experience or culture. Audience outcomes A working language for connection, anchored in the 5 C’s framework, that audiences can apply immediately to internal and external relationships. A clearer view of how personal branding intersects with leadership credibility, especially on LinkedIn. Practical methods for using storytelling, vulnerability and digital channels to build trust at scale. A reframing of networking as a professional discipline, not a transactional activity reserved for extroverts. Confidence to put senior leaders and frontline employees on visible platforms without sounding scripted.

Why organisations work with Joe Mull He has a named, defensible framework, Employalty, that reduces engagement to three operating levers (Ideal Job, Meaningful Work, Great Boss) and links each to retention, reputation and revenue. He brings the credibility of running learning and development inside a major US healthcare employer, UPMC Physician Services, so the content lands with operators rather than HR theorists. He is one of fewer than 300 living speakers inducted into the Professional Speakers Hall of Fame, a body of work recognised by his peers in 2025. Publishers Weekly named Employalty a top business book of the year, which gives the keynote an evidence base buyers can quote back to their executive team. He owns the manager-as-multiplier argument with specific, repeatable behaviours, not generic “be a better boss” framing, which is what a CHRO actually needs to commission a change programme around. Biography highlights 2025 inductee, Professional Speakers Hall of Fame (CPAE), National Speakers Association. Certified Speaking Professional (CSP), NSA. Author of Employalty, named a top business book of the year by Publishers Weekly. Author of No More Team Drama and Cure for the Common Leader. Former Head of Learning and Development, Physician Services, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC). Host of Boss Better Now, ranked among the top management podcasts globally. Named to Global Gurus’ Top 30 Management Speakers list in 2026. Contributor to and featured in The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Fortune, and Harvard Business Review. Biography Engagement scores are a lagging measure of something more basic: whether people have a reason to commit. After three years of forced redesign, employees are choosier, quieter and more willing to walk, and the manager layer is where most organisations lose them. That is the territory Joe Mull works in. His Employalty framework, set out in the book Publishers Weekly named a top business book of the year, names three conditions that decide whether an employee commits or coasts: an Ideal Job, Meaningful Work, and a Great Boss. The argument is operational. Each lever maps to a manager behaviour, and each manager behaviour maps to retention, reputation and revenue. Before he was a keynote speaker, Mull ran learning and development for Physician Services at UPMC, one of the largest physician groups in the United States. That history matters. The content was built inside a healthcare employer under real workforce pressure, not derived from survey data, which is why operators tend to leave his sessions with specific things to change on Monday. In 2025 he was inducted into the Professional Speakers Hall of Fame, a recognition fewer than 1% of professional speakers receive. His podcast Boss Better Now sits among the most-listened-to management shows, and his commentary appears in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Fortune and Harvard Business Review. The through-line across all of it is the same wager: that the quality of bosses, not the quality of perks, decides whether a workforce stays. Key speaking topics Employee commitment and retention The manager-employee relationship as a business lever Workplace culture in the post-pandemic labour market Team dynamics and workplace conflict Leadership development for frontline and mid-level managers Workforce trends and the changing social contract of work Ideal for CHROs and senior HR leaders rebuilding retention and engagement strategy Heads of learning and development designing manager capability programmes Healthcare, hospitality, professional services and other high-turnover sectors CEO and executive offsites where culture and people strategy are on the agenda Audience outcomes A shared language for what actually drives commitment at work, anchored in the Employalty framework A clear read on where the manager layer is creating or destroying retention Specific behaviours managers can adopt to lift discretionary effort A sharper view of the trade-offs between engagement spend and manager capability investment Practical tools for addressing team drama, gossip and the conflict patterns that drain culture

Why organisations work with Calum Chace He has built two books and two operating ventures around the same argument: that AI changes capability, then labour, then the structure of the economy. Boards hear a coherent thesis, not a trend update. He coined the term “economic singularity” and wrote the book on it. Leadership teams trying to think clearly about technological unemployment get the original framing, not a recycled version. Through Conscium, the AI safety company he co-founded in 2024, and the linked PRISM research non-profit, he speaks from inside the live debate on machine consciousness and agent evaluation, not from the sidelines. Thirty years across BBC journalism, Financial Times writing, KPMG strategic intelligence and CEO roles mean he frames AI for commercial audiences in language they already use. Biography highlights Co-founder of Conscium (2024), an AI safety company working on neuromorphic computing, AI agent evaluation, and machine consciousness. Co-founder of the Economic Singularity Foundation, a think tank on the future of jobs in an AI economy. Author of Surviving AI and The Economic Singularity, plus the techno-thrillers Pandora’s Brain and Pandora’s Oracle. Co-host of the London Futurist Podcast and the PRISM Podcast on sentient machines. Read Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford; trained as a journalist with the BBC; contributed to the Financial Times. Former director of KPMG’s strategic and commercial intelligence media practice and CEO of several businesses before moving to full-time writing and speaking in 2012. Biography Artificial intelligence is two distinct strategic questions for a board, not one. The first is what AI does to the products and services a business sells. The second is what it does to the labour the business buys. Calum Chace has spent a decade arguing that the second question is the one most organisations are underprepared for, and that the gap between AI as a capability story and AI as an economic story is where the strategic risk sits. His two non-fiction books frame that gap. Surviving AI deals with the long-term safety question once machines start to match and then exceed human capability. The Economic Singularity gave a name to the moment when technological unemployment becomes the dominant labour reality, and made the case that this is a question of decades, not centuries. The economic singularity is now a term other writers use; he wrote the book it came from. The work has continued into operating ventures. In 2024 he co-founded Conscium, an AI safety company developing neuromorphic computing, agent evaluation methods and research on machine consciousness. Conscium has since seeded PRISM, a non-profit researching sentient machines, which he co-hosts as a podcast. Earlier, he co-founded the Economic Singularity Foundation, a think tank on the future of jobs. Before any of that, Chace read PPE at Oxford, trained as a BBC journalist, wrote for the Financial Times, ran the media practice at KPMG’s strategic and commercial intelligence group, and held several CEO roles. That commercial background is why his talks for senior audiences sound like strategy conversations rather than technology briefings, and why he can argue both sides of the AI question, capability and consequence, in the same room. Key speaking topics Artificial intelligence and the two singularities The economic singularity and the future of jobs AI safety, alignment and machine consciousness Digital transformation and AI in the enterprise AI in healthcare AI in education The philosophy of AI Ideal for Boards and executive committees building a long-range AI strategy CHROs and people leaders facing workforce redesign around AI capability Conferences for technology, financial services, healthcare and professional services leadership Government, regulator and policy audiences working on AI governance and labour-market policy Audience outcomes A clearer separation between AI as a product question and AI as a labour question, and a sense of which one their organisation is more exposed to. A working definition of the economic singularity and a view on whether the case for serious technological unemployment is credible. A more informed position on AI safety, machine consciousness and agent evaluation as governance issues, not laboratory topics. Language and reference points senior leaders can use in their own board and investor conversations about AI.

Why organisations work with Philipp Kristian He treats trust as an operating variable in digital and AI transformation, not a soft cultural theme, and equips leaders with language to discuss it at board level. His thesis predates the current AI debate. The Trust Economy was published in 2017 and has since been translated into German by Springer Gabler, giving his framework a longer track record than most current AI-trust voices. He brings an Asia-anchored view of technology adoption, drawing on a decade of work with Fortune 500s in Singapore and across JAPAC, which most Western-based speakers in this space cannot offer. He has lectured inside INSEAD Executive Education, CEDEP, Singapore Management University, and Civil Service College Singapore, so executive audiences encounter material that has been pressure-tested with senior cohorts. Biography highlights Author of The Trust Economy (Marshall Cavendish, 2017) and RESET: Rethinking Our World And Creating A Different Future (World Scientific, 2021). German edition of The Trust Economy published by Springer Gabler in 2018. Faculty and lecturer engagements at INSEAD Executive Education, CEDEP, Singapore Management University, and Civil Service College Singapore. World Economic Forum Global Shaper, Kairos Society Fellow, and Leader of Tomorrow at the St Gallen Symposium. TEDx speaker, with keynote audiences including Meta, BCG, EY, Munich Re, Standard Chartered, Salesforce, LVMH, Microsoft, Deloitte, P&G, and Zillow. Based in Singapore, with a decade of innovation work across Asia for Fortune 500 corporations and high-growth scale-ups. Biography Trust is the part of digital transformation that the engineering plan does not solve. AI rollouts stall, data products fail to land, and customer adoption flattens for reasons that sit outside the technology stack. Philipp Kristian has spent more than a decade arguing that this is the real bottleneck, and that organisations need a strategy for it. His 2017 book The Trust Economy, published by Marshall Cavendish and later translated into German by Springer Gabler, set out an early framework for how digital businesses earn and lose trust at scale. RESET, published by World Scientific in 2021, extends the argument into the post-pandemic shift in how people relate to institutions, technology, and each other. The work has been refined inside executive classrooms. He has held faculty and lecturer engagements at INSEAD Executive Education, CEDEP, Singapore Management University, and the Civil Service College in Singapore, where the material is taught to senior public and private sector cohorts. The World Economic Forum named him a Global Shaper; the Kairos Society named him a Fellow; the St Gallen Symposium named him a Leader of Tomorrow. Based in Singapore, he brings a non-Western reading of how trust travels through markets, regulators, and customer bases that most boards no longer treat as peripheral. Keynote audiences include Meta, BCG, EY, Munich Re, Standard Chartered, Salesforce, LVMH, Microsoft, Deloitte, and Zillow. Key speaking topics Trust in AI and data systems Digital transformation and adoption Customer experience in digital businesses Future of work and human-technology collaboration Leadership in the digital economy Brand trust and reputation under technological change Ideal for Boards and executive committees overseeing AI, data, and digital transformation programmes CIO, CTO, CDO, and Chief Trust Officer functions working through adoption and governance questions CMO and customer experience leaders rebuilding brand credibility in digital channels Financial services, professional services, and regulated industries facing trust and reputation pressure from AI deployment Audience outcomes A working vocabulary for discussing trust as an operating asset in digital and AI strategy at board level A reading of why AI and data initiatives lose momentum at the adoption stage, with the levers leaders can use to keep them moving An Asia-anchored perspective on how trust is built and broken across regulators, customers, and employees in fast-digitising markets Specific examples drawn from a decade of innovation work with Fortune 500 corporations and scale-ups in Singapore and across JAPAC

Why organisations work with Valentini Konstantinidou A working scientist, not a wellness presenter. Her PhD work on Mediterranean diet and olive oil nutrigenomics is published in peer-reviewed journals including Nutrients, which makes the content defensible inside a medical or HR governance review. She translates nutrigenetics into corporate programme design. DNANUTRICOACH has been doing this commercially in Barcelona since 2015, including for B2B clients, so the operating model is tested. She gives wellbeing teams a way to talk about ESG that is grounded in measurable employee health, not narrative. The connection she draws between Mediterranean diet research, chronic disease prevention and productivity is specific and citable. Trilingual delivery in English, Spanish and Greek, with academic teaching credentials at UOC and TECH in Spain. Useful for multinational employers running pan-European wellbeing programmes. Biography highlights PhD in Biomedicine, Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona (2010); MSc Biomedical Research, Pompeu Fabra (2007); degree in Human Nutrition and Dietetics, CEU San Pablo University, Madrid (2019). Founder of DNANUTRICOACH, Barcelona (2015), and of the first Nutrigenetic Centre in Athens (2020). Co-author of “Nutritional Genomics and the Mediterranean Diet’s Effects on Human Cardiovascular Health” (Nutrients, 2016). Ambassador, European Lifestyle Medicine Organization. Member, American Society of Nutrition since 2012. Collaborating professor at UOC and TECH universities; university lecturer accreditation by AQU Spain. Author of the first Greek-language book on nutrigenetics for a general audience (2021). Biography Most corporate wellness programmes assume one set of habits will work for an entire workforce. Nutritional genomics has spent two decades disproving that assumption. Valentini Konstantinidou’s research career, from Pompeu Fabra University to her current commercial practice, sits inside that disproof. She completed her PhD in Biomedicine at Pompeu Fabra in 2010, with research on the nutrigenomic effects of virgin olive oil polyphenols within the Mediterranean diet. She added a degree in Human Nutrition and Dietetics from CEU San Pablo University in Madrid in 2019, which makes her a registered dietitian-nutritionist in Spain as well as a published researcher. Her 2016 paper in Nutrients on Mediterranean diet and cardiovascular health remains one of the cited reference points in the field. In 2015 she founded DNANUTRICOACH in Barcelona, then opened the first Nutrigenetic Centre in Athens in 2020. The business translates genetic test results into specific dietary and lifestyle recommendations. The corporate arm applies the same model to employee wellbeing, designing programmes that connect nutrition science to chronic disease prevention and to ESG reporting on workforce health. For organisations, the practical value is a defensible alternative to generic wellness. Her work gives HR and benefits leaders a way to spend wellbeing budget on interventions with a published evidence base, delivered by a researcher with academic teaching posts at UOC and TECH and ambassador status with the European Lifestyle Medicine Organization. Key speaking topics Precision nutrition and corporate wellbeing Nutritional genomics and nutrigenetics Mediterranean diet and chronic disease prevention Sustainable nutrition in workplace programmes ESG and employee health metrics Behaviour change in dietary habits Extra virgin olive oil and healthy ageing Ideal for CHROs and benefits leaders designing or auditing employee wellbeing programmes ESG and sustainability leads building defensible workforce health metrics Heads of corporate health, occupational health and medical directors in multinational employers Leadership audiences at food, pharmaceutical, insurance and healthcare companies Audience outcomes A working understanding of how nutritional genomics differs from generic wellness advice, and where each is appropriate Specific examples of how Mediterranean diet research links to chronic disease prevention and productivity A framework for connecting employee wellbeing spend to ESG reporting in a way that holds up to scrutiny Practical entry points for piloting precision nutrition inside an existing wellbeing programme

Why organisations work with Hollie Castro Operating record across the moments that test a people function: IPO transition at YETI, take-private of BMC Software under Bain Capital and Insight Partners, and VC-backed scale-up at Miro under Accel and ICONIQ. Sits credibly in the boardroom on AI and the workforce, co-chairing the NACD Austin chapter and leading director-level sessions on GenAI governance and the multigenerational workforce. Has actually run HR at global scale: workforces of 1,500 to 50,000, 90 countries, budgets to USD 200 million, 25-plus acquisitions integrated. Bridges Fortune 500 and late-stage start-up worlds, including current advisory work with HR-focused AI founders at Series A through her firm HC Advice. Recognised externally where it counts: Financial Times Group Top 100 Board Candidates and the HR Transformation award at Silicon Valley’s High Tech Symposium. Biography highlights Five-time CHRO and Chief Administration Officer: YETI, BMC Software, Talisman Energy, Miro, Kony. Co-Chair, Austin Advisory Board, National Association of Corporate Directors. Advisory Board Member, Texas A&M Mays School of Business Center for Human Resources. Stanford University and NACD certified Corporate Director; MBA, Thunderbird School of Global Management. Financial Times Group Top 100 Board Candidates; HR Transformation award, Silicon Valley High Tech Symposium. Published in Fast Company, Forbes, The Corporate Board, and Directors & Boards; featured at HR Retail and on the Revenue Builders podcast. Biography Few HR leaders have sat in the seat across as many high-pressure transitions. As CHRO, Castro took YETI through its IPO from private equity ownership at Cortec, led BMC Software through its take-private under Bain Capital and Insight Partners, and ran people strategy at Miro and Kony alongside Accel and ICONIQ Capital. The thread across those mandates is the same: HR as an operating discipline tied to capital events, not a support function. Her scope has been unusually broad. Workforces of 1,500 to 50,000, operations in 90 countries, budgets to USD 200 million, and more than 25 acquisitions integrated. That range includes the cultural architecture work that ESG and compensation committees now ask for, as well as the harder M&A integration calls that decide whether a deal earns its thesis. The board work has become a second discipline. Castro co-chairs the Austin advisory board of the National Association of Corporate Directors and led the 2024 NACD Director Summit conversation on how boards govern GenAI alongside a five-generation workforce. She is a Stanford and NACD certified Corporate Director, a Thunderbird MBA, and was named to the Financial Times Group’s Top 100 Board Candidates. Today she advises HR-focused AI founders at Series A through HC Advice and writes for Fast Company, Forbes, The Corporate Board, and Directors & Boards on the governance questions that follow when HR is asked to deploy AI at scale. Key speaking topics The CHRO as a strategic business partner Generative AI in HR and talent acquisition Global HR strategy and M&A integration Board governance of AI and the workforce Scaling people functions through IPO and take-private events ESG, compensation, and human capital in the boardroom The multigenerational workforce Agile HR and design thinking Ideal for CHROs, Chief People Officers, and CPO-track HR leaders preparing for board-facing roles. Boards, compensation committees, and audit committees engaging with AI, human capital, and ESG oversight. CEOs and executive teams in private equity portfolio companies or scale-ups preparing for IPO, M&A, or take-private events. Leadership programmes for senior women in operating and director roles. Audience outcomes A clearer picture of what boards now expect from HR on AI, talent risk, and human capital reporting. Specific reference points on integrating HR through IPO, take-private, and cross-border M&A. A working view of how generative AI is changing talent acquisition and the CHRO operating model. Director-level language for governing AI ethics, workforce design, and compensation in tandem.

Why organisations work with Eric Termuende He gives leadership teams a working language for incremental change. The “one-degree shift” framework reframes culture work as a sequence of small, low-resistance moves teams can actually make, instead of a programme to be launched. His research base is original. Rethink Work and the surveys behind it focus on what attracts and retains the right people for a specific workplace, not the best people in the abstract, which is a more useful question for most CHROs. He pitches at team level, not enterprise level. Most future-of-work speakers operate at workforce-strategy altitude. Termuende speaks to the manager and the leader of leaders, which is where engagement and retention are actually won or lost. He has tested the material against operating environments at Amazon, IBM, Coca-Cola, Toyota, and Nokia. The keynotes have been refined through repeated commercial use, not built for the stage. Biography highlights Co-Founder of NoW of Work, a workplace innovation and leadership consultancy. Author of Rethink Work (Barlow Books), an Amazon best-seller on engagement and retention. Named to American Express’s Top 100 Emerging Innovators under 35. 2022 Arch Award for Early Career Achievement, Haskayne School of Business, University of Calgary. TEDx speaker (TEDxBCIT, “Bigger than Work”) and Walrus Talks contributor. Host of the One Degree Shift podcast, interviewing operators and executives on incremental team change. Biography Most culture programmes fail not because the diagnosis is wrong, but because the prescribed change is too big to land. Teams are asked to adopt new behaviours on top of existing workload, and the new behaviours do not survive the first quarter. Eric Termuende’s work begins from this observation. The argument running through Rethink Work and the surveys behind it is that engagement and retention are decided at the team level, by a small number of recurring behaviours, and that the right intervention is operational rather than aspirational. NoW of Work, the consultancy Termuende co-founded, is built around that premise. The “one-degree shift” framework is its working vocabulary: small, specific behaviour changes designed to reduce friction and build trust without triggering another transformation initiative. The credentials sit underneath the argument. American Express named him to its Top 100 Emerging Innovators. The University of Calgary’s Haskayne School of Business gave him its Arch Award for Early Career Achievement in 2022. The material has been refined in front of audiences at Amazon, IBM, Coca-Cola, Toyota, Nokia, and Zoom, and on TEDx and Walrus stages. For senior people leaders, the proposition is unusually concrete. Termuende leaves an audience with a way to act on Monday morning, not a thesis to debate. That is rare in the future-of-work category, where most speakers operate one level too high to be useful to the line managers who actually run the teams. Key speaking topics Future of work and workforce design Team performance and trust Talent attraction and retention Workplace culture and engagement Multigenerational teams Leadership in uncertainty AI and the manager’s role Ideal for CHROs and people leaders responsible for engagement and retention strategy Leadership development and learning teams designing manager curricula Operations and divisional leaders running multigenerational teams under change Executive offsites focused on culture and talent in growth or post-merger contexts Audience outcomes A working framework for designing small behavioural shifts that hold at team level A clearer answer to which people the organisation should be attracting, not just how to attract more Practical positions on the multigenerational workforce that line managers can apply A reframing of culture work as operational practice, not communications activity