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For university leaders, faculties, careers services and studentsA university has to decide what a degree certifies when a machine can produce most of the work a degree asks for. That is a question about assessment, about what graduates can do on their own, and about what employers are buying. It is the question these sessions are built around.
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
“Rahim's keynote on human judgement in the age of AI was brilliant. We asked for something realistic rather than alarmist, and equally not falsely reassuring, and he delivered exactly that. Our students were captivated by every word, and we want him back.”
Charlotte Wanendeya, Head of Law, BPP University Law School. Booked a keynote and panel for law students.A school decides for its pupils. A university is dealing with adults who choose their own tools, at a scale where every assessment rule is tested almost at once, and with employers who will judge the degree by what the graduate can do on the first Monday. Three decisions follow, and most institutions have made them by default rather than on purpose.
What is assessed unaided, and why. Detection is a weak control, and the evidence is at does AI detection work. The stronger move is to redesign the task, set out at assessing students when AI can do the assignment.
Who marks, and with what. The case for and against is at should universities let AI mark students’ work.
What a graduate must still be able to do. If AI does the tasks juniors once learned on, the degree has to put those repetitions back. The argument is at how juniors become senior.
Rahim Hirji spent twenty years building education technology before he wrote about it. He was chief executive of Maths Doctor, the first online tutoring business in the UK. He founded EtonX, the online learning venture of Eton College, and led international growth at Quizlet across sixty countries. His career also runs through HarperCollins and Kaplan, so he has sat on the supplier side of the sector as well as in front of it.
In higher education he has spoken to law students at BPP University, at Imperial College London, at Kaplan University Partnerships’ leadership retreat in Istanbul and at Echo360’s EMEA retreat. SuperSkills has been used in teaching at the UPEACE Centre for Executive Education, part of the University for Peace.
He also governs. He is the digital and AI governor at Channing School and sits on the Aga Khan Education Board for the UK, so the advice here has been tested in governing meetings, not only from a stage.
A keynote for staff, leadership or a teaching and learning conference. The evidence on what AI does to learning, and the decisions an institution has to take rather than delegate.
A Mastering AI workshop for students. Built on the four levels of AI use: Extract (give me the answer), Explore (help me understand this), Examine (tell me where I am wrong) and Extend (help me build something I could not build alone). Almost nobody leaves the first. Students leave knowing how to use AI without finishing their degree unable to do the work. The framework is at the four levels of AI use, and the questions students ask are at questions for university students.
Careers and employability sessions. What graduate employers now look for when the first draft is free, and how to show judgement rather than output. See is it harder to get a first job now.
Workshops for academic staff. Assessment redesign, which tasks stay unaided, and what a guardrailed tool looks like in a real module.
Briefings for council and senior teams, and advisory. An AI policy written as decisions rather than prohibitions, who owns each one, and what the institution must remain able to do. That work is described at AI advisory.
This is not a demonstration of a particular platform or a tools training session. If the brief is to get staff confident with one product, book the product. If the brief is for younger pupils, the schools and education page is the right one.
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: 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: 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): 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.
Rahim Hirji is the author of SuperSkills: The Seven Human Skills for the Age of AI (Kogan Page, 2026) and spent twenty years building education technology, including founding EtonX, the online learning venture of Eton College, and leading Quizlet's international growth across sixty countries. He has spoken at BPP University, Imperial College London and Kaplan University Partnerships, and gives keynotes, student workshops, staff sessions and advisory for universities. The material is published in full before the room books it, including 1323 questions answered or marked open and 555 graded studies with what each does not establish.
Yes. The Mastering AI workshop takes students through the four levels of AI use, Extract, Explore, Examine and Extend, and how to use AI at university without losing the ability to do the work. It runs for a single cohort or a large lecture theatre, in person or online.
Yes. Advisory for senior teams and councils covers which work is assessed unaided, who marks and with what, what graduates must still be able to do, and who owns each decision. It starts with a 30-minute call.
Universities, schools and charities are quoted differently from corporate events. Tell me the audience and the format and you will get a straight answer on the fee.
Six to twelve weeks is comfortable for most dates, and short notice is often possible from London or for a virtual session. Ask earlier rather than later: there is one of him, and the advisory clients and writing sit alongside the speaking, so not every date can be taken. Each city page carries the real lead time and travel position for that market rather than one number applied everywhere.
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. What moves the number is set out at what an AI keynote speaker costs. Schools, universities and charities are quoted differently. A London booking carries no travel, accommodation or expenses at all.
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.
We brought Rahim in to open our regional retreat in Istanbul with a keynote, in front of our ANZ leadership team, partner universities and priority recruitment agency partners. 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. The keynote was a highlight of the event program, sparking conversation that carried on long after the session, and has an ongoing influence in our strategic thinking and forward planning.Tom DunlopGeneral Manager, Global Student Recruitment, Kaplan University Partnerships ANZ
Tell me the audience, the format and the date: a keynote, a student workshop, a staff session or advisory. A reply within 24 hours.
Enquire or email rahim@thesuperskills.com
Also for schools and education and early careers and graduate talent. The parent page for all of this is AI keynote speaker. Browse every topic, audience and region, or take the speaker pack to whoever is running the day. Every engagement delivered so far, with the dates checkable at each organiser, is at the speaking record.
The research behind these sessions, for staff and for students:
Every page above states what its evidence does not support as well as what it does, which is the same standard the talk is held to.
Not every brief is a talk. A board that needs to settle which decisions a machine may make wants a board briefing, a review or a standing advisor, and the five formats are set out side by side with what each one is for.
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