Who he is
Rahim Hirji is the author of SuperSkills: The Seven Human Skills for the Age of AI, published by Kogan Page in 2026, and the founder of The SuperSkills Intelligence Company. He is based in London and speaks worldwide, in English.
He spent twenty years building education technology before he wrote about it. He founded EtonX, the online learning venture of Eton College, and led Quizlet's international expansion across sixty countries. He writes for European publications including The European Business Review. The argument rests on research across more than 200 organisations in 30 countries since 2019, published openly and in full at the research, where every source is graded and the open questions stay visible.
The argument
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.
The question for a leadership team is therefore about mode rather than adoption. Is the organisation drifting into AI 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.
What Europe has measured, and almost nobody quotes
France produced one of the few national figures that bears directly on this. INSEE reported that in the fourth quarter of 2025, employment of 15 to 29 year olds excluding apprentices fell 7.4 per cent year on year in IT services, 5.8 per cent in publishing and 3.7 per cent in management consulting, against minus 0.7 per cent across the market sector as a whole.
INSEE explicitly cautions against attributing that fall to AI alone, and the caution deserves repeating rather than burying. What makes the finding hard to dismiss is that the same silhouette, concentrated on the young and the educated in the most exposed sectors, turned up independently in Korean data and in American payroll data. Three countries, three methods, one shape.
Germany measured the other half. The DiWaBe 2.0 survey of roughly 9,800 employees found that more than half already use AI at work, largely informally, ranging from about a third of workers without a qualification to around 80 per cent of those with a degree or a Meister qualification. The line worth carrying into a board meeting is the one nobody quotes: there was no difference in training participation between AI users and non-users.
Put those two together and you have the argument without any help from me. The tasks juniors learned on are thinning, and the training that was supposed to replace them is not happening. Both facts come from national statistical bodies rather than from a vendor survey.
Europe also decided what oversight has to mean
The EU has gone further than any other jurisdiction on the machinery of oversight. Article 12 of Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 requires that high-risk AI systems technically allow the automatic recording of events across the system lifetime, and Article 19 requires providers to keep those logs for at least six months. What none of it requires is that anybody read them.
The Court of Justice went further still. In Dun and Bradstreet Austria, decided on 27 February 2025, it held that a controller must describe the procedure and principles actually applied, so that the person can understand which of their data was used and how. Disclosing the algorithm is not a sufficient explanation, and a blanket trade-secret refusal is not permitted. The standard is comprehension, not disclosure.
Which raises the question this keynote exists to ask. Comprehension by whom. A duty to explain assumes somebody inside the organisation still understands the thing well enough to explain it, and that assumption is the thing that thins out while the outputs keep improving. The argument is set out at human in the loop is not a safeguard and who supervises work they cannot do.
Where and how he speaks in Europe
Across European business hubs for boards, executive committees, corporate and association conferences, HR and CHRO conferences and leadership offsites. Delivery is in English only. Rahim travels from London, and where travel is not practical the same session is delivered online. He can travel to the region or deliver virtually across all time zones.
Three keynotes, all versions of one argument. Drift versus Design is the signature talk for boards and executive teams. We Are Superheroes covers the seven human skills that grow more valuable as the tools spread. WTH, What the Human is a live judgement test for boards, run in the room, December to March only. Full descriptions are at keynotes.
He is the wrong choice for a tools demonstration, a vendor pitch or a technical AI briefing, and for any brief that needs an optimistic message with the difficult part removed. If that is the brief, the guide to choosing an AI keynote speaker names four other kinds of speaker and when to pick each.
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 five 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.
City pages in this region
- Paris The works-council duty on new technology, and INSEE's 18 per cent
- London and the UK Home city. No travel cost, and short notice is easier to accommodate.
- Helsinki Put the human-discretion test into general administrative law in one clause, which no other European statute reviewed here does.
- Copenhagen Highest enterprise AI adoption in the Union, and a written question civil servants must answer before Parliament votes.
- Amsterdam A city that proved its welfare algorithm was fairer than its caseworkers and withdrew it anyway.
- Oslo One has in principle accepted a solution one knows will make incorrect decisions in some of the cases. The Ombudsman, on NAV.
- Geneva Responsibility must not be capable of being delegated to machines. A design requirement, not a behavioural one.
- Zurich The highest workplace AI use in Europe, and the least AI-specific law.
- Madrid Spain told every judge in the country what a machine may never be allowed to decide.
- Barcelona Fifty conversations reviewed every month. An oversight commitment with a number attached.
