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.
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, and it is 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, and it is sitting in a Geneva-published document that the conference circuit has not noticed.
The related argument, on what oversight has to consist of before it counts, is at what is meaningful human oversight.
Who books this in Geneva, and who should not
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.
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; 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.
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.
