How a session in New York is put together
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: 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; and a division of a very large company permitted exactly one AI tool, which after the constraint was examined moved to a multi-tool sandbox with different functions choosing different models, then repeated across further divisions.
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 New York. 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 first AI hiring law in the world, and the audit nobody quotes
Local Law 144 of 2021 has been in force since 1 January 2023. It requires a bias audit of an automated employment decision tool before it is used on a candidate or an employee in New York City, and notice to the people it is used on. The rules at 6 RCNY § 5-300 define the trigger with a phrase that belongs in this keynote: a tool counts when it is used to use a simplified output to overrule conclusions derived from other factors including human decision-making. The city wrote down, in 2022, the exact mechanism by which a score displaces a judgement.
On 2 December 2025 the Office of the New York State Comptroller issued audit 2024-N-6 on the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection’s enforcement of that law, covering July 2023 to June 2025. The department surveyed the websites and bias audits of 32 companies and identified one issue of non-compliance. The auditors reviewed the same companies and identified at least seventeen instances of potential non-compliance.
The world’s first AI hiring law, three years in, producing two complaints and one finding. Nobody repealed it and nobody is enforcing it either. If a room needs one example of the difference between a rule existing and a rule operating, this is the cleanest one available anywhere, and it is on the audience’s own doorstep.
The state made somebody sign for it
Albany went at the same problem from the other end, and for state agencies rather than private employers. New York State Technology Law § 503 requires that where a government agency uses an automated decision-making tool with continued and operational meaningful human review, the impact assessment must be bearing the signature of one or more individuals responsible for meaningful human review.
A named person signs. That is a different instrument from a disclosure duty, and it is closer than almost anything else in North America to the question this keynote asks: not whether a human is nominally in the loop, but whether anyone is answerable for having been there. Section 503 then adds the part organisations rarely write down. Where an impact assessment finds the tool produces discriminatory or biased outcomes, the agency shall cease using it, and shall cease using any information produced with it.
Two things to say honestly when quoting it. It binds government agencies rather than private employers. And both articles carry a note repealing them on 1 July 2028, so it is a live experiment with an end date rather than settled law. The wider question of what meaningful oversight has to consist of is at what is meaningful human oversight.
The New York Fed named the failure mode in September 2026
On 1 September 2026 the Federal Reserve Bank of New York published the August supplements to its Empire State Manufacturing Survey and Business Leaders Survey, covering firms in New York State and northern New Jersey. Service firms using AI reached 61 per cent, from 40 per cent in 2025 and 25 per cent in 2024. Manufacturers reached 51 per cent, from 26 and 16.
Then the employment picture, which is not the one the headlines lead with. Four per cent of service firms had laid off workers because of AI. Fifteen per cent had hired fewer people than they would have without it, and thirteen per cent had hired more. Meanwhile the median share of a firm’s own workforce actually using the tools was 17 per cent in services and seven per cent in manufacturing.
Sixty-one per cent of firms and seventeen per cent of people. That gap is the most useful single fact a New York board can hold, because almost every adoption number quoted on a conference stage is the first figure presented as though it were the second.
The Bank also reported that companies emphasised training employees on responsible use, including teaching them to verify AI outputs, understand potential biases, follow data security protocols, and avoid over-reliance on the technology. The regional central bank, in its own words, in its own district, naming the thing. What over-reliance does to a person’s own judgement over time is at what is automation bias and what is automation complacency.
Who books this in New York, and who should not
Boards and executive committees, financial services and professional services leadership, HR and talent conferences, and association conferences with a general session. New York is the one city where all three local instruments above are about hiring, oversight and accountability rather than about technology adoption, which makes it an unusually good room for the argument.
He is the wrong choice for a tools demonstration, a vendor showcase or a technical AI briefing, and for any brief 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.
The three keynotes a New York City 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 New York
Three districts, and they are not interchangeable for this kind of session.
- Javits Center, Hudson Yards
- 3.4 million total square feet across two buildings, 122 flexible meeting rooms, and 500,000-plus square feet of contiguous exhibit space on one level. The only building in Manhattan with exhibit floor and truck marshalling. A keynote here is a general session in front of a trade audience, and the room is too large for anything that needs the audience to answer back.
- New York Hilton Midtown
- The largest hotel ballroom in the city, seating up to 3,000, across 150,000 square feet of meeting space and 49 rooms. Delegates sleep in the building, which changes what an evening session can be.
- New York Marriott Marquis, Times Square
- Broadway Ballroom seats 2,550 theatre, Westside Ballroom 2,401, with 40 breakout rooms behind them. The default when a plenary has to break into tracks and come back together.
- Convene, 225 Liberty Street, Brookfield Place
- 73,000 square feet and up to 720 guests, in the Financial District rather than Midtown. Purpose-built for conferences rather than adapted from a hotel, and the right side of town when the audience is banking or insurance.
- Cipriani Wall Street
- A 12,275 square foot ballroom seating 1,200. A dinner room, not a working room. Worth knowing which one you have booked before the brief is written.
- The Times Center, Midtown
- 390 seated, single track, no balcony. The room where everybody can see the speaker’s face and the speaker can see theirs, which is the format the board version of this keynote is built for.
One geographic footnote that turns out to matter on stage. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York, whose survey supplies the numbers above, is at 33 Liberty Street in the Financial District. For an audience sitting within a few blocks of it, the evidence in this keynote was gathered from them.
