Is Rahim Hirji an AI keynote speaker?
Yes. He is a London-based AI keynote speaker who delivers to boards, executive teams, leadership offsites, corporate conferences and whole organisations, in person and online, worldwide, in English. He is the author of SuperSkills: The Seven Human Skills for the Age of AI (Kogan Page, 2026) and the founder of The SuperSkills Intelligence Company.
His subject is what AI does to human judgement at work. His argument is that AI comes for your judgement before it comes for your job, and that most organisations are handing theirs over without ever deciding to. Three keynotes, forty to ninety minutes, tailored after a briefing call.
Everything asserted on this page is checkable from this page. The engagement dates below are verifiable at each organiser's own site. The endorsements name the person, the role and the employer. The research is published in full with every source graded. Where something has not been verified, the page says so.
Where this AI keynote speaker has spoken, and how far each claim can be checked
Corroborated by a third party, on their own site. The Shape the Future Consortium 2026 Summer Forum, 15 to 16 June 2026, hosted at Korn Ferry’s Mayfair offices. The organiser publishes its own guest speakers page naming 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. That page is not on this domain and was not written here.
Dated by the organiser. The CIPD Festival of Work, from the main stage, 10 to 11 June 2026 at ExCeL London. Dubai Arbitration Week, the 2025 edition, 10 to 14 November 2025. Both links go to the organiser rather than to this site.
Named, with the year, on his own account. A SuperSkills keynote to secondary pupils at JESS Dubai. An AI leadership workshop in Madrid. Presenting in Dubai many times, and work for multiple legal clients in the Emirates whose names they have not agreed to publish.
Named, without a year, because he cannot place one. London Tech Week. Imperial College London. Echo360’s EMEA retreat. EdTechX. Guessing a year for any of these would make them look more checkable and would make them less true, so the year is missing on purpose and this sentence explains why it is.
On air and in print. 11 BBC appearances in three months in 2026, across the BBC World Service and regional BBC radio.
The full selected record, with photographs and links to the organisers who published them, is at speaking record. Seven engagements are written up in full 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 rather than at it.
Why a speaker page is grading its own claims: because every competing page in this market presents all of them at one confidence, which leaves a buyer no way to tell a stage from a story. Four attributions here were wrong on 7 September 2026 and were corrected the same day, including one engagement credited to the wrong company entirely and one dated to an event that had not yet happened. Each correction moved a claim DOWN a tier or off the page, never up. That is the process working, and it is the reason the top two tiers are worth something.
The argument, in the form a room hears it
AI rarely takes a whole job. It takes the first draft, the initial analysis, the routine review. Those were also the tasks through which people built the judgement that made them senior. The work still ships, the output often improves, and nothing triggers an alarm.
So the question for a leadership team is not whether to adopt AI. It is whether the organisation is drifting into it through a thousand small reasonable decisions nobody quite made, or designing it by deciding in advance where human judgement has to remain. Drift asks nothing of you. That is what makes it the default.
Three findings the room is given, 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 says do not use AI. It says the design of the relationship decides the outcome.
The instrument used live in the room is the Drift versus Design Matrix: two axes, awareness and agency, four positions. It is not scored and the page says so.
Three AI keynotes, and what each room leaves with
Drift versus Design, the signature keynote, for boards, executive teams and senior leadership offsites. The room leaves able to read the matrix against its own organisation, having sorted its 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. Most leadership teams find they have never written that list down. Full description.
We Are Superheroes, for whole organisations, cross-sector conferences and education. The suit amplifies; the human decides. The seven human skills that grow more valuable as the tools spread, carried by a family story across four generations and three continents. They arrive thinking AI is the story and leave knowing they are.
WTH, What the Human, a live judgement test for boards, run in the room. December to March only.
All three are at keynotes, with audiences and outcomes. The organiser's document, with formats, timings, technical requirements and what is needed on the day, is the speaker pack.
What the people who booked this AI keynote speaker 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, Next15 Group Plc: “So thought-provoking and so well presented. It set up our board day perfectly.”
Every one of those names a real person, their role and their employer. There is no star rating on this site and no aggregate score, because nobody scored anything out of five and a number nobody gave is the easiest thing on a speaker page to invent.
Why the research is attached to a speaker page
Because the argument is checkable, which is unusual in this market. Behind the keynotes sits a published research estate: 249 research pages, 811 questions mapped across eighteen territories, and 367 graded sources, each one recording its method, what it finds, what it proves and, unusually, what it does not prove.
Practically, that means a claim made from the stage can be traced to the document it came from before the room leaves. It means corrections are published on the page rather than absorbed quietly. And it means the difficult finding gets said: an evidence base that only ever agrees with the speaker who assembled it is not an evidence base.
It also produced this site's directory of a hundred other AI keynote speakers, alphabetical rather than ranked, with no fee or commission from any of them, and with Rahim's own entry flagged as the conflict of interest it is. Start at the research estate.
Where he has been 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.
Two things worth saying about a list like this. Every outlet named above published something with his name on it, and each one can be checked away from this site in under a minute. And a list of logos is the cheapest thing on any speaker page to assemble, which is why this one links out rather than asking to be admired.
The language, and who else uses it
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.
Where a phrase is in independent use by somebody else, this site names them and makes no claim of first use. Capability debt is the clearest case: it is used by Wolfgang Rohde in an April 2026 working paper for the human layer, and by Jeremy Jarrell in software delivery for something else entirely, and the definition page says both. Four coinages have been formally withdrawn and each says so on its own page.
The point of that discipline is narrow and commercial. A speaker who claims every phrase he uses has told you nothing about the ones he actually originated. The glossary holds all of them, with dates.
How to check any AI keynote speaker, including this one
Four tests, in order, and all four can be run on this page in about five minutes.
Open a claim. Pick any statistic and follow it to its source. If it resolves to 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 carry dates nobody has checked; organisers do not.
Look for a named endorser. An unnamed testimonial from a “Board Chair, Global Energy Company” cannot be checked by anyone and is therefore free to write. 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. The next section says who should book somebody else.
Who should book somebody else
Wrong for an AI tools demonstration, a vendor showcase, a technical AI briefing on how models work, or a session that needs an optimistic message with the difficult part removed. Wrong for a room that wants predictions about 2030; the 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 with links to their own sites.
Saying this on a page whose entire purpose is to be found by somebody looking to book a speaker costs something. It is here because a room that booked the wrong talk costs more, and because a page that claims to suit everybody has told you nothing.
Every page, by city, audience and sector
By place. London and the UK, Europe, North America, the Gulf, Asia. Twenty-two city pages sit under those, each carrying that city's own regulation, its venues with capacities read at the venue's own site, and its conference calendar with the dates checked at the organiser: Dubai, New York, Singapore, Riyadh and the rest.
By audience. boards and leadership offsites, HR and CHRO conferences, corporate conferences, schools and education, early careers and graduate talent.
By business problem, which is how a budget-holder searches once they have stopped browsing. 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.
By sector and subject. financial services, professional services, AI and human judgement, human oversight and accountability, AI agents and accountability, human-centred AI adoption.
Booking an AI keynote speaker: fees, lead time and what happens next
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.
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; the 1,500-person session in the case studies was booked at short notice. Each city page carries the real lead time and travel position for that market rather than one number applied everywhere, and the Gulf pages carry 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; the full argument needs 40 or more. 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.
Business is being rewired as AI arrives, and human judgement is leaving with it. 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.
