How a session in Zurich is put together
A financial-services room and a general corporate room need different versions of the same argument, and which is being booked is the first thing established. 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 Zurich. 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.
Supervised by guidance, not by statute
FINMA Guidance 08/2024 is the instrument that governs AI in Swiss financial institutions, and its status is the point. It is supervisory guidance issued by the regulator, not a statute passed by a legislature, in a country with no national AI strategy and outside the scope of the EU AI Act.
For a Zurich board that is a genuinely different position from a Frankfurt or Paris one, and it cuts both ways. There is more room to design an approach that fits the institution, and there is less external machinery forcing anybody to have the conversation at all. Drift is easier here, which is why the session is worth having here.
The federal position sits above it and is the sharper line. The 2020 Swiss guidelines state that responsibility must not be capable of being delegated to machines, which is a design requirement rather than a behavioural one. It is set out on the Geneva page.
What Switzerland has measured about its own workers
The Federal Statistical Office found 41 per cent of employed people in Switzerland using generative AI at work, and 73 per cent of everyone who uses generative AI at all using it for work. The highest measured workplace use in Europe, from a national statistics office rather than a vendor.
Set that beside the regulatory position and the shape of the problem is visible without any help from a speaker. The tools are in the building, they are being used for work by most of the people who use them at all, and the instrument governing them is a guidance note. Nobody is required to write down where a person still has to decide.
What that does to the people doing the deciding, over time, is at capability debt.
Who books this in Zurich, and who should not
Banks and private banks, insurers and reinsurers, asset managers, pharmaceutical and industrial headquarters, and the technology and research community around ETH. Board sessions and executive committees rather than main-stage conference slots, which suits a city that does most of its serious work in small rooms.
He is the wrong choice for a briefing on FINMA compliance, which needs counsel and a risk function. This session asks the question underneath it: which decisions here require judgement somebody still has, and how would you know if that stopped being true.
The three keynotes a Zurich 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 Zurich
- The Kongresshaus and Tonhalle, Enge
- Zurich's principal congress and concert building on the lake, reopened after a full restoration. The right register for a set-piece annual meeting.
- Bank and insurer premises, Paradeplatz and Enge
- Most of the serious convening in this city happens inside institutions rather than in hired rooms, which means small audiences, no stage and no screens. That is a different session and usually a better one for this argument.
- ETH and the university quarter
- Where the research audience sits, and a room that will interrogate the evidence rather than accept it. Worth choosing deliberately if the brief wants challenge.
Switzerland is outside the European Union, so invoicing and VAT need settling early. The city is quiet through late July and August, and the Swiss financial calendar clusters its internal events in the autumn and in January.
