How a session in Zurich is put together
A financial-services audience and a general corporate one 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: a diagnostic of the client's own people, so the audience hears its own evidence. Whatever the people there agree 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 ended. 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 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, so 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.
What guidance asks of a Zurich board
Switzerland has the highest workplace AI use in Europe and the least AI-specific law, so a Zurich financial firm answers to FINMA Guidance 08/2024 and to its sense of responsibility. I have spoken to leadership at Barclays and advised companies across Europe, and few places combine those two facts as sharply as this one. The session gives your board oversight it chose, written down and set against the Federal Statistical Office figures, ready to show a supervisor.
Zurich boards get Rahim's advisory experience across Europe and the reading behind Box of Amazing, his free weekly letter since 2017. Keynotes · Advisory · Box of Amazing
The three keynotes on offer in Zurich
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 are chosen for each audience, around the same argument. 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: Geneva · Frankfurt · Amsterdam.
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.
FINMA guidance rather than AI statute governs Zurich's financial firms, so much rests on internal choices. Executives sort the ones made deliberately from the ones that simply arrived by default.
We Are Superheroes
We Are Superheroes: AI is the suit. The human decides.
Switzerland reports the highest workplace AI use in Europe. With heavy use already normal, the focus is the Augmented Mindset: using the tools hard while keeping the final call recognisably yours.
WTH (What the Human)
WTH (What the Human): a live test of a leadership team's own judgement.
Directors take FINMA Guidance 08/2024 and two of their recent approvals, and decide what they would stand behind if a supervisor asked tomorrow. Guidance leaves room; the session shows how the board is using it.
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: people who will interrogate the evidence before they 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.
