What connects him to Shanghai, and what does not
EtonX, the online learning venture of Eton College, was started by Rahim in China. It partnered with schools in Shanghai and across the country. That is operating a business into this market over a period of years, with the commercial and cultural learning that comes with it.
How to read this. No Chinese official AI statistic is quoted anywhere on this site, because none has been verified at source, which is stated rather than filled.
A working history here, not a market entry
Rahim founded EtonX, the online learning venture of Eton College, and began the business in China, partnering with schools in Shanghai and across the country. He has presented in China, and he later built EtonX operations in India as well. Before that he led Quizlet's international expansion across sixty countries.
That background is the reason the argument sounds the way it does. Twenty years spent on how people acquire capability, followed by a technology that removes the tasks through which they acquired it. The argument rests on research across more than 200 organisations in 30 countries since 2019, published openly and in full at the research, where every source is graded and the open questions stay visible.
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.
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.
Why no Chinese official statistic appears here
No Chinese official statistic on AI adoption or AI-related employment is quoted here, because none has been verified at this site's standard, which is that the issuing body's own document was read at its own page. Where that has not been done, nothing is quoted. Saying so is more useful to a Shanghai audience than a number of unknown provenance would be.
What is verified, and travels, is the international shape. Japan's national survey of 22,000 employees found employer AI use at 12.9 per cent. Korea measured actual firm adoption at 2.7 per cent against 38.8 per cent of jobs scored as technically automatable. Singapore's regulator has written the loss of entry-level training grounds into national guidance. The regional account is at AI and work in Asia.
Practical
Multinational leadership teams, regional headquarters, international schools and education groups, and corporate conferences in Shanghai and elsewhere in China. Delivery is in English only. Simultaneous interpretation is arranged by the host where required. 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 Chinese-language summary of this argument is at the Chinese page, published in Chinese because the reader reads Chinese, not because the keynote is delivered in it.
Coming back to where EtonX began
I founded EtonX in China, working with schools in Shanghai and across the country, and Eton College later acquired the company. The question we asked then is the one I still bring to every room: how do people actually acquire capability, and what happens to it when AI takes on the work? For a Shanghai session I set official statistics aside and work from your organisation's evidence, gathered together ahead of the day. Your leaders come away with a design for keeping judgement growing.
Shanghai is where EtonX started. Rahim's keynotes and Box of Amazing, his weekly letter, still return to the capability question those schools raised. Keynotes · Advisory · Box of Amazing
The three keynotes a Shanghai 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: Hong Kong · Seoul · Singapore.
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.
EtonX began here, with schools in Shanghai, so this talk comes from watching capability form up close. Leadership teams learn to spot where AI takes over decisions their people used to make.
We Are Superheroes
We Are Superheroes: AI is the suit. The human decides.
The question EtonX started with in Shanghai classrooms was how people acquire capability. The talk brings that question back to the city's education and conference audiences, with Curiosity as the first of the seven skills.
WTH (What the Human)
WTH (What the Human): a live test of a board's own judgement.
A Shanghai board looks at its recent decisions, keeping the conversation on how the board decides rather than on any one set of market figures.
Where these sessions happen in Shanghai, and when they can
One honest note before the list. Two of the venues an organiser would expect to see here, including the convention centre in Lujiazui that is the obvious room for a board summit, return empty pages on their own domains. Figures for them circulate; they come from a search engine’s rendering rather than from a page anyone read, so they are not repeated. For those two the honest deliverable is the corrected address and a recommendation to ask the venue directly.
- National Exhibition and Convention Center, Hongqiao
- Close to 600,000 square metres of exhibitable area across seventeen halls, fifteen of them at 30,000 square metres each, with a total build of over 1.5 million. Hall 3 is single-storey and pillarless at 32 metres clear. Forty-seven meeting rooms make tracks trivial, and an InterContinental sits on site. Note the district signal: the venue’s own copy leans on one to two hours to the Yangtze Delta cities, so booking here says REGIONAL event rather than Shanghai one.
- NECC, the Hongguan hall
- 10,000 square metres with close to 8,000 seats, and the only fixed-seat room in the complex. Everything else is a flat-floor build.
- Kerry Hotel Pudong, Grand Shanghai Ballroom
- 2,230 square metres, 34.8 by 64 metres, with a nine metre ceiling and 2,200 theatre, subdividing into three, with 1,200 square metres of pre-function and a twelve-room meeting centre in the office tower. The only Pudong hotel room that credibly takes a two-thousand-plus plenary with proper rigging.
- Grand Hyatt Shanghai, Jin Mao Tower
- The Grand Ballroom takes 1,192 theatre or 792 for a seated dinner, with the Crystal Ballroom at 665 square metres and 720 theatre. The hotel publishes conflicting areas for the Grand Ballroom on its own pages, so quote the seating and treat the square metres as unresolved.
- The Ritz-Carlton Shanghai Pudong
- The Grand Ballroom is 1,134 square metres, 42 by 27 metres, with a 7.4 metre ceiling the hotel describes as one of the highest in the city, seating 1,188 theatre and subdividing into three. Ten event rooms in total, so a main plus modest breakouts rather than a heavy multi-track programme.
The most useful thing on this page, invisible from outside China. The State Council notice makes Sunday 20 September 2026 and Saturday 10 October 2026 ordinary WORKING DAYS, to make up for holiday time taken elsewhere. A weekend event on either date is competing with a full working day, and no calendar an overseas organiser consults will show it.
The holidays themselves, from the same notice: Spring Festival 15 to 23 February 2026, nine days and the longest on record; Mid-Autumn 25 to 27 September, separate from National Day this year; and National Day 1 to 7 October. The 2027 notice has not been published, so 2027 dates are not asserted here.
The practical Spring Festival slowdown runs materially longer than the nine statutory days, typically two to four weeks of reduced decision-making either side. That is convention rather than a published rule, though the notice gives it indirect support by encouraging staff to combine annual leave to form a longer break.
One week to avoid on inventory grounds. The China International Import Expo runs 5 to 10 November 2026 at the NECC. The organiser makes no claim about citywide hotels, but the venue describes daily footfall of 400,000 during it, so the conclusion is sound inference rather than a sourced fact, and offered as such.
