A feel for the room before you put me in front of yours.
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Based in London · speaking worldwideRahim Hirji is a London-based author and keynote speaker on AI, work and human judgement. He argues that AI comes for your judgement before it comes for your job, and that most organisations are handing theirs over without ever deciding to.
A feel for the room before you put me in front of yours.
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 quietly interferes with.
The argument rests on research across more than 200 organisations in 30 countries since 2019, published openly and in full at the research estate, 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.
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.
One argument, sharpened for the room. Forty to ninety minutes, in person or online, tailored after a briefing call.
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.
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.
A live judgement test for boards, run in the room. December to March only.
Full descriptions, audiences and outcomes are at keynotes.
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 is home, so a UK booking carries no travel cost and short notice is easier to accommodate. He has spoken at London Tech Week, the CIPD Festival of Work, AWS, Imperial and Korn Ferry, among others, and has appeared on the BBC.
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.
Keynotes run 40 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.
Written by Rahim Hirji, 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.
A reply within 24 hours, and a straight answer on fit even when the answer is somebody else.
