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.
He spent twenty years building education technology before he wrote about it. He founded EtonX, the online learning venture of Eton College, starting the business in China and partnering with schools in Shanghai and across the country. He led Quizlet's international expansion across sixty countries. Earlier in his career he worked for the government of Abu Dhabi. That background matters to what he argues: he has spent his working life on how people actually acquire capability, which turns out to be the thing AI interferes with.
The argument rests on research across more than 200 organisations in 30 countries since 2019, published openly and in full at this research, where every source is graded and the open questions stay visible. He has written weekly on technology and human capability since January 2017, five years before ChatGPT, in Box of Amazing.
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.
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.
The evidence is more interesting than either the hype or the doom. 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 removed. None of that says do not use AI. It says the design of the relationship decides the outcome.
Three keynotes
One argument, sharpened for the room. Forty to ninety minutes, in person or online, tailored after a briefing call.
Drift versus Design
The signature keynote. Shows a leadership team which mode it is running, then hands it the controls. Boards, executive teams and senior leadership offsites. The room leaves able to read the drift versus design matrix against its own organisation, and to see where AI sharpens judgement and where it weakens it.
We Are Superheroes
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. For whole organisations, cross-sector conferences and education. 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.
Full descriptions, audiences and outcomes are at keynotes.
Who books him, and who should not
Right for boards and non-executive directors, executive committees, leadership offsites, HR and CHRO conferences, professional bodies, and cross-sector conferences wanting a substantive argument rather than a tools demonstration.
Wrong for an AI tools demonstration, a vendor showcase, a technical AI briefing, or a session 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.
London and the UK
London is home, so a UK booking carries no travel cost and short notice is easier to accommodate. He has spoken at the CIPD Festival of Work, at London Tech Week, at Echo360’s EMEA retreat, at Imperial, and at the Shape the Future Consortium Summer Forum, hosted at Korn Ferry’s London offices in June 2026, among others, and has appeared on the BBC.
Also speaking nearby: Paris · Amsterdam · Europe · Dubai.
A UK audience also gets the UK position, which moves faster than most decks acknowledge. The AI Opportunities Action Plan of January 2025 remains the plan of record, but the current position is the One Year On update of 29 January 2026. The AI Safety Institute became the AI Security Institute in February 2025. DSIT is being dissolved and AI strategy has moved to the Cabinet Office, with Kanishka Narayan MP appointed Minister of State for AI in July 2026. And the Information Commissioner reported in March 2026 that many employers are likely relying on solely automated decisions in recruitment without meaningful human involvement, which engages Article 22 of the UK GDPR.
That last one is the argument in miniature: an oversight step that exists on paper and not in practice. It is examined at human in the loop is not a safeguard.
Where these sessions happen in London, and when they can
London has more bookable conference space than anywhere else in Europe and almost none of it is interchangeable. The room decides what version of a keynote is possible before a word of it is written, so this is the ladder rather than a list of the largest.
- ExCeL London, Royal Docks
- The ICC auditorium seats up to 4,200, of which 2,000 are moveable tiered seats, with bespoke configurations to 7,000. The Capital Suite is 17 flat rooms taking up to 1,394. The moveable rake matters more than the headline number: a 1,200-seat single-track keynote and a 4,200 plenary are the same room re-racked. Elizabeth line to Custom House.
- Olympia London, Kensington
- The redevelopment's real addition is the ICC at Olympia: two theatre-style auditoriums, the main one taking 800-plus and the second up to 400. Until it opened, a keynote at Olympia had to be staged inside a draped exhibition hall. The Grand Hall still takes 5,000 seated. Note it is the one major London venue not on the Elizabeth line.
- QEII Centre, Westminster
- The Churchill auditorium takes 700 with an overlooking gallery, which puts a tier of the audience above and behind the speaker's eyeline. The third floor takes up to 1,300 and the whole centre 2,500 across 32 rooms. Where the CBI holds its annual conference, and the right building when the audience is regulators, trade bodies and government relations.
- Convene Sancroft, St Paul's
- A 900-person plenary room, which the venue states is the largest single above-ground event space in the City of London, with 1,200 across the site. The only City address where a real main-stage keynote works without moving to a hotel ballroom.
- Kings Place, Hall One, King's Cross
- A fixed tiered auditorium for 400: 305 in the stalls and 95 in the balcony, with a rear tech booth and a green room. The best true raked 400-seat room in London, and the right size for the board version of this keynote, where the argument depends on being able to see the room answer back. Step-free from platform to street, and outside the congestion charge zone.
- The Royal Institution, Faraday Theatre, Mayfair
- 400 seats in a two-tier amphitheatre with the steepest rake in London. The venue's own words: the rake and the design mean every guest has a clear view. It places the speaker at the centre of a bowl, which rewards working without a script and punishes reading from one.
- Grosvenor House, Park Lane
- The Great Room takes 1,500 theatre, or 2,000 for a banquet or reception, across 3,174 square metres. Flat floor, so a keynote at this scale needs riser height and screens that a raked auditorium makes unnecessary. Budget for both.
- Guildhall and Mansion House, the City
- The Guildhall Great Hall takes 760 theatre and is available for corporate hire only. Mansion House's Egyptian Hall takes 375 theatre, and publishes the constraint that decides it: hire includes a basic four-microphone PA suitable for speeches only, with everything else brought in, inside a fixed daytime window. These are rooms for dinner and remarks, not for a keynote with slides.
Districts, and what each one signals. The City is financial services, insurance and professional services, and Sancroft is its only real plenary; everything else there is a dinner room or a mid-size floor. The financial services and professional services pages carry the sector material behind a City booking. Westminster is government relations, regulators and trade bodies, and it is also the district most exposed to the parliamentary calendar below. King's Cross is AI, developer and scale-up audiences. The West End is prestige, awards and board-level international. The Royal Docks is volume: exhibition-led and trade-audience, and the Elizabeth line changed what a day trip there costs in delegate time. Canary Wharf is the interesting absence, because almost all of its capacity is in-building corporate space rather than open-market hire, so a Wharf audience is usually hosted by one of its own firms.
The London calendar, and one window that behaves like a closed season. Parliament publishes a named recess called Conference: in 2026 the Commons rose on 15 September and returned on 12 October. Five party conferences run back to back inside it. That removes not only ministers but the entire public-affairs, trade-association and communications ecosystem from London for roughly a month, and it is officially published rather than a matter of custom, which makes it the closest thing London has to the Gulf's Ramadan constraint.
The 2027 spring is unusually compressed. Easter falls 26 to 29 March and runs into the school holiday, then the early May bank holiday on the 3rd and the spring one on the 31st, with Whitsun half-term 31 May to 4 June. The genuinely usable windows are roughly 12 to 23 April and 4 to 28 May. Inside that, note that the 2027 London Marathon is a two-day event, Saturday 24 and Sunday 25 April, 100,000 participants across both days, which takes a full long weekend of central hotel inventory, road access and staff availability.
Recurring fixtures, from organisers' own pages: London Tech Week 7 to 11 June 2027 at Olympia; Infosecurity Europe 8 to 10 June 2027 at ExCeL; the CBI Annual Conference on 23 November 2026 at the QEII Centre; HR Technologies UK 5 to 6 May 2027 and the CIPD Festival of Work 9 to 10 June 2027, both at ExCeL, the Festival having moved there from Olympia; Big Data LDN 23 to 24 September 2026 at Olympia.
Two corrections worth having before a plan is built. CogX has folded. The organiser states that the economics of large-scale events no longer worked and that the festival was wound down in 2025, yet third parties are still advertising a CogX Summit the organiser does not publish. And Money20/20 Europe is not a London event: it runs at the RAI in Amsterdam.
One thing said plainly rather than dressed up. The trade belief that August is dead and that December ballrooms are gone by June is convention, not measurement. No United Kingdom industry body publishes a month-by-month series for business-event or function-space demand. The only official monthly series that exists measures hotel bedrooms rather than ballrooms, and it partly contradicts the folklore: London ran fuller and dearer in September 2025 than in August. Where the honest answer is that nobody has measured it, that is the answer.
Practical
Keynotes run 30 to 90 minutes. Workshops and board sessions are longer and structured differently. Booking is usually three to six months ahead, though gaps do appear. Delivery is in English only, in person or online across time zones. Travel from London anywhere the brief justifies it.
A small number of pro bono slots are held each year for schools, charities and public-sector education.
