Innovation & Disruption speakers

Why organisations work with Mira Murati She led the teams that built ChatGPT, DALL-E and Sora at OpenAI. Few speakers can describe frontier AI development from the operational seat; most describe it from the outside. She is the active founder and CEO of Thinking Machines Lab, currently raising capital, hiring researchers, building infrastructure and shipping product against the same labs leaders read about in the news. The view she offers is current. She has spoken publicly on AI governance from the position of someone who has actually shipped the systems being regulated, including at Dartmouth’s Thayer School of Engineering and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg Center. That changes the credibility of the conversation in a boardroom. Thinking Machines Lab is structured as a public benefit corporation. The trade-offs between commercial pressure and societal responsibility are written into how the company is governed, which is rare among frontier AI labs. Biography highlights Founder and CEO of Thinking Machines Lab, an AI public benefit corporation that raised $2 billion at a $12 billion valuation in July 2025, the largest seed round in venture capital history. Former Chief Technology Officer of OpenAI, with leadership across research, product and safety teams behind ChatGPT, DALL-E, Codex, Sora and GPT-4. Briefly named interim CEO of OpenAI during the November 2023 board transition. Senior product roles at Tesla on the Model X programme and at Leap Motion before joining OpenAI in 2018. Recognised in TIME’s 100 Most Influential People in AI (2024), TIME 100 Next (2023), Fortune’s 100 Most Powerful Women in Business (2023) and CNBC Changemakers (2026). Honorary Doctor of Science from Dartmouth College (2024); Bachelor of Engineering from Dartmouth’s Thayer School of Engineering and Bachelor of Arts from Colby College. Biography The decisions about how today’s frontier AI systems would be deployed were made inside small research labs, largely closed to outside scrutiny. The most consequential of those decisions, around ChatGPT, DALL-E, Sora and the GPT series, were made in rooms most boards still cannot see into. Mira Murati was in those rooms. She was Chief Technology Officer at OpenAI from 2022 until 2024, leading the research, product and safety teams behind the systems that brought generative AI into mainstream use. Her tenure included the November 2023 board episode, when she was named interim CEO during the brief removal of Sam Altman, returning to the CTO role within days. She left OpenAI in September 2024, by which point the products her teams had shipped were in everyday use by hundreds of millions of people. In February 2025 she founded Thinking Machines Lab, a public benefit corporation based in San Francisco. The company raised $2 billion at a $12 billion valuation in July 2025, led by Andreessen Horowitz with Nvidia, AMD, Cisco, Accel and Jane Street participating. It was the largest seed round in venture capital history. The lab’s first product, Tinker, launched in October 2025 as an API that lets researchers fine-tune frontier open-weight models without managing the underlying compute. Princeton, Stanford and Berkeley were among the early users. For senior audiences, this is unusual access: a builder’s view of frontier AI from someone still building. Murati has written for Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, on the language and creativity of large models. She has spoken publicly on AI governance at Dartmouth’s Thayer School of Engineering and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg Center. Just over a year after she left OpenAI, Thinking Machines Lab was reportedly in early talks to raise capital at a $50 billion valuation. Key speaking topics Frontier AI development and deployment Generative AI and large language models AI safety, governance and responsible deployment AI product leadership at scale Public benefit corporation models for frontier technology Fine-tuning and model customisation AI strategy and adoption for senior leaders Ideal for Boards and senior executive teams setting AI strategy and capital allocation CTOs, CIOs and chief AI officers responsible for technology platform decisions Public-sector and policy audiences engaging with AI regulation Technology investors and corporate development teams evaluating AI exposure Audience outcomes A direct read on how frontier AI labs actually make development and deployment decisions, drawn from someone who made them. A grounded view of where current AI capability sits and how far the field is from the frontier claims circulating in headlines. A working understanding of governance trade-offs from a builder’s perspective, including how a public benefit corporation structures them. A sharper view of which AI investments and adoption decisions deserve board-level attention over the next 18 to 36 months.

Why organisations work with Monique Morrow She speaks about cybersecurity and digital infrastructure as someone who built it. As the first CTO of Cisco Services and later CTO-Evangelist for New Frontiers Development and Engineering, she sat in the architecture seat through Cisco’s expansion into cloud, IoT and emerging networks. The standards organisations will operate under in extended reality and metaverse systems are partly being written by her. She chairs IEEE P7030 and IEEE P7016, two of the few global working groups defining how these technologies are assessed and built. Engineering credibility that few cybersecurity speakers match. More than seventeen USPTO patents covering networking, IoT, cybersecurity and data handling, plus three published technical books, mean she does not need to translate from analyst-speak. Board-level visibility into how distributed ledger governance actually works. As an Independent Director on the Hedera Council Board, she sees decisions on a major public DLT network being made, not just commented on. Her digital identity work has been pressure-tested against the hardest cases. Through The Humanized Internet, she has built frameworks for portable, self-sovereign identity for stateless and displaced populations, which sharpens her perspective on identity systems for corporate users. Biography highlights President and Co-Founder of The Humanized Internet, the Switzerland-based non-profit advancing self-sovereign digital identity for stateless and displaced populations Former first CTO of Cisco Services and CTO-Evangelist for New Frontiers Development and Engineering at Cisco; previously Senior Distinguished Architect for Emerging Technologies at Syniverse Technologies Independent Director on the Hedera Council Board, governing one of the larger public distributed ledger networks Chair of IEEE P7030 (global extended reality assessment standard) and IEEE P7016 (Standard for Ethically Aligned Design and Operation of Metaverse Systems) Co-author of The Humanized Internet (River Publishers, 2023), The Internet of Women (River Publishers, 2016) and Developing IP-Based Services (Morgan Kaufmann, 2003) Holder of more than seventeen USPTO patents in networking, IoT, cybersecurity and data handling; named one of Forbes Top 50 Women in Tech globally (2018) Biography Distributed ledger systems, extended reality platforms and digital identity protocols are being built faster than the governance around them. Once they scale, the rules embedded in them are very hard to remove. The decisions that matter most are being made at the architecture layer, often in working groups most senior leaders cannot name. Monique Morrow has spent more than twenty-five years inside that layer. She was the first CTO of Cisco Services and later CTO-Evangelist for New Frontiers Development and Engineering. The brief was to read economics, technology and research together and identify what was coming next for the business. She holds more than seventeen USPTO patents in networking, IoT, cybersecurity and data handling, and in 2005 was named Cisco’s first Distinguished Consulting Engineer. She is President and Co-Founder of The Humanized Internet, the Swiss non-profit working on portable, self-sovereign digital identity for the more than one billion people without legal identity. Her 2023 book of the same name from River Publishers makes the argument that identity systems built for stateless and displaced populations produce more robust architecture than systems built for corporate convenience. She chairs IEEE P7030, the global working group writing the assessment standard for extended reality, and IEEE P7016, the standard for ethically aligned metaverse design. She also sits as an Independent Director on the Hedera Council Board, where governance of one of the larger public distributed ledger networks is decided. The rules organisations will operate under in the next decade are being drafted in rooms she chairs. Key speaking topics Cybersecurity strategy and risk Digital identity and self-sovereign identity systems Extended reality and metaverse governance Distributed ledger and blockchain infrastructure Privacy and data governance Ethics in emerging technology Standards and governance for AI and connected systems Ideal for CISOs, CTOs and chief digital officers setting cybersecurity and emerging technology direction Boards and audit committees scrutinising digital identity, AI and distributed ledger exposure Telecommunications, financial services and infrastructure organisations weighing investments in DLT, XR and biometric systems Policy and standards bodies shaping technology governance frameworks Audience outcomes Sharper view of where the actual risks sit in their cybersecurity and emerging technology architecture, separated from vendor noise Working knowledge of the IEEE, GSMA and WEF standards that will shape extended reality, distributed ledger and digital identity over the next five years Grounded perspective on what self-sovereign identity actually requires, from someone building systems for the hardest cases Specific questions to put to vendors and regulators on AI ethics, DLT governance and XR deployment A view of where the next set of regulatory and reputational pressures on emerging technology are likely to land

Why organisations work with Morten Toft Two decades of repeat innovation facilitation work for Grundfos, Danfoss and other large Danish manufacturers, which is unusual longevity for a process consultant. Author of Innovationsrecepten (The Innovation Recipe), Jyllands-Postens Forlag, a text used as a teaching reference on Danish innovation and entrepreneurship programmes, giving his methodology a documented, teachable form. Operating background as sales and marketing director at Photo Experten across 146 stores, so the co-creation work is grounded in line-management experience, not pure consultancy. Initiator of Danske Hospitalsklovne and the MAD House Denmark Innovation Centre, which gives him a track record of building functioning organisations from a standing start, not only advising existing ones. Sessions are designed for engagement and recall, with humour and physical staging used deliberately to lock in concepts that pure presentation tends to lose. Biography highlights Author of Innovationsrecepten (The Innovation Recipe), Jyllands-Postens Forlag, 2007, with Ole Vestergaard Poulsen, used as a teaching text on Danish innovation and entrepreneurship programmes. Author of To Be Perfectly Honest (Aschehoug, 2001) on authentic leadership, and Changemakers (2020, with Rachel Rouncefield). Co-developer with Rachel Rouncefield (De Montfort University) of the Changemakers youth empowerment programme, building on the Butterfly Project in Peterborough. Long-running innovation facilitator for Grundfos and Danfoss. Initiator of Danske Hospitalsklovne (Danish Hospital Clowns), founded after working with Patch Adams at the Gesundheit Institute in West Virginia. Co-initiator of the MAD House Denmark Innovation Centre in Middelfart. Former sales and marketing director at Photo Experten across 146 Danish stores; earlier consultant at GREY. Biography Innovation in large industrial businesses tends to fail in a specific way. Ideas accumulate in the central team. Adoption stalls at the operating units. The work that reaches customers is a thin version of what was originally proposed. Morten Toft has spent over twenty years working inside that gap, mainly with Danish manufacturing groups including Grundfos and Danfoss, designing co-creation processes that bring stakeholders into the work early enough to own it. His methodology is documented in Innovationsrecepten (The Innovation Recipe), co-authored with Ole Vestergaard Poulsen and published by Politikens Forlag. The book is used as required reading on Danish innovation and entrepreneurship programmes, which gives his approach a teachable structure rather than the personality dependence common to facilitator-consultants. The work draws on a line operating background. Before consultancy, Toft was sales and marketing director at Photo Experten, with responsibility across 146 retail stores in Denmark. That experience, alongside earlier work at GREY, shapes a facilitation style oriented to commercial outcomes and to the practical question of who actually executes the change. He is also the initiator of Danske Hospitalsklovne, founded after a period with Patch Adams at the Gesundheit Institute in West Virginia, and a co-initiator of the MAD House Denmark Innovation Centre. Alongside the innovation work, Toft has written on authentic leadership and personal development, including a forthcoming memoir, Journey Out to Find Home (Danish edition August 2026, English edition planned). He also runs Changemakers, a youth empowerment programme co-developed with Rachel Rouncefield of De Montfort University and grounded in the Butterfly Project in Peterborough, which involved several thousand young people over eight years. The connecting argument across his output is straightforward: organisations get more from their people, and societies more from their young people, when those involved feel they built the answer themselves. Key speaking topics Co-creation and stakeholder-led innovation Innovation process design in industrial organisations Authentic leadership Personal development and purpose at work Building healthy organisational cultures Youth empowerment and the changemaker concept Ideal for Innovation, R&D and product directors in industrial and manufacturing businesses HR and learning leaders running leadership development programmes C-suite and senior teams setting direction for cultural change Founders and entrepreneurial leaders running participation-led organisations Audience outcomes A working model for designing innovation processes that build adoption alongside ideas. Specific tools for involving operating-unit stakeholders before, not after, decisions are made. A clearer view of the link between authentic leadership behaviour and commercial culture. Practical examples drawn from long-running work with Grundfos, Danfoss and Danish retail.

Why organisations work with Mustafa Suleyman Few people in AI both ship the product and frame the public debate. As CEO of Microsoft AI he runs Copilot, Bing and Edge for hundreds of millions of users, while The Coming Wave was shortlisted for the Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year and called Bill Gates’s favourite book on AI. His “containment problem” framework gives boards a working language for asking governance questions about AI without lapsing into either hype or fatalism. He has been inside the founding team of three of the most consequential AI organisations of the past fifteen years: DeepMind in 2010, Inflection AI in 2022 and Microsoft AI in 2024. That operating vantage point on how AI strategy actually gets built is uncommon in the speaker market. A Senior Fellowship at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard Kennedy School and a board seat at The Economist Group give him sustained credibility on policy and governance, not only on product. Biography highlights CEO of Microsoft AI since March 2024, with responsibility for Copilot, Bing, Edge, MSN and GroupMe. Co-founder of DeepMind (2010), former head of Applied AI; the company was acquired by Google in 2014 in its largest European deal at the time. Co-founder and former CEO of Inflection AI, where he built the Pi assistant with Reid Hoffman and Karen Simonyan. Author of The Coming Wave (Crown, 2023) with Michael Bhaskar: New York Times bestseller; shortlisted for the Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year; book of the year at the Financial Times, the Economist, Bloomberg and the Guardian. Senior Fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard Kennedy School; board member of The Economist Group. CBE in the 2019 New Year Honours; named to TIME’s 100 Most Influential People in AI in 2023 and 2024; TED main-stage speaker, “What is an AI anyway?” (April 2024). Biography DeepMind, Inflection AI and Microsoft AI are three of the most consequential AI organisations of the past fifteen years. Mustafa Suleyman co-founded two and now runs the third. He co-founded DeepMind in 2010, where he led the applied AI work and the DeepMind Ethics and Society research unit. He went on to co-found Inflection AI in 2022 with Reid Hoffman and Karen Simonyan, building Pi, an assistant designed for emotionally responsive conversation. In March 2024 Microsoft brought him in as CEO of Microsoft AI, with responsibility for Copilot, Bing, Edge and the company’s MAI frontier model team. His public argument turns on the containment problem. It is the task of keeping powerful technologies inside the control of the institutions meant to govern them, even as those technologies become cheaper and more accessible. He developed that argument in The Coming Wave, the book he wrote with Michael Bhaskar. It became a New York Times bestseller and was named a book of the year by the Economist, the Financial Times, Bloomberg and the Guardian. Outside Microsoft, he sits on the board of The Economist and is a Senior Fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard Kennedy School. Key speaking topics The future of artificial intelligence AI governance and the containment problem Frontier AI development and consumer deployment AI strategy for boards and senior leaders Technology, power and the nation-state The next wave of general-purpose technologies AI safety and alignment Ideal for CEOs and boards setting AI strategy and capital allocation Chief technology officers and chief product officers responsible for AI deployment Government leaders, regulators and policy advisors working on AI rules Senior leaders in financial services, healthcare, media and consumer technology Audience outcomes A working language for talking about AI risk and AI opportunity in the same conversation, anchored in the containment problem A clearer view of what frontier AI labs are actually building, from someone who runs one A sense of where consumer AI is heading over the next two to three years, beyond the current news cycle An honest read on which AI claims are worth taking seriously and which to discount

Why organisations work with Navi Radjou He has named and codified two frameworks, Jugaad Innovation and Frugal Innovation, that give leadership teams a shared vocabulary for doing more with less rather than relying on bigger R and D budgets. His client work spans Fortune 500 firms including IBM, Microsoft, Procter and Gamble, GM, SAP, and Ernst and Young, so the case material in his sessions is operational, not academic. The Thinkers50 Innovation Award and three consecutive appearances on the Thinkers50 ranking (2021, 2023, 2025) place him among the small group of innovation thinkers whose work boards take seriously. His 2024 book The Frugal Economy, published by Wiley with Thinkers50, gives senior leaders a current playbook for B2B sharing, distributed manufacturing, and regenerative business models. He brings empirical material from emerging markets that most Western innovation speakers cannot, drawing on field research in India, China, Africa, and Latin America. Biography highlights Former Fellow of Cambridge Judge Business School and former Executive Director of its Centre for India and Global Business. Thinkers50 Innovation Award winner, ranked on the Thinkers50 list in 2021, 2023, and 2025. Co-author of Jugaad Innovation (Jossey-Bass), an international bestseller, and Frugal Innovation: How to Do More With Less (The Economist Books, foreword by Paul Polman). Co-author of From Smart to Wise (Jossey-Bass), a study of wise leadership judgement in technology-driven business environments. Author of The Frugal Economy: A Guide to Building a Better World With Less (Wiley and Thinkers50, 2024). TED Global speaker with over two million views on his talk on frugal innovation. Former Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research; faculty member of the World Economic Forum. Published in Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, and strategy plus business; covered by the Financial Times, The Economist, BBC, NPR, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal. Biography R and D budgets in most large companies have stopped producing the returns they once did. Pilots multiply, capital tightens, and the question on the executive agenda becomes how to generate growth without spending more. This is the territory Navi Radjou has worked in for two decades, first as a Forrester analyst studying global innovation networks, then as Executive Director of the Centre for India and Global Business at Cambridge Judge Business School. His central contribution is a managed practice for innovation under constraint. Jugaad Innovation, co-authored with Jaideep Prabhu and Simone Ahuja, took a Hindi term for resourceful improvisation and turned it into a corporate framework backed by case work from emerging markets. Frugal Innovation, published by The Economist Books with a foreword by Paul Polman, codified the practice for Western firms. The Frugal Economy, his 2024 book with Wiley and Thinkers50, extends the argument into a model for B2B sharing, distributed manufacturing, and regenerative supply chains. The credentials sit underneath the work. Thinkers50 awarded him its Innovation Award in 2013 and has ranked him among the world’s most influential management thinkers in 2021, 2023, and 2025. He has consulted for IBM, Microsoft, Procter and Gamble, GM, SAP, and Ernst and Young, and he serves as a faculty member of the World Economic Forum. His TED Global talk on frugal innovation has been watched more than two million times. What makes the perspective unusual is the empirical base. Most innovation thinkers write from Silicon Valley or business school faculties. Born in Pondicherry, educated at Ecole Centrale Paris and the Yale School of Management, and a French-American dual citizen, Radjou builds his arguments from case material in India, China, Africa, and Latin America, where resource constraint has always been the operating condition, then translates the discipline back into the boardrooms of Fortune 500 firms. Key speaking topics Frugal innovation Jugaad and resource-constrained creativity The frugal economy and regenerative business models Intrapreneurship and corporate growth Innovation strategy in emerging markets Wise leadership in the AI era B2B sharing and distributed manufacturing Ideal for Boards and executive teams reviewing innovation portfolios under capital constraint Chief Strategy Officers and Chief Innovation Officers planning growth without expanding R and D spend Sustainability leads and CEOs translating ESG commitments into operating substance Leadership development programmes for senior executives in multinational organisations Audience outcomes A working definition of frugal innovation that distinguishes it from cost-cutting and connects it to growth Case-based examples from Fortune 500 and emerging-market firms that show the discipline in operation A vocabulary for Jugaad and intrapreneurship that senior teams can carry into their own innovation reviews A view of the frugal economy as a commercial opportunity, with named mechanisms (B2B sharing, distributed manufacturing, regenerative principles) A more rigorous standard for what counts as innovation when resources are scarce

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

Why organisations work with Neil West First-hand operator perspective from inside Apple Music, the App Store, Apple TV+ and iTunes during the period the company shifted a billion-dollar services business across Europe. A specific thesis on simplicity as competitive advantage, set out in It Just Works (Macmillan Business, 2026) and structured as nine rules leaders can apply to their own products and teams. Useful for the meeting after the strategy offsite: he speaks to the practical work of cutting features, killing projects, and protecting customer experience from internal politics. Co-founded the iTunes Festival and curated Apple’s relationship with artists from Beyonce to Bono, which gives the talks the texture of a content business, not a generic technology keynote. Translates Steve Jobs era principles into language that lands with commercial and product leaders who have to ship, not theorise. Biography highlights Head of Services, Apple Southern Europe, with responsibility for App Store, Apple Music, Apple TV+, iCloud, Books, Podcasts, Arcade and Fitness+ across the region. Head of Music, Apple UK and Europe, for ten years, including the period iTunes became the world’s largest music retailer. Co-founder and curator of the iTunes Festival. Author of It Just Works: The Nine Simple Rules of Apple’s Success, Macmillan Business, September 2026. TEDx speaker on The Beatles, Steve Jobs, and Team Management. Earlier career: European Editor-in-Chief at Rhapsody, the first music streaming subscription service, Creative Director at Garageband.com (founded with Jerry Harrison of Talking Heads and Sir George Martin), and Editor-in-Chief of NEXT Generation magazine. Biography iTunes was a record store before it was a streaming service, and the App Store was a developer experiment before it was a platform. The hard part of running those businesses across Europe was not adding features. It was deciding what not to build, what to pull, and which artist or partner relationship was worth defending against internal pressure to standardise. West did that work for sixteen years. As Head of Music for Apple in the UK and Europe, he led the team through the period iTunes became the world’s biggest music retailer, and co-founded the iTunes Festival as a way of binding the catalogue to a live cultural moment. He then ran Services for Apple Southern Europe, a billion-dollar portfolio covering App Store, Apple Music, TV+, iCloud, Books, Podcasts, Arcade and Fitness+, through the shift from downloads to subscription. His argument now, set out in It Just Works (Macmillan Business, 2026), is that Apple’s edge has always been a discipline for removing complexity rather than a talent for adding features. The book offers nine rules drawn from inside the business, on simplifying products, reducing friction in customer journeys, and protecting focus when an organisation grows. His TEDx talk on The Beatles and Steve Jobs makes the team-design version of the same case. For audiences in product, marketing, services and digital businesses, the value is the operator detail. He talks about specific decisions, named launches, and the politics of holding a line on customer experience when commercial pressure points the other way. Key speaking topics Simplicity as commercial operating discipline Customer experience in subscription and platform businesses The shift from downloads to streaming and what it taught the wider content economy Product and service launches at scale Building and managing creative teams Lessons from inside Apple’s services business Ideal for Product, services and platform leaders running multi-product portfolios CMOs and customer experience leaders in subscription, media and consumer businesses Innovation and transformation directors looking for an operator voice rather than a consultant frame Leadership teams resetting after a period of feature accumulation or proposition drift Audience outcomes A working definition of simplicity that can be applied to a roadmap, not just a brand line. Specific tests for deciding what to cut from a product, service or process. A view of Apple’s services business from inside the European operation, including how artist and partner relationships were handled. Language for protecting customer experience against internal pressure to add complexity. A team-design lens drawn from how Apple, and before it The Beatles, structured small creative groups for output.

Why organisations work with Nelly Ben Hayoun-Stépanian She built the experience function at WeTransfer from inside the executive team across ten years, a rare track record of innovation craft sustained at commercial scale rather than delivered as one-off consulting. She has a method for staging ideas in public, tested at the scale of a 17,500-seat Hollywood Bowl performance with NASA scientists and at the scale of small-room design studios at Google, Mattel and Unilever. Her academic foundation is unusual for a creative director: a PhD in Human Geography and Political Philosophy from Royal Holloway alongside an RCA Design Interactions MA, which gives her work argumentative spine rather than spectacle alone. She runs the University of the Underground, a tuition-free postgraduate institution whose advisory board includes Noam Chomsky, Paola Antonelli and Jill Tarter, so she arrives in a room with an active network of researchers and practitioners across science, design and politics. Design Week inducted her into its Hall of Fame in 2023 alongside Jonathan Ive, Es Devlin and Neville Brody, the field’s most explicit signal that her practice has moved from emerging to canonical. Biography highlights Chief of Experiences at WeTransfer from 2012 to 2022, ten years on the executive team during the company’s growth into a global creative platform. Founder and director of the University of the Underground, a tuition-free MA programme hosted at Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam. Designer of Experiences at the SETI Institute since 2013; Vice Chair of the IAF Committee for the Cultural Utilisation of Space. Founder and director of the International Space Orchestra, performed with Sigur Ros at the Hollywood Bowl to 17,500 people. PhD, Royal Holloway, University of London (Human Geography and Political Philosophy); MA, Royal College of Art (Design Interactions, Dunne and Raby). Design Week Awards Hall of Fame, 2023. WIRED Innovation Fellowship, 2014. Karman Fellowship, 2022. Arts Council England Exceptional Award for Disaster Playground. Biography Most companies treat innovation as an internal practice: research teams, pilots, internal demos, the occasional product launch. The harder discipline is staging an idea so that customers, staff and the broader public feel it. Nelly Ben Hayoun-Stépanian has spent fifteen years building a method for that second discipline, first inside a scaling technology company, then as a commissioned director for brands and cultural institutions. She joined WeTransfer in 2012 as its first Head of Experiences and stayed for a decade, eventually serving as Chief of Experiences on the executive team. Nelly Ben Hayoun Studios operated inside WeTransfer as its user experience and innovation department, with a remit that grew from public projects with creative communities to B Corp development, US business expansion, and the founding of the editorial platform WePresent and the University of the Underground. Her parallel practice is anchored by the International Space Orchestra, which she founded in 2012 with scientists and astronauts from NASA Ames, the SETI Institute and the International Space University. The project produced a feature film, a Hollywood Bowl performance with Sigur Ros, and a recording that was played from the International Space Station. It is the clearest example of her core craft, which is the orchestration of scientific and institutional collaborators into something a non-expert audience can feel. In 2017 she founded the University of the Underground, a tuition-free postgraduate programme at Sandberg Instituut whose advisory board includes Noam Chomsky, Paola Antonelli and Jill Tarter. Design Week inducted her into its Hall of Fame in 2023 alongside Jonathan Ive, Es Devlin and Neville Brody. Key speaking topics Immersive experiences as innovation practice Building creative communities inside commercial organisations Public-facing storytelling for science and technology Cultural strategy and brand Interdisciplinary collaboration across science, design and the arts Space culture and the public communication of complex science Independent institution building Ideal for Chief Marketing Officers, Chief Brand Officers and creative directors at consumer or technology brands looking to move from advertising-led growth to experience-led growth. Heads of Innovation and Chief Strategy Officers whose pilots are not translating into customer-visible products or cultural relevance. Cultural institutions, design and architecture studios, and science communication leads commissioning ambitious public projects. Senior leadership teams inside scale-up technology companies considering how to build a brand that creators and partners care about. Audience outcomes A working definition of what an experience function does inside a commercial company, drawn from ten years of operating one at WeTransfer. Concrete patterns for staging an idea publicly, from Hollywood Bowl scale down to a small studio activation. A view of how scientific institutions, creative communities and commercial brands can be brought into the same room without flattening any of them. A reading on where the experience economy is heading, grounded in her current work at SETI, the International Astronautical Federation and the University of the Underground.

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

Why organisations work with Nicholas Webb He has filed and won more than 40 US patents in healthcare, consumer, and industrial technologies. The advice on innovation comes from someone who has run the full cycle from invention to commercial product, not from a researcher reporting on it. The Innovation Mandate and What Customers Crave are used inside operating companies as design references for innovation programmes and customer experience strategy, not as airport reading. Global Gurus has named him a Top 30 customer service authority for multiple consecutive years, a credential held alongside a working consulting practice with boards of multibillion-dollar companies through LeaderLogic. His healthcare work is unusually concrete for a speaker in this space: a documentary, The Healthcare Cure, that won the Sedona International Film Festival’s Audience Choice Award, plus recent AI patent filings in patient monitoring. He builds keynotes around a specific commercial problem the buyer names, rather than a fixed deck. Useful when a board wants a session calibrated to an actual strategic decision, not a generic future-of overview. Biography highlights More than 40 US patents granted, spanning healthcare devices, consumer products, and industrial technologies, including one of the world’s smallest medical implants for ocular surface disease. Author of What Customers Crave, The Innovation Mandate, What Customers Hate, Happy Work, Lucid Leadership, and The Healthcare Mandate. CEO of LeaderLogic LLC, advising boards of multibillion-dollar companies on innovation and customer strategy. Named to Global Gurus’ Top 30 Customer Service authorities list for multiple consecutive years. Director of The Healthcare Cure, a documentary on US healthcare reform that won the Audience Choice Award at the Sedona International Film Festival in 2021. Former Chief Innovation Officer and adjunct professor at a leading US medical school, awarded an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters for contributions to healthcare. Biography A patent is a useful filter. It is one of the few credentials in this field that requires a working invention, a defensible claim, and the discipline to take an idea through to a commercial product. Nicholas Webb has more than 40 of them, across healthcare devices, consumer goods, and industrial technologies, including one of the world’s smallest medical implants for ocular surface disease and an early wearable. That track record sits behind everything he says about innovation. He runs LeaderLogic LLC, a consulting practice that works with boards of multibillion-dollar companies on innovation strategy and customer experience. His books, including The Innovation Mandate, What Customers Crave, What Customers Hate, and Lucid Leadership, function as design references for those engagements rather than standalone trade titles. Global Gurus has placed him among the world’s top 30 customer service authorities for multiple consecutive years. The healthcare work runs in parallel and gives the rest of his thinking a useful test bed. He directed The Healthcare Cure, a documentary on the structural failures of US healthcare that won the Audience Choice Award at the Sedona International Film Festival in 2021, and continues to file AI patents in patient monitoring and mood-state analysis. Healthcare is where his views on innovation, customer experience, and AI are stress-tested in a high-stakes operating environment. For SA clients the practical value is this: a speaker who can sit with a board, take in a specific commercial question, and respond with a session built around the inventor’s logic of constraints, hypotheses, prototypes, and evidence. The output is not inspiration. It is a clearer view of where innovation pays and where customer experience is quietly costing the business growth. Key speaking topics Innovation as a managed commercial discipline Customer experience and the growth agenda AI in operating strategy Healthcare transformation and patient experience Leadership clarity under hyper-complexity Workforce engagement and talent retention Board-level innovation governance Ideal for Boards and executive committees reviewing innovation strategy or customer experience performance CEOs, CCOs, and CMOs accountable for growth in mature or commoditised categories Healthcare executives and provider networks navigating clinical, workforce, and AI transformation simultaneously Chief Innovation Officers and strategy leads building an internal innovation operating model Audience outcomes A clearer view of where current innovation activity is producing returns and where it is absorbing resource without compounding effect A practical model for customer experience design grounded in identifying what specific customer types love and hate, rather than aggregate satisfaction scores A board-level reading of AI as an operating discipline, with examples from healthcare and consumer technology A working definition of leadership clarity that holds up under complexity, drawn from Lucid Leadership Language and structure to take innovation conversations out of culture talk and into commercial governance

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

Why organisations work with Nick Fry He ran the management buyout of Honda’s F1 team for a nominal sum in 2009, then won both the Drivers’ and Constructors’ Championships that same season. There are very few executives anywhere who can speak from inside a turnaround that extreme. He has led at two distinct scales of performance organisation: a 700-person independent team operating on survival economics, and Mercedes AMG Petronas F1 as a global OEM works operation. Most senior teams need both lenses. His career predates F1 by 24 years at Ford Motor Company, including running Aston Martin Lagonda through the DB7 launch. He speaks credibly to industrial leaders, not only to motorsport audiences. He served roughly five years as a UK Business Ambassador under Prime Ministers Brown and Cameron, giving him a working view of how British engineering competes globally. His book “Survive. Drive. Win.” (Atlantic Books, 2019), with a foreword by Bernie Ecclestone, sets out the Brawn GP year in operational detail rather than as motorsport nostalgia. Biography highlights CEO of Brawn GP, the team that won the 2009 Formula One Drivers’ and Constructors’ World Championships in its only season. CEO of Mercedes AMG Petronas F1 from 2010 to 2013, following Mercedes’ acquisition of Brawn GP. Co-author of “Survive. Drive. Win.” (Atlantic Books, 2019), foreword by Bernie Ecclestone. UK Business Ambassador appointed by Prime Ministers Gordon Brown and David Cameron. Non-Executive Chairman of McLaren Applied, appointed October 2021. 24 years at Ford Motor Company, including Managing Director of Aston Martin Lagonda during the DB7 programme. Biography In late 2008, Honda withdrew from Formula One with almost no notice. The team based in Brackley had weeks to find a buyer or close. The CEO, with technical director Ross Brawn, negotiated a management buyout for a nominal sum, secured an interim engine supply from Mercedes, and ran the operation through the winter on a fraction of its previous budget. The team won both World Championships the following season, with Jenson Button taking the Drivers’ title. Brawn GP existed for one year, and won everything available to it. That season is the central case Nick Fry now teaches. He set it out in “Survive. Drive. Win.” (Atlantic Books, 2019), co-written with Ed Gorman and with a foreword by Bernie Ecclestone. The book is a working account of how leadership decisions are made when the organisation has no margin, not a victory memoir. Mercedes acquired the team in 2010 and Fry stayed on as CEO of Mercedes AMG Petronas F1 until 2013, taking a 700-person independent operation into integration with a global OEM works programme. Before Formula One, he spent 24 years at Ford Motor Company. Roles included product planning on the Ford Escort RS Cosworth and the RS200, and Managing Director of Aston Martin Lagonda during the DB7 launch and the move from handbuilt-only production at Newport Pagnell to higher-volume manufacturing at Bloxham. He then ran Prodrive as Managing Director from 2001, before joining BAR and Honda in Formula One. He served roughly five years as a UK Business Ambassador, appointed by Prime Ministers Gordon Brown and David Cameron. He is currently Non-Executive Chairman of McLaren Applied, the company awarded the FIA contract for the 2026 Formula One engine control system, and Chairman of the esports organisation Fnatic. Key speaking topics Leadership under existential pressure Turnaround and restructure in high-performance organisations Decision-making with incomplete information Integration of a small operation into a global parent British engineering and high-performance manufacturing Formula One as an operating model Ideal for CEOs and senior executives facing a forced restructure, funding shock, or major integration Boards weighing the leadership profile required for a turnaround Industrial, engineering, and manufacturing leadership teams Operating committees in performance-driven cultures, including motorsport, aerospace, and elite engineering Audience outcomes A working account of how a senior team made decisions during a survival period in which conventional planning was not possible. A clear view of how leadership behaviours need to change between a small independent organisation and an integrated works operation inside a global OEM. Specific examples of which Brawn GP decisions worked, which did not, and what the CEO would do differently with hindsight. A more honest reading of what Formula One actually demonstrates about high-performance management, separated from the marketing version.