100 speakers across 20 countries, listed alphabetically by surname. Not a ranking. Every entry says what the speaker is best for and who they are the wrong booking for.
Most speaker lists are catalogues of people the publisher can book for you. This one is not, which is why it can do the thing those lists cannot: say plainly who each speaker is wrong for.
100 people, across North America, the UK, Europe, Asia, Asia Pacific, the Middle East, South America. The criteria are published below and applied before anyone is added. Where an external identity could not be verified, the entry says so rather than guessing. The list grows as people are checked against the criteria, and the number in the title is generated from the list itself, so it cannot overstate it.
I am on this list. The alphabet puts me sixth, and the entry for me carries the same two lines as everybody else, including who should book somebody else.
A booker in London and a booker in Singapore are not looking at the same list, and the honest way to help is to say where people live rather than to guess at who will travel. Everyone here will travel for a fee. What follows is residence, which is checkable, and nothing more.
Institute Professor at MIT and a 2024 Nobel laureate in economics. Power and Progress, with Simon Johnson, argues that the direction of technological change is a choice rather than a fact, and that it has usually been made by very few people.
Best for. Audiences who want the economic history of who technology has actually enriched, from a Nobel laureate who has measured it.
Not the booking for. An operational brief, and most bookings on availability. The unit is a century.
Geoffrey Taber Chair in Entrepreneurship and Innovation at Toronto's Rotman School and lead author of Prediction Machines, which reframed AI as a fall in the cost of prediction rather than a new kind of mind.
Best for. Executives and boards who want a genuinely useful economic frame: what happens to a business when prediction gets cheap.
Not the booking for. A culture or capability brief. The instrument is economics.
Director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy and professor at MIT Sloan. The Hype Machine, named a best book on AI by WIRED, is about what algorithmic social systems do to elections, markets and health.
Best for. Audiences on the measurable effects of algorithmic platforms, from someone who runs the experiments.
Not the booking for. A workforce or capability brief. The unit is the network, not the worker.
Spain's first Secretary of State for Digitalisation and Artificial Intelligence, and co-chair of the United Nations AI Advisory Body.
Best for. Government, policy and board audiences on how AI is actually being governed internationally.
Not the booking for. A team wanting practical adoption guidance for next quarter. The frame is policy.
London-based founder of Exponential View; author of Exponential. The technology trajectory.
Best for. Audiences who need the shape of the technology trajectory and what it means for strategy.
Not the booking for. A team wanting step-by-step adoption guidance next quarter. The lens is longer than that.
Director of the AI Institute at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, previously research director at Northeastern's Institute for Experiential AI. A long-standing authority on responsible AI, bias and information retrieval.
Best for. Technical and policy audiences on bias, responsible AI and what decades of search taught us about ranking people.
Not the booking for. A leadership or workforce brief. The subject is systems and their failure modes.
Global chief privacy and AI governance officer at Wipro and author of An Artificial Revolution: On Power, Politics and AI. Writes about who the technology concentrates power for.
Best for. Boards and privacy functions on AI governance from somebody who runs it inside a global business rather than writing about it from outside.
Not the booking for. A capability or workforce brief. The subject is privacy, power and regulation.
Assistant professor of technology management at UC Santa Barbara and author of The Skill Code (2024). His fieldwork on robotic surgery showed how automation quietly removes the apprenticeship that produces experts.
Best for. Organisations worried about how their juniors will ever become seniors. The closest thing in this field to fieldwork on that problem.
Not the booking for. A strategy or governance brief. The unit of analysis is how one person learns to do a job.
Founder of AI&Beyond and author of The Tech Whisperer (Penguin). Former group chief digital officer at Mahindra and regional director at Microsoft India.
Best for. Indian and Asian corporate audiences on adopting AI inside a large traditional business, by somebody who has done it.
Not the booking for. A research or policy brief. The vantage point is the enterprise.
Founder of the AI Accountability Lab at Trinity College Dublin and a senior adviser in AI accountability at the Mozilla Foundation. Her audits of the datasets behind widely used models forced at least one to be withdrawn.
Best for. Boards and regulators who want to know what is actually inside the datasets their models were trained on.
Not the booking for. A strategy or workforce brief. The work is empirical audit of systems and data.
Leads Microsoft Research AI4Science, honorary professor at Edinburgh and fellow of Darwin College, Cambridge. Author of Deep Learning: Foundations and Concepts and of the pattern-recognition text a generation learned from.
Best for. Scientific and technical audiences on machine learning applied to physics, chemistry and biology.
Not the booking for. An organisational or policy brief. The subject is scientific method.
Founder and former head of the AI and automation practices at McKinsey and EY, where he led EY's Asia Pacific automation centre. Author of Intelligent Automation and IRREPLACEABLE: The Art of Standing Out in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.
Best for. Operations and transformation audiences on automating well, and on which human contributions get more valuable as more is automated.
Not the booking for. A research or policy brief. The vantage point is large-scale implementation.
Author of Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (Oxford, 2014), the book that moved the question of machine superintelligence from science fiction into policy conversations.
Best for. Audiences willing to take the long-horizon risk argument seriously and on its own terms.
Not the booking for. A practical or organisational brief. The argument is philosophical, speculative by design, and heavily contested.
Professor emeritus at USC Marshall and co-author of Work Without Jobs and Reinventing Jobs. Has spent a career on how organisations actually allocate human effort.
Best for. Academic and senior HR audiences wanting the evidence base under work redesign.
Not the booking for. A general or mainstream stage. The register is scholarly.
Panasonic Professor of Robotics emeritus at MIT, former director of its AI Lab and of CSAIL, and founder of iRobot and Robust.AI. A long-standing sceptic of timelines other people find obvious.
Best for. Audiences wanting robotics grounded by somebody who has shipped millions of robots and is unimpressed by forecasts.
Not the booking for. A workforce or organisational brief. The subject is machines and what they physically manage.
Director of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab and author of nine books including The Second Machine Age and Machine, Platform, Crowd. One of the few people measuring what AI does to productivity rather than predicting it.
Best for. Boards and economists who want measured productivity effects rather than projected ones.
Not the booking for. A culture or capability brief. The instrument is econometrics.
Professor of ethics and technology at the Hertie School in Berlin and a founding member of its Centre for Digital Governance. Co-authored the UK's Principles of Robotics in 2010, the first national-level AI ethics policy.
Best for. Policy and governance audiences on AI ethics from someone who wrote a national policy rather than commenting on one.
Not the booking for. A commercial adoption brief. The subject is governance and moral standing.
Author of Surviving AI and The Economic Singularity, which named the moment technological unemployment becomes the dominant labour reality. Co-founded the AI safety company Conscium in 2024.
Best for. Audiences prepared to look directly at the possibility that this time the jobs do not come back.
Not the booking for. An event wanting reassurance. The argument is that the disruption is different in kind.
Founder of Humane Intelligence, a non-profit that runs public red-teaming of AI models, and a responsible AI fellow at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center. Built one of the first machine-learning ethics teams inside a large platform.
Best for. Organisations that want their AI systems actually tested rather than assured, by somebody who runs public audits of them.
Not the booking for. A strategy or capability brief. The work is adversarial evaluation.
Author of The Alignment Problem, called by the New York Times the best book on the technical and moral questions of AI, and a Clarendon Scholar at Oxford's Human Information Processing Lab working on models of what humans actually value.
Best for. Audiences who want the alignment question explained properly, including why it is hard, by a writer who did the research rather than summarising it.
Not the booking for. A commercial or workforce brief. The subject is machine learning and human values.
Research professor at USC Annenberg, senior principal researcher at Microsoft Research and inaugural chair of AI and Justice at the Ecole Normale Superieure. Atlas of AI (Yale, 2021) traces what it physically costs to build these systems and who ends up holding the power.
Best for. Audiences prepared to look at the labour, minerals and energy behind the systems, and at who the concentration of power actually serves.
Not the booking for. A brief about adoption or productivity. The argument is political and it is not a comfortable one.
Dunton Family Dean of Northeastern University's D'Amore-McKim School of Business and author of The AI-Savvy Leader: Nine Ways to Take Back Control and Make AI Work. Argues that leaders have handed the AI agenda to technologists and need to take it back.
Best for. Chief executives who suspect they have delegated the AI decisions too far down and want a way to take them back.
Not the booking for. A technical or research brief. The subject is leadership behaviour.
Professor of artificial intelligence at the University of Bath and author of The Shortcut (2023) and Machina Sapiens (2024). Explains what these systems are doing without either mystifying or dismissing them.
Best for. Audiences who want to understand what these systems actually do, from a professor who can explain it without jargon or hype.
Not the booking for. A workforce, adoption or strategy brief. The subject is the machine and how it works.
Argentinian technology writer, professor and speaker. El Algoritmo examines how algorithmic decisions reach into ordinary life, from friendship and anxiety to politics.
Best for. Spanish-language and Latin American audiences on what algorithmic systems are doing to everyday life, rather than to enterprises.
Not the booking for. A corporate adoption brief. The frame is cultural and it is written for a general reader.
Former chief executive of Accenture Technology and its chief technology and innovation officer. Co-author of Human + Machine (2018, updated 2024) and Radically Human (2022), on the roles that only appear once people and systems work together.
Best for. Large enterprises redesigning work around AI, from someone who ran the technology arm of a firm that does it for a living.
Not the booking for. A research or policy brief. The vantage point is the consultancy engagement.
President's Distinguished Professor of information technology and management at Babson, fellow of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, and author of The AI Advantage and All-in on AI. Has been writing about analytics in organisations since long before it was fashionable.
Best for. Organisations that want AI adoption grounded in forty years of evidence about what actually happens to analytics projects.
Not the booking for. A frontier or research brief. The subject is implementation inside real firms.
Futurist and author. The future of work.
Best for. Future-of-work audiences wanting frameworks for how organisations and roles change.
Not the booking for. A room wanting deep technical detail on the systems.
Professor at Sorbonne Universite and holder of the HUMAAINE research chair at CNRS, on machine learning, emotion detection and the ethics of human-machine interaction. Author of Des robots et des hommes.
Best for. French-language audiences on emotional AI and on the ethics of systems designed to affect how people feel.
Not the booking for. A commercial or strategy brief. The work is research and it is concerned with manipulation.
Professor of computer science at Umea University, where she leads the Responsible AI group and directs the AI Policy Lab. Responsible Artificial Intelligence is about turning principles into something an engineer can actually build.
Best for. Organisations that have signed up to AI principles and now have to make an engineer act on them.
Not the booking for. A strategy or futures brief. The work starts where the principles document ends.
Professor emeritus of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington, creator of Markov logic networks, and author of The Master Algorithm.
Best for. Technical audiences who want the five schools of machine learning laid out by someone who has argued with all of them.
Not the booking for. A business or policy brief, and a room expecting consensus. He is a vocal contrarian on several current debates.
Co-founder of Affectiva; author of Girl Decoded. Emotion AI.
Best for. Audiences on emotion AI, human-machine interaction and building AI companies.
Not the booking for. A general AI-strategy overview. The expertise is specific and deep.
Founding director of the Digital Ethics Center at Yale, previously professor of the philosophy and ethics of information at Oxford. The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence (OUP, 2023) is among more than three hundred works.
Best for. Boards and policy audiences who want the ethics framed by a philosopher rather than assembled from principles documents.
Not the booking for. A team wanting operational guidance. The work is conceptual and it is dense.
Futurist and author of The Future of You, named by Forbes among the top fifty female futurists. Works on identity: who we are as more of our thinking and deciding happens with machines.
Best for. Audiences interested in identity, and in what happens to selfhood when thinking is shared with machines.
Not the booking for. An operational or technical brief. The subject is cultural and speculative.
Author of Rise of the Robots. Automation and jobs.
Best for. Audiences confronting automation, displacement and the labour-market argument directly.
Not the booking for. An event looking for an upbeat adoption story.
Dieter Schwarz Associate Professor of AI and Work at the Oxford Internet Institute and author of The Technology Trap. Co-author of the 2013 study that put a number on how many jobs were automatable.
Best for. Audiences wanting the economic history of automation and what it predicts, from the researcher whose number everyone still quotes.
Not the booking for. An operational or capability brief. The frame is labour economics measured across centuries.
Cambridge's inaugural Professor for the Public Understanding of Mathematics. Hello World: How to Be Human in the Age of the Machine won the 2020 Asimov Prize and remains one of the few genuinely popular books on the subject.
Best for. Large mixed audiences who need algorithms made vivid and honest at the same time, which very few people can do.
Not the booking for. A technical or strategic brief. The gift is explanation, and the room should be a broad one.
Chair Professor at HKUST and founding director of its Centre for AI Research. An elected Fellow of the Association for Computational Linguistics for work on statistical language processing and systems that can understand and empathise with people.
Best for. Asian audiences and technical rooms wanting language and emotion in machines from someone who builds those systems.
Not the booking for. A business strategy brief. The work is research and it is technical.
Founder and chief executive of Eticas and author of the algorithmic audit framework behind it. Has advised the OECD, the European Commission, the UN and the European Parliament on applied ethics and responsible AI.
Best for. Boards and regulators who want to know what auditing an algorithm actually involves, from somebody who does it.
Not the booking for. A brief about culture, skills or the workforce. The subject is the system and its accountability.
Former Chief Business Officer at Google X and author of Scary Smart (2021). AI, happiness and what the technology does to human wellbeing.
Best for. Audiences who want the human and emotional consequences of AI addressed directly, by somebody who helped build it.
Not the booking for. A brief needing governance, workforce planning or an evidence review. The register is philosophical.
Founder of the Distributed AI Research Institute and one of the most cited voices in AI ethics. Her work concerns who AI systems are built for and who carries the cost when they fail.
Best for. Organisations willing to hear who an AI system disadvantages, argued without softening.
Not the booking for. An event wanting a comfortable adoption story. That is the point of the booking, not a caveat to it.
Author of Empire of AI, which reconstructs how OpenAI moved from a non-profit research collective to a secretive corporate actor, and one of the most persistent reporters on the industry's labour and environmental costs.
Best for. Rooms prepared to hear how the industry actually operates, including the parts its founders would rather not discuss.
Not the booking for. An event wanting an optimistic adoption story, or one sponsored by a lab.
Historian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Distinguished Research Fellow at Cambridge's Centre for the Study of Existential Risk. Author of Sapiens and of Nexus (2024), which reads AI as a rupture in the history of information networks.
Best for. Events that can carry a civilisational frame, and audiences who want AI placed in the long history of information rather than in this quarter.
Not the booking for. Almost every corporate booking, on availability alone. And a brief needing operational guidance: the altitude is deliberate and it does not descend.
Digital anthropologist and author; Executive Director of the Red Thread Institute. Digital culture and human behaviour.
Best for. Audiences on digital culture, human behaviour and what technology does to how we work.
Not the booking for. A governance, regulation or economics brief.
Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer at NASA Goddard and agency lead for the NASA 2040 AI track, after twenty-seven years at NASA. Author of two books on AI, most recently Artificial Intelligence and Innovation.
Best for. Large institutions wanting to hear how AI is actually adopted inside one of the most risk-averse organisations on earth.
Not the booking for. A commercial or workforce brief. The setting is a public research agency.
London-based author of SuperSkills (Kogan Page, 2026); the Drift versus Design framework. Where human judgement belongs.
Best for. Boards and leadership teams asking where human judgement has to stay as AI adoption increases.
Not the booking for. A brief that needs implementation, tooling or an AI roadmap. That is a different specialism.
Co-founder of LinkedIn, founding investor and former board member of OpenAI, and author of Superagency, which makes the case that AI expands individual agency rather than removing it.
Best for. Audiences who want the optimistic case made by somebody with capital and history behind it rather than as a mood.
Not the booking for. A room wanting the risks weighted equally, and most bookings on availability. The position is deliberately optimistic.
David Sarnoff Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, where he heads technology and operations management and chairs the Digital Initiative. Co-author of Competing in the Age of AI.
Best for. Executives who need the structural argument: what changes about a firm when AI sits at the centre of its operating model.
Not the booking for. A people or culture brief. The unit of analysis is the organisation's architecture.
Senior partner and global leader for transformation services at Mercer, and co-author of Work Without Jobs (MIT Press), which argues for deconstructing jobs into tasks and recombining them around what people can actually do.
Best for. HR and transformation leaders willing to stop thinking in jobs and start thinking in tasks and skills.
Not the booking for. An audience attached to conventional job architecture. The argument dismantles it.
Co-creator of Siri and author of L'intelligence artificielle n'existe pas (2019), which argues that what is called artificial intelligence is better described as augmented intelligence.
Best for. French-language audiences wanting the technology demystified by somebody who helped build a piece of it.
Not the booking for. A brief needing the organisational or workforce consequences. The argument is about the technology itself, it is deliberately deflationary, and it is contested in France.
Former world chess champion and author of Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins. Lost to Deep Blue in 1997 and spent the decades since arguing that the interesting question is what humans and machines do together.
Best for. Audiences who want the human-versus-machine story from the person it actually happened to, and the argument he built from it afterwards.
Not the booking for. A brief needing current technical or organisational detail. The authority is the experience and what he made of it, and most bookings will not reach his availability.
Former Head of Go-To-Market at OpenAI and author of The Next RenAIssance. AI adoption and the expansion of human potential.
Best for. Boardrooms wanting an insider account of where the technology is going, argued optimistically.
Not the booking for. An audience looking for a sceptical or evidence-first treatment. The optimism is the position, not an accident.
Belgian engineer, adjunct professor at Vlerick Business School and programme director for AI at imec. Wanted: Human-AI Translators argues that the scarce skill is not building these systems but explaining them honestly to the people who must decide about them.
Best for. Benelux and European audiences who need AI demystified without being patronised, from an engineer who does it for a living.
Not the booking for. A brief needing organisational or workforce strategy. The work sits between the technology and the decision-maker.
Singapore-based co-founder and CEO of Addo and a board member of Singapore's Infocomm Media Development Authority. AI strategy, smart cities and Asian adoption.
Best for. Asian and Gulf audiences on national AI strategy, smart cities and enterprise adoption.
Not the booking for. A brief centred on Western labour markets or the psychology of work.
Professor of Practice in AI at King's College London; former head of the UK Government Office for AI. AI policy and adoption.
Best for. Public sector, regulators and organisations navigating AI policy and national strategy.
Not the booking for. A commercial growth brief. The centre of gravity is policy rather than revenue.
UK author and adviser on AI in business; the future of work and business transformation.
Best for. Business and marketing audiences wanting applied AI cases they can act on.
Not the booking for. An audience that wants primary research or academic depth.
Former Chief Decision Scientist at Google. Decision intelligence.
Best for. Data, analytics and leadership audiences on decision intelligence and decision quality.
Not the booking for. A people-and-culture brief. The frame is decision science.
Dorothy and Michael Hintze Professor at Harvard Business School and chair of its Digital, Data and Design Institute. Competing in the Age of AI, with Marco Iansiti, argues that the constraint on scale has changed.
Best for. Boards and executives on what changes when AI becomes the operating model rather than a tool inside it.
Not the booking for. A brief about individual capability or team practice. The unit is the firm.
DeepMind Professor of Machine Learning at Cambridge, where he leads the university-wide AI initiative, and a senior AI fellow at the Alan Turing Institute. The Atomic Human (2024) asks what is left of human intelligence that machine intelligence does not reach.
Best for. Audiences who want a serious account of what human intelligence has that machine intelligence does not, from someone who builds the machines.
Not the booking for. A brief needing implementation or organisational change. The argument is about the nature of the thing.
Silver Professor at NYU's Courant Institute and founding director of Meta's FAIR lab. Shared the 2018 ACM Turing Award with Bengio and Hinton for the foundations of deep learning.
Best for. Audiences wanting the science from somebody who built it, and a sceptical read on how close current systems are to general intelligence.
Not the booking for. A brief about workforce, culture or organisational change, and most commercial bookings on availability. The expertise is the architecture, not the workplace.
Author of AI Superpowers. The global AI picture.
Best for. Audiences needing the global picture, and China in particular, from someone inside it.
Not the booking for. A brief focused only on a single Western domestic market.
Creator of Brazil's Marco Civil da Internet and chief scientific officer of ITS Rio. Led the drafting of Brazil's first comprehensive artificial intelligence legislation.
Best for. Audiences wanting how AI is being regulated outside Europe and the United States, from somebody who wrote the law.
Not the booking for. A workforce or capability brief. The lane is law, rights and public policy.
Zurich-based futurist and author of Technology vs Humanity (2016), published in twelve languages. Digital ethics and the human consequences of exponential technology.
Best for. International congresses on the ethics of technology and the human consequences of exponential change, in German or English.
Not the booking for. A team wanting operational detail or an implementation plan. The frame is ethical and long-range.
Sequoia Professor of computer science at Stanford and co-director of its Institute for Human-Centered AI. Created ImageNet, and wrote The Worlds I See (2023), which tells the origin of modern AI through her own.
Best for. Audiences who want the science and the humanism from the same person, told through the history of how the field actually got here.
Not the booking for. An organisational or workforce brief, and most bookings on availability. The frame is scientific and civilisational.
Professor and chair of mechanical engineering at Columbia, where he directs the Creative Machines Lab. Co-author of Driverless: Intelligent Cars and the Road Ahead and of Fabricated.
Best for. Audiences who want robotics and machine creativity from a lab that builds the things rather than writes about them.
Not the booking for. A workforce or governance brief. The subject is what machines can physically and creatively do.
Emeritus professor of psychology and neural science at NYU and co-author of Rebooting AI. The most persistent technical critic of the claim that scaling current models leads to general intelligence.
Best for. Rooms that have heard the optimistic case and want the technical objections put by someone qualified to make them.
Not the booking for. An event wanting enthusiasm. The position is sceptical and he does not soften it.
Author and adviser on AI in business and strategy.
Best for. Large mainstream audiences needing a clear, accessible map of AI in business.
Not the booking for. A specialist room that has already read the overviews.
Founder of the think tank Hack Future Lab, a Thinkers50 contributor and partner at MIT Solve. The Upside of Disruption is about leading when the ground will not stay still.
Best for. Leadership audiences who want disruption framed as something to lead through rather than survive.
Not the booking for. A research or evidence brief. The register is executive and motivational.
Future-of-work strategist; co-author of The Adaptation Advantage and The Empathy Advantage. Workforce adaptability.
Best for. Workforce, HR and leadership audiences on adaptability and the shape of future work.
Not the booking for. A technical audience wanting depth on the systems themselves.
Technology correspondent at the New York Times, previously a senior writer at WIRED. Genius Makers reconstructs, from hundreds of interviews, how a small group of researchers took deep learning from the fringe to the centre.
Best for. Audiences who want the human history of how these systems were built, reported rather than theorised.
Not the booking for. A strategy or capability brief. The method is journalism and the subject is the past.
Economic historian and professor at Tufts's Fletcher School. Chip War won the Financial Times Business Book of the Year and explains why the whole of AI rests on a handful of factories.
Best for. Boards and policy audiences who need the geopolitics and physical supply chain that everything else depends on.
Not the booking for. A workforce or organisational brief. The subject is semiconductors and statecraft.
James B. Alley Jr. Professor at the Santa Fe Institute and author of Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans. Works on analogy and abstraction, and is a careful sceptic of claims about machine understanding.
Best for. Audiences who want a working scientist's account of what these systems can and cannot do, without either hype or dismissal.
Not the booking for. A business or workforce brief. The subject is machine cognition.
Wharton professor; author of Co-Intelligence. The practical use of AI in daily work.
Best for. Teams who want evidence-led, practical guidance on using AI well, from someone testing it.
Not the booking for. A macro or policy brief. The work is at the level of the desk, not the economy.
The Financial Times's first artificial intelligence editor and author of Code Dependent, shortlisted for the 2024 Women's Prize for Non-Fiction, which reports the effects of AI through the people living with them.
Best for. Audiences who want the human consequences reported rather than theorised, from the FT's AI editor.
Not the booking for. A strategy or technical brief. The method is journalism and the unit is a person.
Canadian author of The AI Product Design Handbook, who has worked with more than two hundred and fifty organisations including Apple, TELUS and the Government of Canada, and teaches in Canada and Europe.
Best for. Product and design teams who have to put AI inside something people will actually use.
Not the booking for. A board or policy brief. The altitude is the product, not the institution.
Naylor Fitzhugh Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and co-author of The Digital Mindset: What It Really Takes to Thrive in the Age of Data, Algorithms and AI.
Best for. Leaders working out what their people actually need to know, and how much, to work well with these systems.
Not the booking for. A technical or frontier brief. The subject is human readiness.
Founder of DeepLearning.AI, general partner at AI Fund, co-founder and chairman of Coursera, and an adjunct professor at Stanford. Has probably taught more people machine learning than anyone alive.
Best for. Technical and executive audiences wanting a clear-eyed practical read from someone who has built, taught and funded across the whole field.
Not the booking for. A philosophical or risk-framed brief, and most bookings on availability. The disposition is builder-optimistic.
Co-founder of Infosys and architect of Aadhaar, India's biometric identity system. Argues that the AI opportunity lies in applications at population scale rather than in building the largest models.
Best for. Audiences on AI at population scale, and on what digital public infrastructure makes possible in emerging markets.
Not the booking for. A brief about individual capability or team practice. The unit of analysis is a country.
Distinguished education fellow at Stanford's Institute for Human-Centered AI and long-time research director at Google. Co-author of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, the textbook used by most of the field.
Best for. Educators and technical audiences on how AI is taught, and on what the field actually knows.
Not the booking for. A business or workforce brief. The frame is education and research.
Director of the ELLIS Alicante Foundation, the Institute of Humanity-centric AI, and vice-president of ELLIS. Spain's representative on the international expert panel advising on advanced AI safety.
Best for. Audiences wanting AI research and safety framed around human benefit, from inside the European research community.
Not the booking for. A commercial adoption brief. The vantage point is scientific and public-interest.
Germany's best-known public philosopher and author of Kuenstliche Intelligenz und der Sinn des Lebens. Argues that AI has something to do with intelligence, little to do with understanding, and nothing to do with reason.
Best for. German-language audiences wanting the philosophical case argued seriously, by somebody the room already knows.
Not the booking for. An organisation looking for adoption guidance or an evidence review. The register is philosophical and the position is deliberately sceptical.
Finnish author based in Spain whose Inteligencia artificial: 101 cosas que debes saber hoy sobre nuestro futuro is published in seven languages. Works on how companies and societies adapt rather than on the technology itself.
Best for. Spanish-language audiences who want AI explained practically and at introductory depth, by the author of the bestseller most of them will have seen.
Not the booking for. A technical or research audience. The work is deliberately accessible.
Director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the first woman to hold the post, and author of The Heart and the Chip and The Mind's Mirror.
Best for. Audiences who want robotics and AI from the person running one of the field's largest laboratories.
Not the booking for. A workforce or strategy brief, and most bookings on availability.
Professor of computer science at Berkeley, co-author of the standard AI textbook, and author of Human Compatible (2019), which argues that the field has to be rebuilt around machines that are uncertain about what we want.
Best for. Boards and technical audiences who want the control problem set out rigorously by the person who wrote the textbook.
Not the booking for. A brief about adoption, culture or capability. The subject is how to build systems that stay steerable.
Author of Deepfakes. Generative AI and synthetic media.
Best for. Audiences on generative AI, synthetic media and what it does to trust and information.
Not the booking for. A workforce, skills or labour-economics brief.
Holder of the Francis Crick Chair at the Salk Institute and Distinguished Professor at UC San Diego. Co-invented the Boltzmann machine with Geoffrey Hinton and wrote The Deep Learning Revolution (MIT Press, 2018).
Best for. Audiences who want deep learning explained by one of the people who built it, and the parallel with how brains learn.
Not the booking for. An organisational or commercial brief. The subject is the science.
Professor of cognitive robotics at Imperial College London and a senior scientist at DeepMind. Author of The Technological Singularity, and one of the more careful writers on whether these systems have anything like a mind.
Best for. Audiences prepared to think carefully about consciousness and machine minds without either mysticism or dismissal.
Not the booking for. A practical adoption brief. The questions are philosophical and unresolved.
Optics research scientist and author of You Look Like a Thing and I Love You, which explains how machine learning works by documenting the strange and specific ways it fails.
Best for. Mixed audiences who will learn more from laughing at what these systems get wrong than from being told what they might do.
Not the booking for. A board or strategy brief. The register is comic and the material is deliberately small-scale.
Professor of practice in AI and innovation at Imperial College Business School, co-director of the Trusted AI Alliance and a visiting scholar at MIT's School of Engineering. Author of Basic AI.
Best for. Business audiences wanting trusted AI made practical, from a business school rather than a computer science department.
Not the booking for. A research or frontier brief. The register is executive education.
Norwegian physicist and AI researcher whose Maskiner som tenker was the best-selling non-fiction book in Norway in 2023, won the Brageprisen, and has sold more than 75,000 copies across Europe.
Best for. Nordic and European audiences wanting AI explained clearly and in Norwegian, by the person who wrote the country's best-selling book on it.
Not the booking for. An organisational change brief. The strength is explanation, not implementation.
Chief executive of Microsoft AI, co-founder of DeepMind and of Inflection. The Coming Wave argues that the central problem of the next decade is containment rather than capability.
Best for. Audiences wanting the frontier read from someone running one of the labs, and the containment argument made seriously.
Not the booking for. Almost every booking, on availability. He runs Microsoft AI.
Economist at Oxford; author of A World Without Work. The economics of AI and work.
Best for. Policy, professional-services and public-sector audiences on the economics of work.
Not the booking for. An operational audience looking for what to do on Monday.
Professor of physics at MIT, co-founder of the Future of Life Institute, and author of Life 3.0 (2017) on what it means to be human as machines become more capable.
Best for. Audiences ready to think about the long-range consequences, argued by a physicist rather than a futurist.
Not the booking for. A team wanting near-term practical guidance. The horizon is decades and it is meant to be.
Baillie Gifford Chair in the Ethics of Data and Artificial Intelligence at the University of Edinburgh, and author of The AI Mirror (2024) and Technology and the Virtues (2016). Argues that AI systems are mirrors of our past rather than minds.
Best for. Audiences ready for the philosophical case made rigorously, and for a serious account of what these systems actually are.
Not the booking for. A team wanting adoption guidance or metrics. The argument is philosophical and it is meant to be.
Author of The Algorithmic Leader. Algorithmic leadership.
Best for. Executive audiences on algorithmic leadership and designing the twenty-first-century organisation.
Not the booking for. A room that wants the underlying research rather than the synthesis.
Scientia Professor at UNSW and chief scientist of UNSW.ai. Author of 2062 and Machines Behaving Badly: The Morality of AI (2022), and a long-running campaigner against autonomous weapons.
Best for. Audiences who want the ethical questions put plainly by a working AI scientist rather than by a commentator.
Not the booking for. A commercial adoption brief. The register is scientific and public-interest.
Founder of the Future Today Institute. Strategic foresight.
Best for. Boards and strategy teams who want structured foresight and scenario work.
Not the booking for. An audience wanting near-term operational answers. Foresight works at longer range.
Global managing director of thought leadership and technology research at Accenture, previously at Babson Executive Education. Co-author of Human + Machine and Radically Human.
Best for. Audiences who want the research behind the human-plus-machine argument rather than the headline.
Not the booking for. A brief needing a single keynote voice. He is usually the research half of a pair.
Professor and head of computer science at Oxford, a Fellow of Hertford College, and former president of both the European Association for AI and IJCAI. The Road to Conscious Machines tells the story of the field through its failed ideas as much as its successes.
Best for. Audiences wanting an honest account of what the field has and has not achieved, including the ideas that failed.
Not the booking for. An organisational or workforce brief. The subject is the discipline itself.
Chair Professor of AI Science at Tsinghua and founding dean of its Institute for AI Industry Research. President of Baidu from 2014 to 2019, and before that sixteen years at Microsoft including chairman of Microsoft China.
Best for. Audiences who need the Chinese AI picture from inside its research and industry establishment rather than described from outside it.
Not the booking for. A Western workforce or culture brief, and most commercial bookings on availability.
Professor of computer science at RPTU Kaiserslautern, where she leads the Algorithm Accountability Lab, and a recipient of the Bundesverdienstkreuz. Writes German-language AI books for a general reader.
Best for. German-language audiences on algorithmic decision-making and how to hold it to account, from the professor who built the lab for it.
Not the booking for. A commercial adoption brief. The frame is accountability and regulation.
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