How a session in Oslo 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: 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 Oslo. 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, and what it cost to get it
In January 2023 the Norwegian Parliamentary Ombudsman decided a complaint about NAV, the labour and welfare administration, cutting a disability benefit through a fully automated process with no manual handling. The finding contains this:
Selv om den automatiske løsningen i de aller fleste tilfeller vil fatte en riktig avgjørelse, har man i prinsippet godtatt en helautomatisk løsning som man er klar over vil fatte uriktige vedtak i noen av tilfellene.
Even though the automated solution will in the vast majority of cases reach a correct decision, one has in principle accepted a fully automated solution that one knows will make incorrect decisions in some of the cases.
That is the trade every organisation makes when it automates a consequential decision, stated plainly by a supervisory body, without hedging and without the word efficiency anywhere near it. Most institutions have made the same trade and have never written the sentence down.
And it finished. The ministry told the Ombudsman on 27 February 2026 that NAV had changed practice, with a notice and a three-week window now preceding the decision, and the case was closed on 19 March 2026. Three years to put a human window in front of a machine.
A second case, still open, at a scale that changes the question
The Ombudsman has a live file on NAV’s sickness benefit system, with follow-ups through 11 August 2026. The scale is the part worth carrying into a room: 2.1 million applications in 2024, of which 65 per cent were fully automated.
The line from that file is the one to quote to a board: technological limitations in the digital solutions cannot reduce citizens’ legal protection without a legal basis. Substitute your own noun for citizens and it is a governance principle rather than an administrative one.
Norway’s Office of the Auditor General graded government AI governance ikke tilfredsstillende, not satisfactory, in September 2024. And the Ombudsman has separately ruled against Oslo municipality that efficiency and system limitations cannot justify routinely omitting the decision-maker’s name from a decision, which is the accountability question at what is a moral crumple zone.
The statute that is not yet in force, said honestly
Norway passed a new administrative procedure act in June 2025. It requires that the legal content of automated case-processing systems be documented and that the documentation be published, and it gives an affected person a right to an explanation and to manual review.
It is not yet in force. The commencement is for the King in Council to decide and the record still shows it as not commenced. Saying so from a stage costs nothing and is the difference between a speaker who read the statute and one who read a summary of it. Norway’s position on the EU AI Act, as an EEA state, was also unresolved at the time of checking and is not asserted here.
What Norway has measured is not in doubt. Statistics Norway found 54 per cent of people aged 16 to 79 had used generative AI in the previous three months, up eighteen points in a year, and that 63 per cent of those users use it in a work context. Enterprise use is 28.9 per cent, which would place Norway eighth in the European Union. Seventy-seven per cent of non-adopting firms cite a lack of relevant competence, up from 69 per cent, which is a striking thing to say about a tool marketed as requiring none.
Who books this in Oslo, and who should not
Public sector leadership and directorates, energy and shipping, banks and the sovereign fund ecosystem, and the technology community around Oslo Innovation Week. Norwegian audiences tend to want the caveats stated rather than smoothed, which suits this material.
He is the wrong choice for a session that needs an unqualified case for adoption.
The three keynotes a Oslo 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 Oslo
- Oslo Kongressenter, Folkets Hus
- The Kongresshallen takes 1,600 theatre and Sal A 690, in the centre by Youngstorget. The city's default congress building.
- NOVA Spektrum, Lørenskog
- Five halls and 34,855 square metres, outside the city. Formerly Norges Varemesse, and the old domain no longer resolves, which is worth knowing when checking a brief.
- Oslo Spektrum
- Operating, and under expansion: a new congress and culture stage completes in autumn 2028. Arena scale rather than conference scale.
NDC Oslo runs 14 to 18 September 2026 at Oslo Spektrum and Oslo Innovation Week 19 to 22 October 2026. Two to keep out of a Norwegian plan: Slush is Helsinki, and Nordic Edge and ONS are Stavanger rather than Oslo. Norway is outside the European Union, so invoicing and VAT need settling early. July is genuinely empty.
