Innovation & Disruption speakers

Why organisations work with Vlatka Hlupic A single, evidence-led system of organisational transformation, built from more than two decades of research and field application across companies including GlaxoSmithKline, BP, SAP, Burberry, and the European Commission A measurable diagnostic, the Organisational Health Scan (developed from her 6 Box Leadership instrument), that lets a leadership team baseline its current culture, identify the constraints holding performance back, and track shift over time The intellectual authority of an academic who chairs a faculty position at Hult Ashridge and has published in Harvard Business Review, paired with the practitioner credibility of a CEO running her own consultancy A clear position on what comes after command-and-control management, set out in two books that have been recognised by Forbes, the Axiom Business Book Awards, and the CMI Biography highlights Professor of Leadership and Management, Hult Ashridge Executive Education Founder and CEO, Management Shift Solutions Ltd; Founder, Drucker Society London Author of “The Management Shift” (Palgrave Macmillan) and “Humane Capital” (Bloomsbury) “The Management Shift” listed by Forbes among the top eight business books of 2014; winner of the Axiom Business Book Award and CMI Management Articles of the Year 2015 Damehood (non-UK) received 2025 for contribution to humanising business; Think Global People “80 Outstanding Global Women 2025” Featured in Harvard Business Review, Financial Times, The Economist, Forbes, and at the Global Peter Drucker Forum Biography Most large organisations are still managed through assumptions that were set in a different industrial cycle. Hierarchy, central control, and extrinsic incentives delivered scale in the twentieth century, but they produce diminishing returns when the work is knowledge-intensive and the workforce expects autonomy. Hlupic’s research argues that the gap between how leaders say they want their organisations to behave and how those organisations actually operate is the single largest drag on engagement and innovation today. Her response is the Management Shift, a five-level model of organisational culture developed across more than a decade of longitudinal research and set out in two books, “The Management Shift” (Palgrave Macmillan) and “Humane Capital” (Bloomsbury). The model describes the steps an organisation moves through as it leaves command-and-control behind, and it sits on top of a diagnostic, the Organisational Health Scan (developed from her 6 Box Leadership instrument), that senior teams use to measure where they actually are. The credentials sit behind the argument, not in front of it. Hlupic is Professor of Leadership and Management at Hult Ashridge Executive Education, Founder and CEO of Management Shift Solutions, and Founder of the Drucker Society London. Her work has been applied inside organisations including GlaxoSmithKline, BP, SAP, Burberry, the European Commission, and the House of Commons. She has contributed to Harvard Business Review, the Financial Times, The Economist, Forbes, and the Global Peter Drucker Forum. In 2025 she received a non-UK damehood for her contribution to humanising business. Forbes listed “The Management Shift” among the top eight business books of 2014, and the work has since picked up the Axiom Business Book Award and the CMI Management Articles of the Year. The throughline across the academic publications, the books, and the client work is the same: a board that wants better engagement, better innovation, and a more durable culture has to change how it leads, and there is now a tested way to do that. Key speaking topics Conscious leadership and the post-command-and-control organisation The Management Shift framework Organisational culture transformation Employee engagement and human-centric leadership Innovation in knowledge-intensive organisations Future of work and digital transformation Humane capitalism and purpose-driven business Culture due diligence for mergers and acquisitions Ideal for CEOs, COOs, and boards re-examining their operating model after restructure, merger, or digital transformation CHROs and chief people officers leading culture change at enterprise scale Senior leadership teams using diagnostic instruments to baseline culture before and after major change programmes Executive education and leadership development functions in large multinationals Audience outcomes A clear five-level map of organisational culture and where their own organisation currently sits on it Specific behaviours that move a team from compliance-driven to engagement-driven performance Evidence from multinationals that have used the Management Shift approach, and what it changed in measurable terms A view of leadership beyond authority, drawn from her HBR work and longitudinal research Language and frame to take into their own executive conversations on culture, engagement, and innovation

Why organisations work with Whitney Johnson A field-tested model, the S Curve of Learning, that gives executives a shared language for placing every team member on a developmental trajectory rather than an annual performance grid. A track record of applying disruptive innovation theory to capital allocation, including co-founding the Disruptive Innovation Fund with Clayton Christensen and leading the seed investment in Coupang. A No. 8 Thinkers50 ranking in 2021 and consecutive listings since 2015, signalling sustained credibility with the same boards her audiences sit on. Direct relevance to succession planning, post-merger integration, and the talent risk inside transformation programmes, drawn from Fortune 500 advisory work with Kraft Heinz, Intermountain Health, Morgan Stanley, and Amazon. A Wall Street equity-analyst background that lets her speak to commercial leaders in their own language about return on people, not just culture. Biography highlights CEO and co-founder of Disruption Advisors, advising Fortune 500 companies, private equity portfolios, and scale-ups on leadership and team development. Co-founder with Clayton Christensen of the Disruptive Innovation Fund at Rose Park Advisors; led the seed round in Coupang. Ranked No. 8 on Thinkers50 in 2021, with continuous listings since 2015. Author of Smart Growth (Harvard Business Press, 2022), a Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestseller and a Thinkers50 Best New Management Book. Author of Disrupt Yourself, Build an A-Team, and Dare, Dream, Do. LinkedIn Top Voice and host of the Disrupt Yourself podcast, with guests including Brene Brown, Adam Grant, Susan Cain, and Stanley McChrystal. Biography Most companies treat leadership development as a calendar of programmes. The harder question is where each senior leader sits on a learning curve, and what the organisation does when too many of them are stalled at the top of the same one. That is the question Whitney Johnson built a career around. Before founding Disruption Advisors, Johnson spent eight consecutive years as an Institutional Investor-ranked equity analyst on Wall Street. She then partnered with Harvard Business School’s Clayton Christensen to co-found the Disruptive Innovation Fund at Rose Park Advisors, where she served as President from 2007 to 2012 and led the seed round in what is now Coupang. Her shift from capital allocation to people allocation is the through line of her work. The S Curve of Learning, adapted from Everett Rogers and applied through her January-February 2022 Harvard Business Review article and the book Smart Growth, gives executives a way to manage their organisations as a portfolio of learning curves. It reframes engagement, retention, and succession as the same problem looked at from three angles. That argument has earned her a No. 8 Thinkers50 ranking in 2021 and a consistent place on the list since 2015. Her client roster includes Kraft Heinz, Intermountain Health, Morgan Stanley, and Amazon, and her Disrupt Yourself podcast features sustained conversations with figures including Brene Brown, Adam Grant, Susan Cain, and Stanley McChrystal. Key speaking topics Disruptive innovation applied to people and teams The S Curve of Learning as a development framework Succession planning and talent portfolio management Building and leading high-performing teams Personal disruption and reinvention for senior leaders Smart growth and organisational scaling Coaching cultures inside Fortune 500 companies Ideal for CEOs and executive committees rebuilding the bench beneath them CHROs and chief talent officers redesigning succession and development Private equity operating partners pressure-testing portfolio leadership Boards reviewing CEO succession and senior team capability Audience outcomes A working vocabulary for placing every senior leader on a learning curve, with implications for retention and succession A clearer view of when high performers are about to plateau and what to move them toward A practical link between team composition and commercial performance, drawn from her investment-fund experience Specific moves to disrupt their own roles before circumstances disrupt them Examples from named Fortune 500 engagements they can stress-test against their own organisation

Why organisations work with Will King He has the rare full-cycle operator story: a 22-year run as founder-CEO, not a single product win or an exit anecdote He took a category-challenger brand from one person hand-filling bottles to national listings in Boots, Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Asda, Morrisons and Waitrose, against Gillette and Wilkinson Sword He bought shave.com in 1995 for GBP 18 and used it as a working DTC channel long before that was a category, which gives him real authority on how brands earn direct customer relationships Hyperglide gave him a credible hardware-innovation story: a patented water-activated cartridge built on superhydrophilic technology licensed in from a UK university medical-device project His book, The King of Shaves Story (Hachette, 2009), reframes the conventional start-up narrative around tough-times trading rather than vanity growth, which is the conversation most boards actually want Biography highlights Founder of King of Shaves (1993), built from a kitchen-sink operation to national UK grocery and pharmacy distribution Author, The King of Shaves Story, also published as How to Build a Great Business in Tough Times (Hachette / Headline) Inducted into the Great British Entrepreneurs Hall of Fame in 2019 Founder of the Entrepreneur in Residence Company, advising early-stage technology and retail founders since 2014 Speaker for Founders4Schools and the Speakers for Schools programme Bought shave.com in 1995, an early UK direct-to-consumer move; led the Hyperglide razor launch (2014) with multiple granted and pending patents Biography King of Shaves began at a kitchen sink in 1993, with 10,000 bottles of shaving oil filled by hand and a first listing at Harrods. Will King had just been made redundant from a marketing job. Two years later he bought the shave.com domain for GBP 18, well before direct-to-consumer was a category most brands took seriously. The business he built over the next two decades is the part senior buyers want to hear. King of Shaves moved from independent retailers into Boots, then Tesco, then the rest of the UK multiples, taking shelf space in a category dominated by Gillette and Wilkinson Sword. By the mid-2000s the parent company was producing grooming ranges for Ted Baker, Orla Kiely and Fish, and the brand was running a real digital channel alongside national distribution. The 2014 Hyperglide launch is the part that separates him from most founder speakers. The product used superhydrophilic technology originally developed by a UK university for medical devices, packaged into a razor cartridge that lubricates on contact with water. Multiple patents granted and pending, around GBP 5m to 7m of investment, four years of R and D. He stepped down as CEO the same year to set up the Entrepreneur in Residence Company, advising early-stage technology and retail founders. His book, The King of Shaves Story, published by Hachette in 2009, was rewritten that year for the recession audience as How to Build a Great Business in Tough Times. He was inducted into the Great British Entrepreneurs Hall of Fame in 2019 and is a long-standing speaker for Founders4Schools and Robert Peston’s Speakers for Schools. Key speaking topics Challenger brand building against category incumbents Direct-to-consumer and digital channel pioneering Product innovation and hardware patents in consumer goods Trading through recession and capital constraint Founder-led marketing and brand discipline Scale-up sequencing: product, distribution, cash, brand The transition from operator to investor and adviser Ideal for Founders, scale-up CEOs and management teams of consumer challenger brands Marketing directors and CMOs in FMCG, beauty, retail and DTC Corporate innovation and venturing teams looking at category-disruption case studies Conferences for SME owners, family business leaders and entrepreneurial communities Audience outcomes A clear-eyed account of what moving from independent stockists into national multiples actually demands of a small team Specific lessons on defending shelf space and brand identity against incumbents with materially larger budgets A working view of how a founder uses digital channels and direct customer relationships as a strategic asset, not a tactic A realistic picture of what hardware innovation costs in time, capital and patents in a consumer category Practical reasoning on when to step out of the operator seat and what changes when a founder becomes an adviser and investor

Why organisations work with William McDonough His Cradle to Cradle framework is not a sustainability philosophy but an operational design standard that underpins a third-party certification programme (Cradle to Cradle Certified™), This programme has been adopted by major global manufacturers and retailers, giving organisations a verifiable, externally recognised pathway to circular design rather than a set of principles to interpret internally. He provides a direct counter-argument to the prevailing ESG framing: that the goal is not «less bad» but genuinely positive material and ecological outcomes; a reframe that changes what boards ask of product and operations leaders, not just what they report. His consultancy work spans the molecular (material chemistry and product formulation via MBDC) through to the industrial-architectural (Ford’s River Rouge plant, NASA’s Sustainability Base): a cross-scalar range that almost no other figure in sustainable design can match from direct project experience. As inaugural Chair of the World Economic Forum’s Meta-Council on the Circular Economy (2014-2016), he has been involved in shaping the global policy and business conversation on circular economy at the highest level, giving organisations access to the strategic framing that has informed international standards. His argument that sustainability and economic abundance are not in tension – that well-designed systems generate more value, not less – addresses the specific internal resistance that sustainability strategies encounter from commercial and operations leadership. Biography highlights Co-creator of the Cradle to Cradle design framework and co-author of Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things (2002) and The Upcycle: Beyond Sustainability-Designing for Abundance (2013), foundational texts of the circular economy movement Inaugural Chair, World Economic Forum Meta-Council on the Circular Economy (2014–2016); member, WEF Global Future Council on the Future of Environment and Natural Resource Security Co-founder, McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry (MBDC) – the consulting and assessment body behind the Cradle to Cradle Certified™ Products Programme Architect of landmark sustainable design projects including the Ford River Rouge/Dearborn Truck Plant (world’s largest living roof at the time of completion) and NASA’s Sustainability Base, Ames Research Center Recipient of three U.S. presidential honours: Presidential Award for Sustainable Development (1996), first U.S. EPA Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Award (2003), and National Design Award, Cooper Hewitt/Smithsonian (2004) Named «Hero for the Planet,» Time magazine (1999); one of the World’s 50 Greatest Leaders, Fortune magazine (2019); WEF Award for Circular Economy Leadership (2017) Commissioned to write The Hannover Principles: Design for Sustainability (1992) as official design guidelines for the City of Hannover’s EXPO 2000 Consulting Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Stanford University; former Dean, School of Architecture, University of Virginia (1994–1999) Biography The core problem with most corporate sustainability programmes is that they are built on top of systems that were never designed to be sustainable; product lines, manufacturing processes, and supply chains conceived entirely within a linear, extractive logic. Reducing harm at the margins is not the same as changing it. The question organisations are increasingly unable to avoid is whether their design intentions, and the material and industrial systems those intentions produce, are structurally compatible with a regenerative future. William McDonough is the architect and designer who, with chemist Michael Braungart, developed the Cradle to Cradle framework as a response to precisely that problem. Published in their 2002 book Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, the framework reframes design around three principles drawn from natural systems: that all materials function as nutrients for subsequent use, that systems run on clean and renewable energy, and that diversity rather than uniformity strengthens resilience. The follow-up, The Upcycle (2013), extended the argument from harm reduction to the active generation of ecological and economic abundance. Through co-founded firm MBDC, these principles became the basis for the Cradle to Cradle Certified™ Products Programme, an independent standard adopted by major manufacturers in fashion, consumer goods, and construction. His practice spans both the theoretical and the demonstrably built. McDonough’s architecture firm, William McDonough + Partners, has delivered some of the most cited proof points in industrial sustainability – among them the Ford River Rouge plant in Dearborn, Michigan, whose living roof became one of the most referenced examples of integrated green infrastructure in manufacturing, and NASA’s Sustainability Base at Ames Research Center. These projects are not showcases of green aesthetics; they are operational arguments that regenerative design performs economically and functionally at scale. He was commissioned to write The Hannover Principles: Design for Sustainability (1992) for the City of Hannover’s EXPO 2000 – a document that remains a reference point in sustainable design policy three decades on. At the World Economic Forum, McDonough served as inaugural Chair of the Meta-Council on the Circular Economy (2014-2016), positioning him within the institutional conversation that shaped how circular economy principles were adopted in global business and policy frameworks. For senior leadership, the value of that positioning is specific: McDonough is not a commentator on circular economy standards, he’s a figure who helped define them, and who speaks with direct authority to how the gap between current industrial design and those standards is closed. Key speaking topics Cradle to Cradle design and the circular economy Regenerative design for products, buildings, and industrial systems Material health and the elimination of waste as a design concept ESG strategy and circular business models Sustainable architecture and the built environment Carbon management and the Circular Carbon Economy The Next Industrial Revolution Ideal for Chief Sustainability Officers and ESG leads shaping long-term material and production strategy Chief Operating Officers and heads of manufacturing or supply chain facing regulatory and investor pressure on circular design Product design and innovation leadership in consumer goods, construction, and manufacturing sectors Board-level and executive audiences grappling with the strategic gap between current operations and net-positive environmental commitments Audience outcomes A clear, working understanding of the difference between linear sustainability (less harm) and circular design (positive output), and what that distinction demands operationally Specific grounding in the Cradle to Cradle framework as a design and certification standard that organisations can apply to products, materials, and buildings An evidence-based case, drawn from major industrial projects, that regenerative design is economically viable and operationally executable, not aspirational A revised framing of ESG and circular economy commitments: from reporting exercise to design mandate Practical insight into where the current generation of sustainability strategies falls structurally short, and what a structurally different approach looks like

Why organisations work with Ymir Vigfusson He is a tenured computer scientist at Emory and a practising offensive-security entrepreneur, with three founded companies and two acquisitions. Boards rarely get both registers from the same speaker. His TEDxReykjavik talk on teaching people how to hack has passed 1.8 million views, which means executives often arrive already primed by his argument and ready to engage at depth. Keystrike, his third company, was built specifically for the problem of secure remote access when the user’s machine is already compromised. He has commercial scar tissue on the exact threat model most enterprises now face. He holds an NSF CAREER award for fundamental work on caching and distributed systems, so the technical authority extends well beyond cybersecurity into the infrastructure layer that AI workloads depend on. His guest-researcher role at the CDC, applied to disease-outbreak surveillance, gives him a working analogy for how organisations should model contagion and propagation inside their own networks. Biography highlights PhD in Computer Science, Cornell University; BSc in Mathematics, University of Iceland. Associate Professor at Emory University and director of the SimBioSys lab. NSF CAREER award recipient for the “Rethinking the Cache Abstraction” project. Co-founder of Syndis (acquired by Origo, 2021), Adversary (acquired by Secure Code Warrior, 2020) and Keystrike (current CTO). TEDxReykjavik talk “Why I teach people how to hack” with more than 1.8 million views. Guest researcher at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, applying network science to outbreak surveillance. Biography The cybersecurity industry has a translation problem. Attackers reason in workflows; defenders reason in compliance frameworks. Most senior leaders only hear the second language, which is why most security investment is shaped by audit logic rather than by how an adversary actually moves through a system. Ymir Vigfusson works in both languages. He is Associate Professor of Computer Science at Emory University and director of the SimBioSys lab, where his NSF CAREER-funded research on caching and distributed systems has produced papers at USENIX ATC, VLDB and EuroSys. The same researcher co-founded Syndis, the de facto cybersecurity firm in Iceland (acquired by Origo in 2021), the hacker-training platform Adversary (acquired by Secure Code Warrior in 2020), and Keystrike, where he is now CTO and which won Emory’s Innovation of the Year for a product that secures remote access even when the endpoint is compromised. That dual track shapes how he speaks to leadership audiences. His TEDxReykjavik talk, “Why I teach people how to hack,” has been viewed more than 1.8 million times and lays out the argument that an organisation cannot defend itself against an attacker mindset it refuses to study. He brings the same logic into board conversations: walk through how an adversary would actually compromise this organisation, then decide what to fund. A guest-researcher post at the CDC, where he applies network-science methods to outbreak surveillance, gives him a working model for how threats propagate inside any complex network. The practical result for leadership audiences is a clearer picture of where their actual attack surface sits and which defensive habits change the outcome. Key speaking topics Cybersecurity as a board-level risk The hacker mindset as a defensive capability Secure remote access and the compromised endpoint Distributed systems and the infrastructure layer beneath AI Network science applied to threat propagation Cybersecurity education and the future security workforce Ideal for Boards, audit committees and CISOs commissioning a sharper view of attacker behaviour Chief technology and chief information officers planning resilience investment Banking, healthcare and critical-infrastructure leadership teams with high-value endpoints Innovation and R&D leaders integrating security into AI and cloud roadmaps Audience outcomes A working model for how adversaries actually move through an enterprise network A sharper line between security spend that changes attacker behaviour and spend that satisfies audit A vocabulary for discussing cyber risk with non-technical board members A view of where computational epidemiology and network science inform threat modelling

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 Zoe Kleinman She is the BBC’s first Technology Editor, which gives any panel or main-stage conversation an immediate authority signal that a corporate moderator cannot match. She has interviewed Tim Cook, Sir Demis Hassabis, Brad Smith and Jensen Huang on the record, and is comfortable holding senior technologists to a specific answer rather than letting a talking point pass. She translates AI, cybersecurity and digital regulation for boardrooms and general audiences without flattening the technical substance, which is the skill most in-house tech leaders ask for and rarely find. She has chaired flagship sessions for the Open Data Institute, the Royal Institution and Fintech Connect, and hosted The National AI Awards, so she arrives knowing the room. Her reporting has fed UK parliamentary inquiries and her March 2025 House of Lords evidence on AI governance gives her current standing on the regulatory questions buyers are now being asked by their own boards. Biography highlights BBC Technology Editor since September 2021, the first person appointed to the role. Over 20 years at the BBC, including senior technology reporter from 2009 to 2021. Reports across BBC News television, BBC World News, BBC Radio 4’s Today programme and BBC World Service. On-the-record interviews with Tim Cook, Sir Demis Hassabis, Brad Smith, Jensen Huang and Dave Baszucki. Has interviewed two serving UK Prime Ministers, Rishi Sunak at the 2023 UK Global AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park and Keir Starmer. Gave evidence to the House of Lords on AI governance and data privacy in March 2025. Investigative reporting on children’s in-game spending triggered a UK parliamentary committee inquiry. Hosted The National AI Awards and chaired sessions for the Open Data Institute, Royal Institution and Fintech Connect. Biography The hard part of a senior AI conversation is no longer finding an expert. It is finding someone who can sit between the expert and the audience, ask the question the room wants asked, and refuse to let a polished non-answer count as an answer. That is the editorial craft Kleinman has been building at the BBC for two decades. She joined the BBC in 2003 and moved through web production, features editing and senior technology reporting before being appointed the corporation’s first Technology Editor in September 2021. Her reporting now runs across BBC News television, BBC World News, Radio 4’s Today programme and BBC World Service technology and business strands, with a specific brief on artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, digital regulation and diversity in technology. The interview list is the part senior buyers usually recognise. Tim Cook at Apple, Sir Demis Hassabis at Google DeepMind, Brad Smith at Microsoft, Jensen Huang at Nvidia, Dave Baszucki at Roblox, and two serving Prime Ministers, Rishi Sunak at the 2023 UK Global AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park and Keir Starmer. Her investigation into children’s in-game spending prompted a UK parliamentary committee inquiry, and in March 2025 she gave evidence to the House of Lords on AI governance and data privacy. What that record gives a corporate stage is something specific. She arrives understanding the technical detail, she knows what the regulators are about to ask, and she has spent enough time across the table from senior technologists to keep the conversation honest. For an organisation putting its leadership in front of clients or its own workforce to talk about AI, that is the moderator profile that does the work. Key speaking topics Artificial intelligence and generative AI AI governance, ethics and regulation Cybersecurity and digital risk Big Tech, platforms and competition Digital transformation and emerging technology Diversity in technology Innovation and disruption Moderation, hosting and panel chairing Ideal for AI, technology and innovation summits requiring a credible main-stage host or interviewer CIO, CISO, CTO and digital transformation leadership events Boards and executive committees commissioning a closed-door briefing on AI and digital regulation Awards ceremonies, flagship dinners and member events seeking a recognisable BBC face with subject authority Audience outcomes A clearer picture of where AI regulation and governance are moving in the UK, EU and US, and what that means for corporate decisions in the next 12 to 24 months. A sharper sense of which AI vendor and platform claims hold up under scrutiny and which do not. Direct exposure to how the world’s most senior technology leaders are talking, and not talking, about risk. A working vocabulary for non-technical executives to discuss AI, cybersecurity and digital regulation with confidence in front of clients, staff and regulators.