Innovation & Disruption

Why organisations work with Jeffrey Schnapp He has done the rare thing of building both a respected academic institution (metaLAB at Harvard, Stanford Humanities Lab) and a venture-backed hardware business (Piaggio Fast Forward, makers of the gita robot). Most innovation speakers have done one or the other. The gita robot, which he co-conceived, won the 2020 Red Dot Award Best of the Best. He can speak to product design as a senior operator, not as a commentator on other people’s products. His framework treats culture, narrative, and material design as part of the same engineering problem. For consumer brands, mobility companies, and cultural institutions, that is the integration most teams never manage internally. He sits at the centre of the most serious institutional conversations on the future of libraries, museums, archives, and AI-augmented knowledge work, with Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center, the Triennale di Milano, and the Canadian Centre for Architecture among his collaborators. Biography highlights Carl A. Pescosolido Chair in Romance Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literature, Harvard University; Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature. Founder and faculty director of metaLAB (at) Harvard; faculty co-director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. Co-founder and Chief Visionary Officer of Piaggio Fast Forward; former CEO 2015 to 2018. Founding director of the Stanford Humanities Lab, 1999 to 2009. Co-author of Digital_Humanities (MIT Press, 2012); author of FuturPiaggio (2017) and Storia rapida della velocita (2025), winner of the 2025 Premio di saggistica “Citta delle rose.” Speaker at TED, the United Nations, and the Royal Academy of Sweden; gita robot recipient of the 2020 Red Dot Award Best of the Best. Biography The gita robot, a two-wheeled cargo follower built by Piaggio Fast Forward in Boston, won the 2020 Red Dot Award Best of the Best. Its co-founder is a Harvard professor of comparative literature. That sentence is the simplest way to describe what Jeffrey Schnapp does: he runs serious cultural scholarship and serious product engineering as a single practice, and ships from both ends. At Harvard he holds the Carl A. Pescosolido Chair, chairs the Department of Comparative Literature, and founded metaLAB, an experimental research unit at the intersection of design, technology and the humanities. He is also a faculty co-director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. Before Harvard he founded and ran the Stanford Humanities Lab, one of the earliest serious experiments in digital humanities infrastructure. In parallel, he co-founded Piaggio Fast Forward, the robotics arm of the Italian mobility group behind Vespa, and served as its CEO from 2015 to 2018 before moving into the Chief Visionary Officer role. PFF has shipped the gita and gita mini personal cargo robots and, in 2025, the kilo utility robot. His authored work, including FuturPiaggio and the prize-winning Storia rapida della velocita, treats mobility, speed and material culture as questions a serious product company needs to answer. The pattern across his career is a refusal to separate cultural intuition from operational delivery. He has curated exhibitions at the Triennale di Milano and the Canadian Centre for Architecture, redesigned tunnels in Trento into a working history museum, and helped define what the next generation of libraries, archives and AI-augmented knowledge tools will look like. For corporate audiences working on brand, customer experience, mobility, or innovation portfolios, that integrated view is the asset. Key speaking topics Innovation at the intersection of design, culture and technology Mobility and the future of urban life Robotics and human-centred product design The future of libraries, archives and museums AI and the future of knowledge work Cultural history as a strategic asset for brands Design-led entrepreneurship Ideal for Boards and executive teams in mobility, consumer products, and design-led brands Innovation, R&D, and design leaders integrating cultural insight into product development Cultural institutions, libraries, and museum leadership rethinking their operating model Universities and think tanks commissioning on the future of knowledge work and the humanities Audience outcomes A working model for treating cultural history and product design as one discipline rather than two budgets Concrete reference cases from Piaggio Fast Forward, metaLAB, and large-scale curatorial projects A clearer view of how AI is reshaping libraries, archives and knowledge institutions, from someone building inside both the academy and a venture A vocabulary for senior teams who want innovation programmes that produce shipped objects, not slide decks

Why organisations work with Taryn Southern She produced the first solo-artist pop album composed with AI in 2018, when most organisations were still asking whether generative tools could ship anything usable. The lessons on creative workflow integration are now several years ahead of most enterprise practice. She runs storytelling and external communications at Blackrock Neurotech, an implantable BCI company, which gives her a working view of the next technology layer beyond generative AI. Her documentary work, including «I AM HUMAN» at the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival, gives her a rare ability to translate frontier neurotechnology into language a non-technical board can use. She has keynoted SXSW, Web Summit, the World AI Summit, and NY Times Future of Work, and has been booked by Google, Salesforce, Deloitte, and Gartner. Senior tech audiences treat her as a peer, not a populariser. Biography highlights Chief Storytelling Officer at Blackrock Neurotech since 2021, leading story strategy for funding rounds totalling over $230M led by Thiel Capital, Apeiron, and Tether Released «I AM AI» in 2018, the first solo-artist pop album composed and produced with AI tools including Amper, IBM Watson Beat, Google Magenta, and AIVA Directed and produced «I AM HUMAN,» premiered at the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival; subsequent awards include Best Director at Oslo Film Fest Three-time Streamy Awards nominee; 2018 Geena Davis Award recipient for innovative female filmmaking Keynote speaker at SXSW, Web Summit, World AI Summit, Google’s AI Summit, VidCon, The Next Web, NY Times Future of Work Featured in Vanity Fair, Billboard, Fast Company, Wired, Forbes, Psychology Today, and Harvard Business Review Biography The first solo-artist pop album composed with AI was released in September 2018, before most enterprises had finished their first ChatGPT briefing note. «I AM AI» used Amper, IBM Watson Beat, Google Magenta, and AIVA, with the lead single «Break Free» reaching the Top 100 radio charts. The interest, for a serious audience, is not the novelty. It is what the project showed about how a working creative integrates these tools into a production workflow that ships. That production credibility is the spine of the work Taryn Southern now does with senior teams. She has produced more than 1,500 videos across more than a decade of digital media, advised early product teams at YouTube, Google VR, and Snapchat, and directed an award-winning Google VR series. The vantage point is unusual: she has built original commercial product with generative tools at every stage of their maturity. Since 2021 she has been Chief Storytelling Officer at Blackrock Neurotech, the implantable brain-computer interface company. She launched what the company describes as the world’s first BCI museum, oversaw a corporate rebrand and the formation of a BCI Ethics Advisory board, and led communications strategy for funding rounds totalling over $230M, with investors including Thiel Capital, Apeiron, and Tether. The role gives her a working view of the technology layer that arrives after generative AI, and the regulatory and ethical questions a board will be asked to take a position on within the next decade. Her directorial debut, «I AM HUMAN,» premiered at the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival and followed three of the first patients to receive implantable brain-computer interfaces. The film is the practical bridge in her work with corporate audiences: it shows what the next frontier of human-machine technology looks like in a hospital, in a home, and in the conversations a serious organisation will need to have about it well before the technology becomes commonplace. Key speaking topics Generative AI in creative production AI-augmented workflows and creative practice Brain-computer interfaces and human-machine integration Frontier neurotechnology and ethics Storytelling for emerging technology companies The future of human and artificial intelligence Ideal for Boards and leadership teams setting AI strategy beyond initial pilots Chief Marketing Officers, Chief Communications Officers, and creative leadership integrating generative tools into production Innovation, R&D, and strategy leaders tracking neurotech and the post-AI technology stack Senior leadership conferences in technology, media, healthcare, and life sciences Audience outcomes A working understanding of how generative AI tools function inside a real production workflow, drawn from a practitioner who has shipped commercial product A grounded view of brain-computer interface technology, what it currently does, where it is going, and the questions boards will face A sharper sense of which categories of creative and knowledge work are most exposed to generative AI, and which remain durably human An informed perspective on the ethical and governance terrain emerging at the intersection of AI and neurotechnology

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 Tom Cheesewright The Intersections methodology maps incoming macro trends against the specific stress points inside an organisation or sector; producing prioritised decision-points with the analysis behind them, not a generic forecast that leadership teams have to interpret themselves. The framework is teachable and licensable. Organisations leave with a repeatable process they can run internally, not a dependency on a single advisor. His published credentials – Future-Proof Your Business (Penguin; FT business book of the month) and High Frequency Change (Business Book Awards shortlist, 2020) – mean audiences arrive already oriented to his thinking. He does not need to spend the first third of a session building the intellectual case. A decade-plus of broadcast experience across BBC, Channel 4, and national press makes him unusually effective at translating complex AI and technology change for non-technical board audiences without losing analytical precision. Named clients across sectors – Google, Barclays, NASA, HMRC, BMW, Virgin Media, Visa – give procurement teams confidence in sector-agnostic credibility. This is not a speaker whose framework only works in one industry. Biography highlights Creator of the Intersections foresight methodology, now licensed and delivered to third-party organisations Author of High Frequency Change (LID Publishing, 2019) shortlisted, Business Book Awards 2020, ‘Leadership for the Future’ category Author of Future-Proof Your Business (Penguin Business Experts, 2020), Financial Times business book of the month Clients include Google, Barclays, NASA, HMRC, BMW, Visa, HSBC, Accenture, and Virgin Media and more than 30 Global 500 companies Regular contributor and broadcaster: BBC Breakfast, BBC Radio 4, Channel 4 Sunday Brunch, The Guardian, The Times, Evening Standard, The Daily Telegraph BEng in Mechatronics, Lancaster University; established as a full-time applied futurist in 2012 Biography Most organisations know they need to anticipate change. Very few have a structured way to do it. The annual strategic planning cycle and the technology roadmap were not designed to connect incoming macro trends to the specific decisions a leadership team faces this quarter. Tom Cheesewright built the Intersections methodology to close that gap. It maps macro trends, from AI capability shifts to demographic and regulatory change, against the existing pressures inside an organisation or sector, identifying the points where disruption will hit hardest and where meaningful opportunity sits. More than 30 Global 500 companies and government bodies, including NASA, HMRC, Google, and Barclays, have put the framework to work. His two business books establish the intellectual foundation. High Frequency Change (LID Publishing, 2019; shortlisted for the Business Book Awards 2020) sets out why organisations feel overwhelmed by the pace of change and what structural responses actually work. Future-Proof Your Business (Penguin Business Experts, 2020; Financial Times business book of the month) translates the methodology into practical tools for strategy teams. His sustained media presence – BBC Breakfast, Radio 4, Channel 4, The Guardian, The Times – means he is not an unknown quantity when he walks on stage. A mechatronics engineer by training, Cheesewright spent years in technology marketing and digital business before establishing himself as a futurist in 2012. That background – engineering logic, commercial experience, years of public communication about technology – is what keeps the Intersections work grounded. The output is not prediction. It is a structured process for stress-testing an organisation’s assumptions against what is actually coming. Key speaking topics AI and automation in strategic decision-making Scenario planning and applied foresight methodology Organisational agility and adaptive strategy Technology-driven disruption and competitive positioning The future of consumer behaviour and business models Change management in high-frequency environments Long-range strategic planning under uncertainty Ideal for Executive leadership teams and boards preparing long-range or scenario-based strategy Chief Strategy Officers and Chief Technology Officers navigating AI investment decisions Industry associations and sector bodies facing structural disruption from technology or regulation Conference audiences drawn from finance, technology, retail, government, or professional services sectors Audience outcomes A working understanding of the Intersections methodology and how to apply it to their own organisation’s planning process Clarity on which AI and technology developments are commercially significant in their sector, and which can be deprioritised A revised set of strategic questions, not just better answers to the existing ones Stronger language and frameworks for briefing boards and senior stakeholders on emerging technology risk and opportunity A clearer view of where their organisation is most exposed to macro-level disruption over the next three to five years

Why organisations work with Stephen Shapiro He treats innovation as a portfolio of small, structured bets rather than a culture programme, which is why his work lands with CFOs and operating leaders, not just innovation teams. His 25 Lenses framework, set out in Invisible Solutions, gives leadership teams a working tool for reframing the questions behind a stalled initiative, rather than another model to admire and shelve. He built and ran Accenture’s 20,000-person process and innovation practice, so the advice is grounded in operating a function at scale, not in observing one. Senior corporate audiences trust him with active programmes: 3M, P&G, Nike, Marriott, NASA, Microsoft, Capital One, and Johnson and Johnson are among the organisations that have brought him in to work on real innovation problems. The 2015 Speaker Hall of Fame induction and Senior Fellow appointment at The Conference Board signal that the speaking craft and the underlying research both meet a serious institutional bar. Biography highlights Senior Fellow, The Conference Board. 15-year career at Accenture, where he built the firm’s 20,000-person process and innovation practice. Inducted into the Speaker Hall of Fame (CPAE) by the National Speakers Association in 2015. Author of seven books, including Best Practices Are Stupid, named 800-CEO-READ’s best innovation and creativity book of the year, and Invisible Solutions, an INDIE Award winner. Industrial Engineering, Cornell University; Certified Speaking Professional (CSP) designation; six-year term on the NSA Board of Directors. Has worked with leadership teams in over 50 countries, including 3M, P&G, Marriott, Nike, NASA, Microsoft, Capital One, Honda, and Johnson and Johnson. Biography Most corporate innovation programmes fail in the same place. They generate ideas faster than the operating model can absorb them, and the executive committee eventually quietens down because the cost is visible and the return is not. The problem is rarely a shortage of creativity. It is a missing discipline for choosing which questions to spend money on. That is the problem Stephen Shapiro has spent twenty-five years working on. At Accenture he co-led the business process reengineering practice, then built the firm’s 20,000-person process and innovation practice. The shift from efficiency work to growth work shaped the argument that runs through his books: innovation is an operating capability, not a culture, and it can be managed with the same rigour as any other portfolio. His seven books trace that argument. Best Practices Are Stupid, named 800-CEO-READ’s best innovation and creativity book of the year, makes the case for small structured bets over large transformational programmes. Invisible Solutions sets out 25 Lenses for reframing the questions behind a stalled initiative. Pivotal, published in 2024, takes the same discipline into how organisations create stability while continuing to change. The recurring thesis is that better questions are cheaper and more useful than more answers. The institutional credentials reinforce the work. He is a Senior Fellow at The Conference Board, was inducted into the Speaker Hall of Fame (CPAE) in 2015, and holds the Certified Speaking Professional designation. Clients including 3M, P&G, Nike, Marriott, NASA, and Microsoft have brought him in for active innovation programmes rather than thought-leadership set pieces, which is the more useful test of where his work actually lands. Key speaking topics Innovation as a managed corporate discipline Question reframing and problem definition Portfolio approaches to innovation investment Culture and team composition for innovation Stability and adaptability in uncertain markets Growth strategy beyond best-practice benchmarking Ideal for CINOs, heads of innovation, and R&D leaders running enterprise programmes CEOs and strategy leaders trying to convert innovation activity into commercial results Transformation sponsors and operating committees rebuilding the innovation function after a stalled programme Large industrials, financial services, consumer goods, and healthcare organisations with complex internal innovation portfolios Audience outcomes A working method for reframing the strategic question behind a stalled initiative, drawn from the 25 Lenses framework A clear case for replacing large transformational bets with structured small ones, and the financial logic to defend it internally A diagnostic for which innovation activities are producing learning and which are producing motion Specific examples of how named Fortune 500 clients have restructured innovation portfolios, with the trade-offs made visible Language a senior leader can use the next morning to challenge their own innovation roadmap

Why organisations work with Shameen Prashantham Owns a defined intellectual territory, corporate-and-startup partnering, that almost no other senior strategy academic has built a 15-year body of fieldwork around. Wrote the practitioner book on the subject. Gorillas Can Dance (Wiley, 2021) sets out a tested framework of synergy, interface and exemplar drawn from work with Microsoft, SAP, Bayer, Bosch, BMW, Cisco, Ford, IBM, Intel, Unilever, Walmart and others. Brings genuinely first-hand China and emerging-market perspective to Western boards. Based at CEIBS in Shanghai, with active fieldwork across Bangalore, Lagos, Nairobi, Accra, Tel Aviv and Silicon Valley, he can discuss what Chinese firms actually do, not what Western analysts assume. Writes for the audience he speaks to. Recent contributions to Harvard Business Review, including a June 2024 piece on safe engagement with China, give a buyer confidence the keynote will land at board level rather than in academic register. As CEIBS Associate Dean (Africa) and former MBA Director, he is one of a small group of strategy academics with substantive operating insight into both China and Africa, the two markets large corporations most often handle badly. Biography highlights Professor of International Business and Strategy, China Europe International Business School (CEIBS), Shanghai. Associate Dean (Africa), CEIBS. Previously Associate Dean and MBA Director, 2020 to 2024. Author of Gorillas Can Dance: Lessons from Microsoft and Other Corporations on Partnering with Startups (Wiley, 2021). Author of Born Globals, Networks, and the Large Multinational Enterprise (Routledge). Research published in Journal of International Business Studies, Journal of Business Venturing, Journal of Management Studies, Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, and Organization Studies. Contributor to Harvard Business Review, Financial Times and the Brightline-Thinkers50 volume Strategy@Work. Biography Microsoft, SAP, Bayer, BMW, Walmart and Unilever have all built programmes to partner with startups. Few of those programmes work as designed. The reason is rarely strategy. It is the operating asymmetry between a $200 billion balance sheet and a 30-person company, and almost no one has studied that asymmetry as carefully or for as long as the author of Gorillas Can Dance. Based at CEIBS in Shanghai, Shameen Prashantham has spent more than fifteen years inside this question. His fieldwork runs across Silicon Valley, Bangalore, Tel Aviv, Beijing, Berlin, Lagos, Nairobi and Accra. The book sets out three pillars, synergy, interface and exemplar, that distinguish corporate partnership programmes that produce real innovation from those that produce press releases. His academic credibility is straightforward. PhD from the University of Strathclyde. Research in the Journal of International Business Studies, the Journal of Business Venturing, the Journal of Management Studies, Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, and Organization Studies. The work translates into Harvard Business Review, where his June 2024 piece on safe engagement with China ran in the print edition. What buyers tend to value most is the geography. He sits in Shanghai, runs CEIBS engagement in Africa, and has serious working knowledge of Indian and Israeli innovation ecosystems. For a Western board trying to decide whether and how to partner in or from emerging markets, that combination is rare and expensive to replicate. Key speaking topics Corporate-startup partnerships Innovation strategy in large corporations Doing business in and with China Emerging-market growth strategy Africa as a strategic market Corporate entrepreneurship Sustainable Development Goals partnerships Ideal for CEOs, chief strategy officers and chief innovation officers running corporate venturing or startup-engagement programmes. Boards reassessing China exposure or considering operating commitments in Africa or India. Heads of M&A, partnerships and corporate development designing the next phase of inorganic growth. Executive audiences inside multinationals where emerging-market strategy is on the agenda. Audience outcomes A clear test for whether an existing corporate-startup partnership programme is structurally set up to produce results. Three operating levers, synergy, interface and exemplar, to apply to live partnership decisions. A grounded read on what is actually happening inside Chinese firms and Chinese innovation, beyond Western commentary. A working frame for sequencing entry, partnership and growth decisions in emerging markets. Concrete examples drawn from named programmes at Microsoft, SAP, Bayer, Unilever, Walmart and others.

Why organisations work with Inma Martinez She chairs the Multi-Stakeholder Expert Group at the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence, the G7/OECD body whose work fed directly into Japan’s Hiroshima Process for AI Safety. That gives her a line of sight into the regulation boards will actually have to live with. She built mobile AI recommendation systems with Cambridge University and Trinity College Dublin teams in the early 2000s, before recommender systems were a category. The technical fluency is real, not borrowed. She moves credibly between Goldman Sachs alumni networks, Nokia-era telecoms, the European Commission, UNESCO, the Spanish AI Council, and Imperial College Business School. Few AI voices are taken seriously in all of those rooms. Two published books, including The Fifth Industrial Revolution, give her a coherent thesis on where digital and space economies converge, rather than a list of trends. Biography highlights Chair, Multi-Stakeholder Expert Group, and Co-Chair, Steering Committee, Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence (G7/OECD). Member, AI Council Advisory Board, State Secretariat for AI, Spanish Ministry of Economic Affairs and Digital Transformation. Expert advisor to the European Commission on Big Data and AI since 2001; collaborator with UNIDO, UNESCO, and the European Space Agency. Guest lecturer, Imperial College Business School; Director, Master in Artificial Intelligence, Loyola University, Spain. Author of The Fifth Industrial Revolution (Deusto/Planeta) and The Future of the Automotive Industry. Career across Goldman Sachs, Cable & Wireless, and mobile-internet ventures Escape Velocity and Visual Radio (acquired by Nokia); regularly cited by the Financial Times, The Economist, Bloomberg, Fortune, and Time. Biography The hard problem in AI right now is not the model. It is the distance between what a board has committed to publicly and what the operating business can actually deploy, govern, and defend. Inma Martinez has spent the last decade working that gap from both ends. At the policy end, she chairs the Multi-Stakeholder Expert Group at the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence, the G7/OECD body that shapes the rules large enterprises will eventually have to operate inside. The work she led on Responsible AI, AI Innovation, and the Future of Work fed into the Hiroshima Process for AI Safety. She also sits on Spain’s AI Council Advisory Board and has advised the European Commission on Big Data and AI since 2001. At the operating end, her credentials are not theoretical. She built mobile AI recommendation systems with Cambridge University and Trinity College Dublin teams when the category did not yet exist, after a finance career at Goldman Sachs and a global director role at Cable & Wireless. Her mobile-internet ventures Escape Velocity and Visual Radio were acquired by Nokia. She has worked inside the innovation labs of IBM, HP, LG, and Apple. That combined vantage point is what makes her useful to senior leadership: she can speak to a CTO about deployment, to a chief risk officer about governance exposure, and to a CEO about what the next five years of AI regulation will do to capital allocation. Her two books, The Fifth Industrial Revolution and The Future of the Automotive Industry, set out the same thesis in long form. Named outlets including the Financial Times, The Economist, Bloomberg, Fortune, and Time turn to her when an editorial line on AI needs a serious voice. Key speaking topics Applied AI and competitive advantage AI governance, safety, and the G7/OECD policy landscape The future of work in an AI-automated economy Digital transformation for established enterprises and SMEs The Fifth Industrial Revolution and the space economy Connected mobility and the automotive industry’s digital reinvention 5G, edge and cloud computing, and the Internet of Everything Ideal for Boards and executive committees setting AI strategy and AI-governance posture CTOs, CIOs, and chief data officers moving AI from pilot into production Chief risk officers and general counsel scoping AI regulatory exposure Industry forums in financial services, automotive, telecoms, and the space economy Audience outcomes A clear read on where global AI regulation is heading, from someone shaping it A working distinction between AI as marketing narrative and AI as operating capability Specific examples of where applied AI is producing measurable advantage, and where it is failing A defensible position on the workforce implications of AI automation A sharper view of how the digital and space economies will reshape industrial strategy

Why organisations work with Maria Santacaterina A published Wiley thesis (Adaptive Resilience) that gives boards a structured way to integrate AI and frontier technology without dismantling the human capability the enterprise still runs on. A formal AI ethics and risk role at ForHumanity, which means her view on governance is grounded in audit standards, not opinion. A humanities-and-international-relations frame that translates directly into how regulators, customers, and employees actually experience AI decisions, useful in rooms where the technology team cannot read the political weather. Recognised in Computer Weekly’s Most Influential Women in UK Tech longlist, with a profile across HBR-adjacent and AI research podcasts (MLST, Love & Philosophy) that signals credibility to technical audiences as well as commercial ones. Working language fluency in English, French, Italian, and Spanish, which matters for European boards running AI programmes across jurisdictions with diverging regulatory regimes. Biography highlights Author of Adaptive Resilience: How to Thrive in a Digital Era, Wiley, 2023. ForHumanity Fellow, Ethics and Risk, contributing to AI audit and governance standards. Founder and CEO of Santacaterina, a UK board advisory firm focused on strategic leadership and digital transformation. Named in Computer Weekly’s Most Influential Women in UK Tech longlist. Featured on Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST) and Love & Philosophy on the human-AI relationship. M.A. in International Relations, with prior study in modern languages, philosophy, and political sociology. Biography AI deployment has run ahead of AI governance. Boards have signed off on programmes whose failure modes, regulatory exposure, and human consequences they would struggle to articulate under questioning. Santacaterina’s argument starts there: technology is a means, the operating model is the constraint, and human judgement is the asset most easily eroded in the rush to automate. Her book Adaptive Resilience: How to Thrive in a Digital Era (Wiley, 2023) sets out how to integrate frontier technology into the enterprise without hollowing out the people, ethics, and oversight that make it defensible. The argument draws on her humanities training, an M.A. in International Relations, and twenty-five years advising senior leaders through digital transformation programmes. That position is reinforced institutionally. As a ForHumanity Fellow in Ethics and Risk, she works on the audit standards that AI systems are now being assessed against. As founder and CEO of Santacaterina, she advises boards on strategy, transformation, and the governance posture that follows. Computer Weekly has named her among the most influential women in UK tech. What she brings into a room is the connection most AI conversations miss: between the technical decision, the governance frame, and the human cost of getting either wrong. She has been a featured voice on Machine Learning Street Talk, where the audience is technical, and on board-facing platforms, where it is not. The same argument holds in both rooms. Key speaking topics AI strategy, ethics, and board oversight Adaptive resilience in the digital enterprise Human-AI complementarity and the future of work Responsible innovation and AI governance frameworks Digital transformation and operating-model redesign Sustainable value creation in a frontier-technology era Ideal for Boards and audit committees commissioning AI governance and assurance CEOs and CTOs moving AI from pilot to operational deployment CHROs and transformation leads redesigning the workforce around AI capability Risk, ethics, and compliance leaders building defensible AI policy Audience outcomes A board-level vocabulary for governing AI decisions that stand up to regulatory and stakeholder scrutiny A clearer view of where human judgement remains the binding constraint on AI deployment, and where it does not Specific reference points from Adaptive Resilience for stress-testing the organisation’s digital strategy A grounded sense of how European AI regulation and ethics standards translate into operating choices

Why organisations work with Dror Gill Coaches leadership teams through the practical decisions of generative AI adoption: tool selection across ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, and Claude, prompt design, hallucination control, and workflow redesign for real business processes. Brings engineering credibility most generative AI speakers cannot match: 37 granted patents, a 2021 Technology and Engineering Emmy for perceptual video encoding at Beamr, and three decades inside companies shipping production technology. Runs hands-on workshops, not lecture sets. Executives leave with prompts, chatbots, and analyses they built themselves during the session. Demonstrates what is possible at the frontier with live builds, including a signature session in which he creates a startup from scratch using ChatGPT alone, covering ideation, business model, investor deck, and go-to-market. Updates his material continuously. The pace of model and tooling change makes most static keynote decks stale within months; he rebuilds against the current state of the field. Biography highlights 2021 Technology and Engineering Emmy Award (National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences) for content-adaptive video encoding at Beamr. Co-inventor on 37 granted patents in video and image processing. First employee and long-serving CTO, VP Product, and VP Marketing at Beamr (NASDAQ: BMR). IBM Research Lab in the mid-1990s, pioneering media streaming and voice-over-IP, including collaboration with Sun Microsystems on the Java Media Framework. Founder of Gamdala, a generative AI consultancy advising executives on adoption, prompt engineering, and workflow integration. B.Sc. Electrical Engineering, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. Speaking engagements at DLD Munich, AI Global Summit Italy, IBM, Samsung, Microsoft for Startups, and Amdocs. Biography The current generative AI conversation inside most companies sits between two failure modes. Either the technology is treated as a productivity gimmick to be tolerated, or it is over-promised as a strategy in itself. Neither produces operating advantage. The work of turning general-purpose models into specific, repeatable improvements in how a business actually functions sits in between. That work needs someone fluent in both the underlying technology and the practical question of what executives can do on Monday. Dror Gill is that profile. He spent three decades inside companies shipping production technology, most recently as the long-serving CTO of Beamr (NASDAQ: BMR), where he led the development of the perceptual video encoding technology that won the 2021 Technology and Engineering Emmy. He is a co-inventor on 37 granted patents. Earlier, he was at IBM Research in the mid-1990s pioneering streaming over IP and voice-over-IP, and at Emblaze Semiconductor chairing the Wireless Multimedia Forum. Today he runs Gamdala, a generative AI consultancy. The shift is consistent: he is again working at the frontier of a general-purpose technology, only now the audience is executives rather than engineers. His sessions are workshop-led. Participants leave having built prompts, chatbots, and analyses themselves. His signature live build creates a startup from scratch using ChatGPT alone, covering ideation, business model, investor deck, and go-to-market inside a single session. What makes his keynote work uncommon is the engineering pedigree behind the executive coaching. He has shipped the kind of technology he now teaches leaders to deploy. The Technion degree, the Emmy, and the patent record are not credentials worn for show. They are the reason the operating advice translates. Key speaking topics Generative AI adoption for executives Prompt engineering and hallucination control ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, and Claude in business workflows Generative AI for product, marketing, and operations AI in education and corporate learning Live demonstrations of generative AI for business creation Workflow redesign around large language models Ideal for CEOs, COOs, and executive committees seeking to move generative AI from pilots to operating use. CHROs and learning and development leaders designing AI fluency programmes for senior managers. Product and engineering leadership teams evaluating where to embed generative AI in customer-facing and internal workflows. Founders, investors, and innovation teams who want a working understanding of the current state of the tools, not last year’s. Audience outcomes A clearer view of which generative AI tools fit which business problems, and where each one breaks. Practical prompt patterns participants use in their own work the same week. A working sense of how to control hallucination, including chain-of-thought prompting and verification techniques. Awareness of what is now possible end-to-end with generative AI, demonstrated live rather than described in slides. Confidence to lead an organisational conversation on generative AI adoption without needing a translator.

Why organisations work with Philip Sheppard He has actually built and runs an AI creative business. LifeScore, the generative music platform he co-founded with Siri creator Tom Gruber, has raised £11m and ships to Warner Music Group and Octopus Ventures-backed commercial partners. The argument is grounded in a working company, not a slide on disruption. He brings a working composer’s view of human-AI collaboration. Most AI commentary is by analysts. His comes from sitting at the boundary where a human writes the musical raw materials and the machine selects, layers and mixes them in real time, which is the same architectural question now facing design, copy, video and brand teams. The credentials carry weight in a creative-leadership audience. A Fellowship of the Royal Academy of Music, an Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Music Branch membership, and conducting all 205 national anthems for the London 2012 Olympics with the London Philharmonic Orchestra at Abbey Road are not transferable credentials. He has a track record of speaking to technology buyers, not music audiences. Keynotes for Ernst & Young, Deloitte, Google, Facebook, YouTube and Kyu Collective, and on stages including C2MTL, TTI Vanguard and Business Innovation Factory. He turns an abstract debate into a live demonstration. He performs and composes on stage using a six-string electric cello, which makes the argument about generative systems and human craft visible rather than theoretical. Biography highlights Founder and CEO of LifeScore, an AI adaptive music platform co-founded with Tom Gruber, co-creator of Siri at Apple; backed by Warner Music Group and Octopus Ventures. Fellow of the Royal Academy of Music, awarded as a lifetime recognition of services to music and education. Composer of more than 65 scores for film, television, gaming and theatre, including Detroit: Become Human (Sony), the Star Wars: The Force Awakens Comic Con trailer, Mercury 13 (Netflix), In the Shadow of the Moon and Meru. Conducted and arranged all 205 national anthems for the London 2012 Olympic winners’ ceremonies, recorded with the London Philharmonic Orchestra at Abbey Road Studios. Music director for the London handover at the 2008 Beijing Olympics closing ceremony; music producer for the Tour de France, Rugby World Cup and the COP21 Paris climate summit. Member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Music Branch (2017) and the Television Academy; author of Music Makes Your Child Smarter (Schirmer Trade Books). Biography LifeScore was incubated inside Abbey Road Studios for a reason. The company was set up to answer a question that now matters far beyond music. If a machine can generate plausible creative output on demand, what exactly is the human still meant to do? Philip Sheppard, a composer and Fellow of the Royal Academy of Music, co-founded the platform with Tom Gruber, co-creator of Siri at Apple, and now runs it as CEO. Warner Music Group and Octopus Ventures have backed it through an £11m funding round. The architecture of LifeScore is, in effect, the architecture of any serious human-AI creative system. Composers and musicians build the raw musical materials. The machine selects, layers, sequences and mixes them in real time around the listener’s environment. The output is generated, but the judgement, taste and craft that make it sound human are not. That is the model Sheppard now describes to technology and creative leaders trying to industrialise generative AI without losing what made their work recognisable in the first place. The credentials behind the argument are concrete. Sheppard has composed more than 65 scores for film, television and gaming, including Detroit: Become Human, the Mercury 13 documentary for Netflix and In the Shadow of the Moon. He conducted and arranged all 205 national anthems for the London 2012 Olympics with the London Philharmonic Orchestra at Abbey Road, and was music director for the London handover at the Beijing 2008 closing ceremony. He sits as a voting member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the Television Academy, and wrote Music Makes Your Child Smarter for Schirmer Trade Books. His keynote audiences are mostly outside the music industry. Ernst & Young, Deloitte, Google, Facebook, YouTube and Kyu Collective have all booked him, alongside stages such as C2MTL, TTI Vanguard and Business Innovation Factory. The reason is the same in each case. He is one of the few people who can speak about generative AI and creative work from the position of having shipped a company that does it, and a body of work that depends on it being done well. Key speaking topics Human-AI collaboration in creative work Generative AI and the future of creative industries Building an AI venture from inside a creative practice Music, data and adaptive systems Innovation and creativity as a managed discipline The role of craft in machine-augmented teams Ideal for Chief technology, AI and digital officers shaping how generative AI is deployed across creative, brand and design functions Chief marketing, brand and customer-experience leaders whose teams now produce content with generative tools Innovation, R&D and product leadership at media, entertainment, consumer and platform businesses Leadership offsites at technology, consulting and professional services firms looking for a credible voice on creativity and AI Audience outcomes A clearer account of what generative AI changes about creative production, and what it does not A working mental model for dividing labour between human judgement and machine generation in creative workflows Named examples of how an AI creative venture is actually built, funded and run, drawn from LifeScore’s own history A sharper sense of where craft and taste still differentiate a brand or product in a generative environment A live demonstration of human-machine creative collaboration through performance, not slides

Why organisations work with Hubertus Porschen He speaks to mid-market boards from inside the same world. As the elected federal chairman of Die Jungen Unternehmer from 2015 to 2018, he represented Germany’s young Mittelstand owners directly to policymakers and to ASU/Die Familienunternehmer. He has built and run digital businesses, not just advised on them. App-Arena and iConsultants give him a working vocabulary for what actually breaks when a traditional company tries to digitise a business model. His book Digitaler Suizid frames digital inertia as an existential risk to German firms, an argument that lands with audiences who have heard the optimistic version too often. He works in German and English with equal credibility, which matters for groups whose senior leadership sits across DACH and the wider European market. Biography highlights Federal Chairman, Die Jungen Unternehmer (BJU), 2015 to 2018, the young-entrepreneurs body within the ASU/Die Familienunternehmer association. Doctorate in economics, University of Marburg, with a dissertation on the academic entrepreneur. Author of Digitaler Suizid, on the digitalisation gap in the German economy. Founder and operator of multiple digital ventures including App-Arena GmbH; partner at iConsultants GmbH. Lecturer at Niederrhein University of Applied Sciences and the University of Cologne. Listed in Top 100 Speakers Excellence 2026 by Speakers Excellence. Biography The German Mittelstand is one of the most successful industrial structures in Europe. It is also one of the slowest to absorb new technology. That tension defines the working subject matter of Hubertus Porschen. He spent three years, from 2015 to 2018, as federal chairman of Die Jungen Unternehmer, the young-entrepreneurs wing of the ASU/Die Familienunternehmer association. The role put him in regular contact with policymakers in Berlin and with several thousand owner-managers running mid-sized German firms. The work that followed, as a speaker and as a founder, builds directly on that constituency. His operating experience is the second pillar. App-Arena, an online marketplace for social media applications, and iConsultants, a digital advisory practice, gave him direct exposure to the gap between digital strategy decks and the messy reality of changing how a 150-person company actually works. His book Digitaler Suizid develops the argument: German firms that treat digitisation as a marketing project rather than an operating one are quietly removing themselves from their own future. Today his keynote work concentrates on artificial intelligence: specifically the question of how a board moves from “AI-interested” to “AI-ready” without paralysing the operating business in the process. He lectures at Niederrhein University of Applied Sciences and the University of Cologne, holds a doctorate from the University of Marburg, and is listed in Speakers Excellence’s Top 100 for 2026. Key speaking topics Artificial intelligence in mid-market operations Digital transformation in family-owned and Mittelstand businesses Entrepreneurship and founder leadership Innovation and disruption in traditional industries Change management across generational workforces Digital business model design Ideal for Boards and executive teams of family-owned and Mittelstand firms in DACH CEOs, COOs and digital leaders confronting an AI adoption gap Industry associations and chambers of commerce convening member firms Founder networks and entrepreneurship programmes in German-speaking markets Audience outcomes A clearer sense of where their organisation sits on the line between AI-interested and AI-ready A working argument for why digital inertia is a strategic, not operational, risk Specific examples of how German mid-market companies have moved digital initiatives out of pilot Vocabulary to talk to a sceptical board about AI without leaning on vendor language

Why organisations work with Ian Khan He gives executive teams a diagnostic rather than a forecast. The Future Readiness Score, built from his research across hundreds of organisations, turns “are we ready for AI” into a scored view across seven operating pillars. His writing carries commercial weight. Undisrupted won the Bronze Medal at the 2025 North American Book Awards and the Non-Fiction category at the Goody Business Book Awards 2025; Metaverse For Dummies is a Wiley title. He reports on the future as a working journalist, not only a consultant. As executive producer and host of The Futurist on Amazon Prime Video, he has interviewed hundreds of global leaders on the record, which keeps his keynote content closer to evidence than to speculation. He separates AI hype from AI advantage in front of technical and non-technical rooms. His AIRS assessment gives boards a common language for where they sit on vision, use cases, data, governance, and adoption. Biography highlights USA Today bestselling author of Undisrupted, which introduces the Future Readiness Score across seven organisational pillars. Author of Metaverse For Dummies, published by Wiley. Executive producer and host of The Futurist, a streaming series on Amazon Prime Video across more than 45 regions. Director of the documentary Blockchain City and producer of additional films on AI and the future of work. Thinkers50 Future Readiness Award finalist and Thinkers360 Distinguished honoree. Media contributor and on-record commentator featured by CNN and Forbes. Biography Most AI strategy conversations stall at the same point. The executive team agrees the technology matters. Nobody can agree on what to do on Monday. Khan’s contribution is a working answer to that problem, built from research across hundreds of organisations and codified in his book Undisrupted and the Future Readiness Score that sits inside it. The Score moves the question from opinion to diagnostic. It measures an organisation across seven pillars, including engagement, learning, collaboration, culture, innovation, and execution, and returns a prioritised picture of where readiness is thin. His AIRS framework does the equivalent for AI specifically, covering vision, use cases, data, governance, and adoption. Boards use both as a shared map before they approve the next investment. Khan works across the commercial and editorial sides of technology. He is the author of Metaverse For Dummies, published by Wiley, and of additional titles on prompt engineering and value creation. As executive producer and host of The Futurist on Amazon Prime Video, he has interviewed hundreds of founders, scientists, and policy leaders on the record. Commentary work with CNN and Forbes sits alongside that. His keynote practice reflects that dual background. Audiences get a filmmaker’s feel for narrative and a consultant’s insistence on instrumentation, applied to the decisions leadership teams are actually trying to make about AI, automation, and emerging technology. Key speaking topics Artificial intelligence and generative AI strategy Future readiness and organisational diagnostics Digital transformation and enterprise technology adoption Emerging technology and disruption AI governance and responsible deployment Leadership in an AI-driven operating environment Ideal for CEOs, CIOs, and CTOs sponsoring AI strategy across business units Boards and executive committees setting technology investment priorities Transformation and digital leaders responsible for moving pilots into production Government and public-sector leaders assessing AI readiness and governance Audience outcomes A shared vocabulary for assessing where the organisation actually stands on AI and digital readiness. A prioritised view of which technology bets are worth compounding and which to retire. Sharper criteria for AI governance decisions, from data to adoption. Concrete patterns drawn from hundreds of documented executive interviews, not abstract predictions.