How a session in Seoul 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: a survey of fifty of a client's own people run BEFORE the session, to find where judgement had already been handed to tools they had built themselves, read back to the executive team in their own words, then a workshop in which they named four or five of their own processes and rebuilt them; 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 Seoul. 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 gap, and why it matters more than either number
The Korea Development Institute scored 38.8 per cent of Korean jobs as technically automatable across more than 70 per cent of their tasks. Its survey of 800 firms with ten or more staff found actual adoption at 2.7 per cent.
Those are not competing estimates. They measure different things: what a technology could in principle do, and what organisations have in practice done. Almost every widely circulated figure in this field is the first kind, and almost every boardroom conversation treats it as the second. A Korean audience has its own national institute's work to make the point with.
What Korea found when it looked at effects
The realised effects are the ones worth carrying into a board meeting: no aggregate employment change, lower earnings, and the impact concentrated on younger, tertiary-educated workers and on women.
France's national statistics office found the same shape independently, with employment of 15 to 29 year olds excluding apprentices down 7.4 per cent year on year in IT services. Two countries, two methods, one silhouette, and it runs opposite to what twenty years of automation commentary trained everyone to expect. The story was never mass unemployment. It was the quiet removal of the first rung.
That is the mechanism at the missing rungs, and the debt it accrues is at capability debt.
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.
The question for a leadership team is therefore about mode rather than adoption. Is the organisation drifting into AI 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.
Practical
Boards, executive committees, conglomerate leadership, and corporate and association conferences in Seoul and across Korea. Delivery is in English only. Simultaneous interpretation is arranged by the host where required, and the session is structured to work with it. Rahim travels from London, and where travel is not practical the same session is delivered online. He can travel to the region or deliver virtually across all time zones.
Three keynotes, all versions of one argument. Drift versus Design is the signature talk for boards and executive teams. We Are Superheroes covers the seven human skills that grow more valuable as the tools spread. WTH, What the Human is a live judgement test for boards, run in the room, December to March only. Full descriptions are at keynotes.
A Korean-language summary of this argument is at the Korean page, published in Korean because the reader reads Korean, not because the keynote is delivered in it.
The distance between 38.8 and 2.7
The KDI survey of 800 firms found 38.8 per cent of jobs technically automatable and 2.7 per cent of firms adopting. That gap gives Korean organisations room to design before habits set. I was GM International at Quizlet, a US company with users all over the world. In Seoul I work with you on which decisions to shape now, and your team comes out with that list agreed and owned. I deliver in English.
Rahim advises executive teams and writes Box of Amazing, a free weekly letter he has kept up since 2017. Keynotes · Advisory · Box of Amazing
The three keynotes a Seoul 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, and the full talk runs 45 to 60 minutes. 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 is built from your room. Your audience answers five anonymous questions beforehand, their answers shape the talk, and afterwards you get a one-page readout with the three decisions to look at first.
Also speaking nearby: Tokyo · Shanghai · Hong Kong.
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.
The Korea Development Institute found 38.8 per cent of jobs technically automatable and 2.7 per cent of firms adopting. Seoul executive teams decide now what should fill that gap.
We Are Superheroes
We Are Superheroes: AI is the suit. The human decides.
Change Readiness, made concrete for conferences and universities in Seoul: what to keep learning when the tools move faster than the curriculum.
WTH (What the Human)
WTH (What the Human): a live test of a board's own judgement.
Korean boards may see that adoption gap close quickly. A working session now, while the numbers are small, means the first big AI decision is taken on purpose.
Where these sessions happen in Seoul, and when they can
Two geography flags. KINTEX is in Goyang and Pangyo is in Seongnam, both in Gyeonggi rather than Seoul, so a delegate flown into Incheon for a Seoul event and sent to either will notice, and your Seoul room block stops making sense.
- COEX Grand Ballroom, Gangnam
- 1,817 square metres, entirely column-free, splitting into five rooms, seating 1,800 theatre. Flat floor. The room when a plenary has to become tracks the same afternoon.
- COEX Auditorium
- 1,080 seats in fixed theatre rake across 2,104 square metres, with a built stage 12 by 24 metres and 11 high, a 20 by 6 metre LED screen and permanent interpretation booths. Everyone sees the speaker and nothing can be moved.
- COEX exhibition halls
- Hall A is 10,368 square metres and Hall C 10,348, with Hall D described by the venue as taking around 7,000 people at once. Scale, and the whole estate can be taken by a single event, which has happened.
- Vista Walkerhill, Vista Hall
- 1,305 square metres with a six metre ceiling, and the venue's own table gives 1,500 theatre across the three sections. Note it sits in Vista Walkerhill rather than Grand Walkerhill, which are different buildings on the same estate.
- Grand Walkerhill, Grand Hall
- 1,061.8 square metres across six halls with a stated breakout function and its own registration lobby, so it runs plenary plus tracks natively. The only venue here where the room block and the ballroom are the same address, at the cost of sitting in Gwangjin-gu, off the Gangnam and city-hall axis.
Korea gazettes its two lunar festivals annually and each is a legislated three-day block with a substitute-holiday mechanism. In 2026 the issuing body puts Seollal at 14 to 18 February and Chuseok at 24 to 27 September, with 70 public holidays in the year.
The practical stand-down is wider than the gazetted days, and this is convention rather than law: bridging leave either side, and a travel crush that makes the adjacent days unusable for anything needing national attendance. Korean firms conventionally avoid the fortnight straddling either festival. There is also a real mechanism for temporary holidays declared at a few weeks’ notice to bridge awkward gaps, which cannot be planned around, so build on the gazetted dates and accept a day may be added late.
Recurring fixtures at COEX include the Korea Electronics Show, 13 to 16 October 2026, and Smart Life Week, 6 to 8 October 2026, hosted by the metropolitan government. Seoul Fintech Week runs 26 to 28 October 2026 at Conrad Yeouido, and the choice of Yeouido over Gangnam is itself the signal: securities and the National Assembly on one island.
