Switzerland has the highest generative AI use at work in Europe and no national AI strategy, and a federal guideline from 2020 that says responsibility must not be capable of being delegated to machines. Keynotes for international organisations, NGOs and boards.
Rahim Hirji is available for in-person AI keynotes in Geneva, Switzerland, and for online sessions worldwide. 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.
The local instrument
Swiss federal guideline 4, and the WHO LMM guidanceRead at the issuing body’s own page, and quoted in full below.
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.
“It is not easy to walk into a room full of super bright and very successful people and keep them completely focused and engaged for the duration of the talk, without the help of any gimmicks (slides etc), just thanks to the power of the message and your story.”
Gosia Rosa, Mulberry Bow. Wrote this after a leaders' dinner talk.
On the book
“The business leaders who successfully scale their organisations invest in people, not just technology. This book shows you exactly how to do that in the age of AI.”
Sherry Coutu CBE, Entrepreneur and Non-Executive Director
How a session in Geneva is put together
An international-institution audience and a corporate one need different versions of the same argument, and which is being booked is the first thing established. Every keynote is tailored after a briefing call, and the larger engagements start before the day rather than on it: a diagnostic of the client's own people, so the room hears its own evidence rather than somebody else's. What the room leaves with is written down.
What that has looked like: about 1,500 people joining a session run hybrid from central London at short notice, for a technology business changing AI tools faster than its people could absorb, which became executive coaching for the transformation lead; and an agency business convening Asia, Asia-Pacific, EMEA and North America into one event, where the work was naming the recurring situations nobody had vocabulary for, and the company took that wording into its strategy.
Six of the seven engagements published on this site produced further work after the session rather than at it. The seven are set out in full at case studies, each with a line saying what it does not show.
How to read these examples. They are published to show how the work is put together, not as a client list for Geneva. Most engagements are covered by confidentiality and are described without naming anyone; where a client is named anywhere on this site, it is with their agreement.
The sentence Switzerland wrote in 2020
The Swiss federal guidelines on artificial intelligence, adopted in 2020, contain a line that most later frameworks talk around. Guideline four states that Die Verantwortlichkeit darf nicht an Maschinen delegiert werden können: responsibility must not be capable of being delegated to machines.
Note the construction. Not that responsibility should not be delegated, which is a behavioural instruction, but that it must not be capable of being delegated, which is a design requirement. It puts the duty on how the system is built rather than on how well people behave around it, and that distinction is the whole difference between a safeguard and a hope.
Alongside it the Federal Chancellery’s own guidance for staff names automation bias directly, which is unusual for a document written for civil servants rather than for regulators. The mechanism is at what is automation bias.
Mid-keynote, to a seated room
The highest use in Europe, and no strategy
The Federal Statistical Office found that 41 per cent of employed people in Switzerland use generative AI at work, and that 73 per cent of those who use it at all use it for work. That is the highest measured workplace use in Europe.
Switzerland has no national AI strategy document, and is not in the European Union, so the AI Act does not apply to it directly. A country with the highest workplace adoption on the continent and the least AI-specific regulation is an unusually clean test of the argument in these keynotes: what happens to judgement when nothing external is forcing the question.
For the financial audience specifically, FINMA Guidance 08/2024 is the instrument that does exist, supervisory rather than statutory. The wider comparison, and the caution that national and Eurostat figures measure different populations, is at AI and work by country.
Why Geneva specifically
Geneva is where the international system writes its own guidance, and one document from that system is more useful to this argument than most national frameworks. The World Health Organization’s guidance on large multi-modal models names skills degradation and moral de-skilling as risks, in a document intended for health ministries.
A United Nations agency, headquartered in this city, writing down that the people using these systems may lose both the skill and the moral habit of deciding. That is the keynote, said by an institution the audience already trusts, sitting in a Geneva-published document that the conference circuit has not noticed.
International organisations and their leadership, NGOs and foundations, the humanitarian sector, private banks and family offices, and the commodity trading houses. Delivery in English to audiences that are usually multilingual and rarely native English speakers, which changes pacing rather than content.
He is the wrong choice for a session on AI governance policy design, which the institutions in this city do better than any speaker. This is the operational question underneath it.
A note from Rahim
Heart, and the people outside the data
Switzerland wrote in 2020 that responsibility must not be delegable to machines, and the WHO has issued guidance on large multimodal models. Geneva organisations make decisions that reach people who never enter the system as data. My framework for evidencing judgement, Hand, Head, Hours and Heart, was built for that: Heart asks who bears the consequence. It comes from my book SuperSkills. Your governing body walks out with a record of which decisions stay human, and who answers for each. I deliver in English, the working language of many rooms here.
Rahim advises organisations and writes Box of Amazing, weekly reading on new technology since 2017, that feeds directly into his Geneva sessions. Keynotes · Advisory · Box of Amazing
The three keynotes a Geneva room can book
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 is built from your room. Your audience answers five anonymous questions beforehand, their answers shape the talk, and afterwards you get a one-page readout with the three decisions to look at first.
Drift versus Design: why most organisations hand their judgement to AI without deciding to, and how to design your way through instead.
International organisations here make decisions that reach people who will never see the system involved. Senior staff find where judgement has drifted to tools and decide, on the record, where it stays.
We Are Superheroes
We Are Superheroes: AI is the suit. The human decides.
Geneva rooms gather many nationalities and mandates. Global Adaptability is the skill in focus, with the seven skills offered as a shared vocabulary for staff trained in very different systems.
WTH (What the Human)
WTH (What the Human): a live test of a board's own judgement.
For a governing body, a two-hour working session built on the 2020 federal principle that responsibility must not be delegable to machines, and on WHO guidance for large multimodal models.
Where these sessions happen in Geneva
Geneva concentrates its convening in a small number of institutional buildings, and a great deal of the most important convening happens in rooms that publish nothing at all.
Centre International de Conférences Genève
The city's dedicated international conference centre, next to the Palais des Nations and built for the multilateral calendar. The default when the audience is institutional.
Palexpo
Geneva's exhibition and congress centre by the airport, and the venue for the largest events the city hosts. Scale rather than intimacy.
International organisation premises
A large share of Geneva convening happens inside the institutions themselves, which publish no hire information and work by invitation. If your audience is one of them, the room is usually theirs and the logistics conversation is with them.
Two practical notes. Geneva empties in late July and August more completely than most European cities, and the multilateral calendar drives its autumn: the weeks around the opening of the UN General Assembly in New York pull senior international staff out of the city. And Switzerland is not in the European Union, so a non-EU booking has its own invoicing and VAT position worth settling early rather than late.
Formats and logistics
Signature keynote
Drift versus Design
Length
30 to 90 minutes, or a board session
Language
English
Region
Geneva and French-speaking Switzerland
Delivery
In person and online
Based
London, travels to Geneva
Local anchor
Swiss federal guideline 4, and the WHO LMM guidance
What the first conversation usually sounds like, in composite“Our staff are further into these tools than our policies are, and we are the organisation that writes guidance for everyone else.”
Before you book
Questions asked about Geneva.
Who is a good AI keynote speaker in Geneva?
Rahim Hirji is a London-based keynote speaker on AI, work and human judgement and the author of SuperSkills (Kogan Page, 2026). He speaks in English to international organisations, NGOs, banks and boards in Geneva. The Geneva version of the keynote works from Swiss federal guidance, Federal Statistical Office measurement and the World Health Organization's own guidance on large multi-modal models. The research behind the talk is published in full: 547 graded studies drawn from work across more than 200 organisations in over 30 countries, each with what it does and does not prove.
What does Swiss guidance say about AI and responsibility?
The 2020 Swiss federal guidelines on artificial intelligence state at guideline four that responsibility must not be capable of being delegated to machines. The construction matters: it is a design requirement rather than a behavioural instruction. The Federal Chancellery's own staff guidance separately names automation bias. Switzerland has no national AI strategy document and, not being in the European Union, is not directly bound by the AI Act.
How much is AI actually used at work in Switzerland?
The Federal Statistical Office found 41 per cent of employed people use generative AI at work, and that 73 per cent of those who use generative AI at all use it for work. That is the highest measured workplace use in Europe. Note it measures people rather than enterprises, so it is not comparable with Eurostat's enterprise series.
How far in advance should we book Rahim Hirji for an event in Geneva?
Three to six months ahead for an in-person date in Geneva. Shorter is often possible for a virtual session, and sometimes in person where the diary is free and the talk already exists in the form you need. Ask earlier rather than later. There is one of him, he carries advisory clients and other commitments alongside the speaking, so not every date can be taken.
What does it cost to bring Rahim Hirji to Geneva?
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. Tell us the room, the date, the audience and what you need them to do differently, and you will get a number within 24 hours. Schools, universities and charities are quoted differently. On travel there is one rule: outside London you book it and you pay it, because your rates are better than his and nobody is out of pocket waiting on a reimbursement. From London to Geneva is under three hours, so a coach fare and arrival the night before. One night is usually enough, and a same-day return is possible for an afternoon slot if that suits the budget better. A London booking carries no travel, accommodation or expenses at all.
When is Rahim Hirji not the right speaker for an event?
When the decision has already been made and the session exists to announce it. When the audience has no authority over their own work, because the talk asks them to decide which repetitions are worth keeping. When the slot runs under thirty minutes, because the turn needs setting up. And when the session follows a vendor pitch, since order matters more than programmes usually assume. Where the conditions are wrong we will say so, and sometimes that means reshaping the session. Occasionally it means recommending somebody else.
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.
Geneva
Tell me about your mandate and your room
Send the audience and the matter on your table. Governing bodies plan well ahead, so I will hold a provisional date while we shape it.
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.
Box of Amazing
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.
Charlotte Wanendeya, Head of Law, BPP University Law School. Booked a keynote and panel for law students.
