Rahim Hirji is an AI keynote speaker based in London and speaking worldwide. He argues that AI comes for your judgement before it comes for your job, and that most organisations are handing theirs over without ever deciding to. He speaks to boards, executive teams, leadership offsites, conferences and whole organisations.
Rahim Hirji is available to speak on this subject, in person worldwide and online, for boards, executive teams, leadership offsites and conferences. He is a London-based keynote speaker specialising in AI and human judgement, and the author of SuperSkills (Kogan Page, 2026). He founded the skills platform EtonX, later acquired by Eton College, and led Quizlet’s international growth across more than 60 countries.
Watch the showreel · 2 minutes
A feel for the room before you put me in front of yours.
SuperSkills is endorsed by Karim Lakhani (Harvard Business School), Alnoor Bhimani (London School of Economics), David Rowan (founding editor, WIRED UK), Sherry Coutu CBE and ten others. Rahim has spoken to leadership teams at Google, Barclays, Kaplan, BPP University and Next 15. Published by Kogan Page, part of Hachette UK.
What organisers say
“I brought Rahim in to speak to the Luminary Community, a group of female leaders and high potentials working in HR and people. I wanted something that would make sense of AI for them without the hype and without the fear. Rahim started with the human rather than the technology, and that reframing was the thing. He made AI feel simple and made us feel capable, which is not a combination I have come across before. Our members left with something they could actually use.”
Azmina Kara, Founder, Luminary. Booked a talk for the Luminary Community.
“We brought Rahim in to help our EMEA People Operations leadership team think through AI and human judgement. He surveyed us beforehand, sixteen of eighteen answered, and he built the session from our own responses, so the whole morning was about us. I’d recommend him to any leadership team working out what should stay human.”
Karina Govindji, Director, Head of HR UK, Google. Booked a leadership session.
Formats
One argument, every room
From one-to-one coaching, small dinners and board dinners, to facilitated sessions of six to ten, team meetings of 20 to 50, webinars, conversations, panels and large gatherings of 500 to 1,000. The same argument works in each, delivered a little differently every time.
Yes. He speaks to boards, executive teams, leadership offsites, corporate conferences and whole organisations, in person and online, worldwide, in English. He wrote SuperSkills: The Seven Human Skills for the Age of AI (Kogan Page, 2026) and founded The SuperSkills Intelligence Company.
His subject is what AI does to human judgement at work. There are three keynotes, 30 to 90 minutes, each tailored after a briefing call. The engagement dates below link to the organisers, every endorsement carries a name, role and employer, and the research behind the talk is published in full.
Main stage, CIPD Festival of Work, ExCeL London.
Where he has spoken
2026. The Shape the Future Consortium 2026 Summer Forum, 15 to 16 June 2026, at Korn Ferry’s Mayfair offices. The organiser’s guest speakers page names Rahim alongside Roger Philby, Korn Ferry’s UK Head of Consulting, Katell Le Goulven of INSEAD, Piers Lea of Learning Technologies Group, Matt Donovan of GP Strategies and Charles Jennings.
Also. A SuperSkills keynote to secondary pupils at JESS Dubai, an AI leadership workshop in Madrid, many presentations in Dubai, and work for multiple legal clients in the Emirates who have not agreed to be named. London Tech Week, Imperial College London, Echo360’s EMEA retreat and EdTechX.
The full record, with photographs and links to the organisers, is at speaking record. Seven engagements are written up at case studies, from about 1,500 people joining a session hybrid from central London at short notice, to a division of a very large company permitted exactly one AI tool. Six of the seven produced further work after the session.
The argument
AI rarely takes a whole job. It takes the first draft, the initial analysis, the routine review: the tasks through which people built the judgement that made them senior. The work still ships, the output often improves, and no alarm goes off.
So the question for a leadership team is whether the organisation is drifting into AI through a thousand small, reasonable decisions, or designing it by deciding in advance where human judgement has to remain. Drift is the default because it asks nothing of you.
The room hears three findings, each traceable to a source on this site. Across 106 experiments, human and AI combinations performed worse on average than the better of human alone or AI alone, with the losses concentrated in decision-making. Clinicians whose unassisted detection rate fell after AI exposure. Students whose grades rose 48 per cent with an AI tutor and fell 17 per cent below a control group once it was taken away. None of that is a case against AI. It is a case for designing the relationship.
The tool used live in the room is the Drift versus Design Matrix: two axes, awareness and agency, and four positions. It is not scored.
Three keynotes, and what each room leaves with
Drift versus Design, the signature keynote, for boards, executive teams and senior leadership offsites. The room sorts its own consequential decisions into what may be handed over, what a machine may draft with a person deciding, and what a person must do from the start. Full description.
We Are Superheroes, for whole organisations, cross-sector conferences and education: the seven human skills that grow more valuable as the tools spread, carried by a family story across four generations and three continents.
WTH, What the Human, a live judgement test for boards, run in the room. December to March only.
All three, with audiences and outcomes, are at keynotes. Formats, timings, technical requirements and what is needed on the day are in the speaker pack.
What clients and endorsers say
Karim Lakhani, Harvard Business School, co-author of Competing in the Age of AI: “Rahim maps the exact capabilities we need to partner with machines without surrendering our authorship.”
Rebecca McKinlay, Managing Director, Oystercatchers: “We are pretty selective about the speakers we put in front of our audience. Rahim was a standout speaker. He told our audience something they did not especially want to hear, and explained it in a way that encouraged them to take action.”
Stuart Foster, Head of Coverage, UK Corporate Banking, Barclays: “He handled a demanding room and left them with something they could act on rather than only something to think about.”
Tom Dunlop, General Manager, Global Student Recruitment, Kaplan University Partnerships ANZ: “He went well beyond the brief, interviewing students and families directly so he could tell us what was happening on the ground rather than what we assumed from our own data.”
Sam Knights, CEO, Next 15 Group plc: “So thought-provoking and so well presented. It set up our board day perfectly.”
The research behind the talk
Behind the keynotes sits a published research base: 405 research pages and 1323 questions mapped across eighteen territories, with every source graded for its method, what it finds, what it proves and what it does not prove. A claim made from the stage can be traced to its source before the room leaves, corrections are published on the page, and the difficult findings get said. Start at the research.
Published, broadcast and reviewed
In 2026 he became a regular contributor to the BBC, with 11 appearances in three months across the BBC World Service and regional BBC radio, on AI in work, society and human judgement.
Bylined and quoted in the New York Observer, Bloomberg, The Telegraph, Entrepreneur, the Evening Standard, City AM, The Straits Times, Arab News, Gulf News, The CEO Magazine, The European Business Review, CEOWORLD, TechRound, Publishers Weekly and The Bookseller, with further coverage in the UK, the Middle East, China and Asia-Pacific.
The book, SuperSkills, is published by Kogan Page, ISBN 9781398628991. Arab News reviewed it: “A reminder that success is not about what you know today, it is about your capacity to keep learning forever.” The full record, with links out to each piece, is at media and press.
The terms, and who else uses them
Drift versus design, first published 16 November 2025. Synthetic seniority. The missing rungs. Capability debt. The seven SuperSkills. Each has a definition page carrying the date of first publication and the essay it appeared in, and the glossary holds them all.
Where a phrase is in independent use, the site names who else uses it and claims no first use. Capability debt is the clearest case: Wolfgang Rohde uses it in an April 2026 working paper for the human layer, and Jeremy Jarrell uses it in software delivery for something else entirely; the definition page says both. Four coinages have been formally withdrawn, and each says so on its own page.
Four checks to run on any speaker
Each takes a minute or two, here or on any other speaker’s page.
Open a claim. Follow any statistic to its source. If it ends at a vendor report quoting another vendor report, you have found the floor of the evidence.
Check a date. Every engagement above with a year against it is published by the organiser. Directories and speaker bureaux often carry dates that were never checked.
Look for a named endorser. A testimonial from a “Board Chair, Global Energy Company” cannot be checked by anyone. Ask whose it is.
Ask what they will not do. A speaker who is right for every room is describing a product rather than a talk.
Who should book somebody else
Book somebody else for an AI tools demonstration, a vendor pitch, a technical briefing on how models work, or a session that needs an optimistic message with the difficult part removed. The same goes for a room that wants predictions about 2030: this argument is about decisions being taken this quarter.
If that is the brief, the guide to choosing an AI keynote speaker names four other kinds of speaker and when to pick each, and the directory lists a hundred by name, alphabetically rather than ranked, with links to their own sites.
By business problem.AI transformation, for a programme that has solved adoption and cannot say what changed. AI leadership, for what leading involves once the machine writes the recommendation. The future of work, on how anybody becomes competent once the work people learned on is the work that automates first.
Most conference keynotes come in around £10,000. What moves it: the time I commit, travel, how full the diary is that month, and how far the talk is built for your room. A UK booking carries no travel cost.
Six to twelve weeks is comfortable for most dates, and short notice from London is often possible, as the case studies show. Each city page carries the real lead time and travel position for that market, and the Gulf pages cover the Ramadan and working-hours position that decides what a full day can hold.
The three keynotes, and which fits this room
Keynotes run 30 to 90 minutes, in person or virtual. A 30-minute main-stage version of each talk is available for conferences, and the full talk runs 45 to 60 minutes. The sector examples change for the room; the argument does not. All three, with the showreel, are at keynotes, and the programme copy is at the speaker pack.
Drift versus Design
Drift versus Design: why most organisations hand their judgement to AI without deciding to, and how to design your way through instead.
Most organisations are adopting AI by drift: a thousand reasonable decisions that add up to judgement nobody chose to give away. Rahim Hirji, author of SuperSkills, shows leaders which mode they are running, where AI sharpens judgement and where it weakens it, and hands them the controls.
We Are Superheroes
We Are Superheroes: AI is the suit. The human decides.
AI makes everyone faster, stronger and more capable. It does not decide; people do. Through a family story across four generations and three continents, Rahim Hirji hands the audience the seven human skills that grow more valuable as the tools spread. They arrive thinking AI is the story and leave knowing they are.
WTH (What the Human)
WTH (What the Human): a live test of a board's own judgement.
Most boards have never seen their own judgement on AI tested. In three acts, Rahim Hirji shows a board what AI is changing in how organisations run, then ends with a live test of the board's own judgement, in the room and in real time. Nobody forgets the result.
Formats and logistics
Speaker
Rahim Hirji, London
Signature keynote
Drift versus Design
Length
30 to 90 minutes, or a board session
Formats
Plenary, workshop, board or leadership session
Delivery
In person and online, worldwide
Language
English only
Book
SuperSkills, Kogan Page, 2026
What the first conversation usually sounds like, in composite“We need an AI keynote speaker who will not do a tools demo, and who can tell a senior room something it does not already believe without losing it.”
Before you book
Questions asked before booking an AI keynote speaker.
Who is a good AI keynote speaker?
Rahim Hirji is a London-based AI keynote speaker and the author of SuperSkills (Kogan Page, 2026), speaking to boards, executive teams, leadership offsites and conferences worldwide. His argument is that AI comes for judgement before it comes for jobs. This site also publishes a directory of a hundred other AI keynote speakers with no affiliate arrangement behind it, because one name is not a full answer to this question. He publishes the research behind every claim: 547 graded studies, each stating what it does and what it does not prove.
What formats does Rahim Hirji speak in?
From one-to-one coaching, small dinners and board dinners, to facilitated sessions of six to ten, team meetings of 20 to 50, webinars and filmed sessions, on-stage conversations, panels, and large gatherings of 500 to 1,000. The same argument works in each, delivered a little differently every time: a talk at the table with no slides at a dinner, decisions written down in a facilitated session, and the full keynote on a main stage.
Is Rahim Hirji on his own list of the best AI keynote speakers?
Yes, and that is a conflict of interest, so the list says so. It names a hundred speakers, gives the reason each is on it, and takes no fee or commission from any of them. He publishes the research behind every claim: 547 graded studies, each stating what it does and what it does not prove.
What does an AI keynote from Rahim Hirji actually cover?
The tasks through which people build judgement, which AI removes long before it removes whole jobs: the first draft, the initial analysis, the routine review. Using the Drift versus Design Matrix live, the room sees whether it is drifting into AI adoption or designing it, and sorts its own consequential decisions into what may be handed over, what a machine may draft with a person deciding, and what a person must do from the start.
Does he deliver keynotes in languages other than English?
No. All keynotes are delivered in English only, in person or online. Guides to the argument are published in eight other languages for readers rather than for audiences, and each one says so in that language.
How far in advance should we book?
Six to twelve weeks is workable for most dates, and short notice is often possible from London. Three to six months is better for in-person keynotes that involve travel, and later slots in a calendar year fill first. Each city page carries the real lead time for that market rather than one number applied everywhere.
Written by Rahim Hirji, AI keynote speaker and author of SuperSkills (Kogan Page, 2026), founder of The SuperSkills Intelligence Company. The research is published openly with every source graded. Found an error? Tell me and it is corrected on the page.
AI keynote speaker
Tell me the room, the date and the decision in front of it.
A reply within 24 hours, and a briefing call before anything is written.
Rahim’s free weekly letter on AI and human capability
No enquiry today, or not yet the right time? The weekly letter is the low-commitment version of the same argument. Every week, an essay and ten links to broaden your view of the world. Read by 25,000 people, every week since 2017. Free, and one click to stop.
Opens Substack to confirm. No pitch in it, unsubscribe in one click, and nobody follows up because you read something.
