An independent editorial guide to 100 AI keynote speakers across 20 countries, organised by the human, organisational and societal questions they help audiences understand. Not a ranking, and not a roster: every entry says who the speaker is 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.
Independent here means something specific and checkable rather than a compliment. Nobody on this page is represented, booked or invoiced by me, and no fee, commission or reciprocal arrangement attaches to any entry. That is the only kind of independence a list like this can honestly claim, and it is the one an agency cannot. I do speak on this subject myself, and I am on the list, which is set out at the foot of the page.
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.
Every entry is classified on two dimensions, and both are printed on the entry itself. They exist because the question a booker actually has is not who is famous. It is what this person’s authority is built on, and which argument they are equipped to make.
What the authority rests on. Six bases: a substantive book, an academic post or research programme, having built or run an AI company or function, a government or regulatory role, reporting on the field, or having done the thing. Across the 100 entries: 87 author, 62 researcher, 39 operator, 11 policy, 5 journalist, 2 practitioner. Those numbers sum to more than 100 because most people rest on more than one, which is usually the point of them. 87 of 100 have written a book, which is the single largest basis here and a fair description of what this list selects for.
Which territory they speak in. Six territories: Governance, ethics and accountability 21, Frontier AI and the science 21, AI trajectory, futures and risk 17, Enterprise adoption and transformation 17, Humans, capability and judgement 15, Economics, jobs and labour markets 9. Nobody covers all six well and the entries do not pretend otherwise. A speaker who is superb on frontier capability is often the wrong booking for a session on labour economics, and the “not the booking for” line usually says so.
No ranking, no score and no tier is published. A composite score across these dimensions would be a number invented to look objective, and the honest version is to show the dimensions and let a reader weigh them.
The six territories above gather into three questions, which is the most useful cut if you know what the session is for but not who should give it. One caveat, because the fit is not perfect: frontier AI and the science is grouped with the societal questions, and it is really the technical layer the other two sit on. It is placed there because that is where somebody looking for it would go, not because the category is clean.
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. Economic history at the scale of centuries, from a Nobel laureate who has measured who technology actually enriched.
Not the booking for. Anyone needing next quarter's operating plan. He thinks in centuries and will not pretend otherwise.
Authority rests on. has written a substantive book, holds an academic post or leads a research programme. Territory. Economics, jobs and labour markets.
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. What happens to a business when prediction becomes cheap. Agrawal wrote the frame most economists now reach for.
Not the booking for. Culture and capability fall outside his instrument, which is price theory.
Authority rests on. has written a substantive book, holds an academic post or leads a research programme. Territory. Economics, jobs and labour markets.
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. Put him in front of a room arguing about social platforms and he will replace the argument with experimental results.
Not the booking for. His unit is the network, not the worker. A workforce session keeps missing him.
Authority rests on. has written a substantive book, holds an academic post or leads a research programme. Territory. Governance, ethics and accountability.
Spain's first Secretary of State for Digitalisation and Artificial Intelligence, and co-chair of the United Nations AI Advisory Body.
Best for. How AI is genuinely being governed across borders, from a co-chair of the UN advisory body that helped shape it.
Not the booking for. Not an adoption session. Artigas works at treaty altitude.
Authority rests on. has held a government, regulatory or international role. Territory. Governance, ethics and accountability.
London-based founder of Exponential View; author of Exponential. The technology trajectory.
Best for. The shape of the curve, and what a strategy is supposed to do about it. Strategic rather than technical.
Not the booking for. Teams wanting a step-by-step plan for next quarter will find the horizon too long.
Authority rests on. has written a substantive book, reports on the field. Territory. AI trajectory, futures and risk.
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. Decades of watching search systems sort human beings. That history is what makes his account of bias concrete rather than abstract.
Not the booking for. He talks about systems and how they fail, not about leaders and how they behave.
Authority rests on. has written a substantive book, holds an academic post or leads a research programme. Territory. Governance, ethics and accountability.
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 who would rather hear about AI governance from somebody who runs it inside a global business than from somebody who writes about it.
Not the booking for. Capability and workforce questions are not hers. Privacy, power and regulation are.
Authority rests on. has written a substantive book, built or ran an AI company, lab or function, has held a government, regulatory or international role. Territory. Governance, ethics and accountability.
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 quietly worried that their juniors will never become seniors. Beane did the fieldwork on exactly that, in operating theatres.
Not the booking for. He works one apprentice at a time, which pitches a strategy brief at the wrong altitude.
Authority rests on. has written a substantive book, holds an academic post or leads a research programme. Territory. Humans, capability and judgement.
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. Adopting AI inside a large traditional business, from somebody who has actually had to do it.
Not the booking for. Not a research or policy booking. Bindra speaks from inside the enterprise.
Authority rests on. has written a substantive book, built or ran an AI company, lab or function. Territory. Enterprise adoption and transformation.
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. Ask what is actually inside the datasets your models learned from. Her audits have forced at least one to be withdrawn.
Not the booking for. Ask her for strategy and you will get an audit, because that is the work.
Authority rests on. holds an academic post or leads a research programme, has held a government, regulatory or international role. Territory. Governance, ethics and accountability.
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. Machine learning inside physics, chemistry and biology. Pitch the room technical: he wrote the pattern-recognition text a generation learned from.
Not the booking for. Organisational and policy questions sit a long way from his subject, which is scientific method.
Authority rests on. has written a substantive book, holds an academic post or leads a research programme. Territory. Frontier AI and the science.
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. Automating well, and knowing which human contributions get more valuable as you do. He built the automation practices at both McKinsey and EY.
Not the booking for. Bornet speaks from large-scale implementation. A research stage wastes that.
Authority rests on. has written a substantive book, built or ran an AI company, lab or function. Territory. Humans, capability and judgement.
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. Rooms willing to take the long-horizon risk argument seriously, on its own terms, for a full hour.
Not the booking for. Speculative by design and heavily contested. An audience wanting something practical for Monday will be irritated.
Authority rests on. has written a substantive book, holds an academic post or leads a research programme. Territory. AI trajectory, futures and risk.
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. Senior HR audiences who want the evidence base underneath work redesign rather than the slogan version.
Not the booking for. The register is scholarly and a mainstream stage will feel it.
Authority rests on. has written a substantive book, holds an academic post or leads a research programme. Territory. Humans, capability and judgement.
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. Robotics from a man who has shipped millions of actual robots and is cheerfully unimpressed by everyone else's timelines.
Not the booking for. Machines and what they physically manage. Workforce questions belong to somebody else.
Authority rests on. has written a substantive book, holds an academic post or leads a research programme, built or ran an AI company, lab or function. Territory. Frontier AI and the science.
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. For boards tired of projected productivity gains who would like some measured ones.
Not the booking for. Econometrics is the instrument, so culture and capability briefs go elsewhere.
Authority rests on. has written a substantive book, holds an academic post or leads a research programme. Territory. Economics, jobs and labour markets.
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. AI ethics from somebody who wrote a national policy rather than commenting on one.
Not the booking for. A commercial adoption brief misses what she does, which is governance and moral standing.
Authority rests on. has written a substantive book, holds an academic post or leads a research programme, has held a government, regulatory or international role. Territory. Governance, ethics and accountability.
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. If the brief is reassurance, book somebody else. His argument is that this disruption differs in kind.
Authority rests on. has written a substantive book, built or ran an AI company, lab or function. Territory. Economics, jobs and labour markets.
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. Chowdhury runs public red-teaming on them.
Not the booking for. Adversarial evaluation is the work, so a strategy or capability brief asks for the wrong thing.
Authority rests on. holds an academic post or leads a research programme, built or ran an AI company, lab or function, has held a government, regulatory or international role. Territory. Governance, ethics and accountability.
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. 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. Machine learning and human values, not commerce and not the workforce.
Authority rests on. has written a substantive book, holds an academic post or leads a research programme. Territory. AI trajectory, futures and risk.
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. Look at the labour, the minerals and the energy behind the systems, and at whom the concentration of power actually serves.
Not the booking for. The argument is political and deliberately uncomfortable. Adoption and productivity briefs will chafe against it.
Authority rests on. has written a substantive book, holds an academic post or leads a research programme. Territory. Governance, ethics and accountability.
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 route back.
Not the booking for. Leadership behaviour is the subject. Technical and research rooms are not the fit.
Authority rests on. has written a substantive book, holds an academic post or leads a research programme. Territory. Humans, capability and judgement.
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. A professor who can explain what these systems actually do without jargon and without hype.
Not the booking for. The machine and how it works. Workforce, adoption and strategy all sit outside that.
Authority rests on. has written a substantive book, holds an academic post or leads a research programme. Territory. Frontier AI and the science.
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 rooms on what algorithms are doing to ordinary life rather than to enterprises.
Not the booking for. Written for a general reader and framed culturally, which makes a corporate adoption slot the wrong one.
Authority rests on. has written a substantive book, holds an academic post or leads a research programme. Territory. AI trajectory, futures and risk.
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 the man who ran the technology arm of a firm that does it for a living.
Not the booking for. He speaks from inside the consultancy engagement. Research and policy stages get less out of him.
Authority rests on. has written a substantive book, built or ran an AI company, lab or function. Territory. Enterprise adoption and transformation.
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. Forty years of evidence about what actually happens to analytics projects, applied to the current wave.
Not the booking for. Implementation inside real firms is the subject, so a frontier or research brief misses.
Authority rests on. has written a substantive book, holds an academic post or leads a research programme. Territory. Enterprise adoption and transformation.
Futurist and author. The future of work.
Best for. Frameworks for how organisations and roles change, for a future-of- work audience.
Not the booking for. Do not expect deep technical detail on the systems themselves.
Authority rests on. has written a substantive book, built or ran an AI company, lab or function. Territory. Enterprise adoption and transformation.
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 the ethics of systems built to move how people feel.
Not the booking for. Her concern is manipulation and her output is research. Commercial and strategy briefs sit elsewhere.
Authority rests on. has written a substantive book, holds an academic post or leads a research programme. Territory. Governance, ethics and accountability.
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 the AI principles and now have to make an engineer act on them.
Not the booking for. She starts where the principles document ends, which is too late for a futures brief and too early for strategy.
Authority rests on. has written a substantive book, holds an academic post or leads a research programme. Territory. Governance, ethics and accountability.
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. Five schools of machine learning, laid out by somebody who has argued with all of them.
Not the booking for. A vocal contrarian on several live debates. Business and policy rooms expecting consensus will not get it.
Authority rests on. has written a substantive book, holds an academic post or leads a research programme. Territory. Frontier AI and the science.
Co-founder of Affectiva; author of Girl Decoded. Emotion AI.
Best for. Emotion AI, human-machine interaction, and what building an AI company actually involved.
Not the booking for. The expertise runs deep and narrow. A general AI-strategy overview is the wrong use of it.
Authority rests on. has written a substantive book, holds an academic post or leads a research programme, built or ran an AI company, lab or function. Territory. Frontier AI and the science.
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. Ethics framed by a philosopher, rather than assembled out of principles documents.
Not the booking for. Conceptual and dense. Teams wanting operational guidance will struggle.
Authority rests on. has written a substantive book, holds an academic post or leads a research programme. Territory. Governance, ethics and accountability.
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. What happens to selfhood once thinking is shared with machines.
Not the booking for. Cultural and speculative by design, which makes operational and technical briefs a poor match.
Authority rests on. has written a substantive book, built or ran an AI company, lab or function. Territory. AI trajectory, futures and risk.
Author of Rise of the Robots. Automation and jobs.
Best for. Automation, displacement and the labour-market argument, met head on.
Not the booking for. Not for an event that wants an upbeat adoption story.
Authority rests on. has written a substantive book. Territory. Economics, jobs and labour markets.
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. Frey co-wrote the 2013 study whose number everybody still quotes. Book him for the economic history of automation and what it actually predicts.
Not the booking for. He measures labour economics across centuries. Operational and capability briefs need a shorter ruler.
Authority rests on. has written a substantive book, holds an academic post or leads a research programme. Territory. Economics, jobs and labour markets.
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. Very few people can make algorithms vivid and honest at the same time. Fry is one of them, and she needs a big mixed room.
Not the booking for. Explanation is the gift. Put her in a technical or strategic session and you have wasted it.
Authority rests on. has written a substantive book, holds an academic post or leads a research programme. Territory. Humans, capability and judgement.
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. Language and emotion in machines, from somebody who builds those systems, for Asian and technical audiences.
Not the booking for. Research-led and technical by nature, so a business strategy brief is the wrong ask.
Authority rests on. holds an academic post or leads a research programme. Territory. Frontier AI and the science.
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. What auditing an algorithm actually involves, from the person whose firm does it for regulators.
Not the booking for. The system and its accountability, not culture, skills or the workforce.
Authority rests on. built or ran an AI company, lab or function, has held a government, regulatory or international role. Territory. Governance, ethics and 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. He helped build it at Google X and now talks about what it does to people's happiness. Audiences find that combination disarming.
Not the booking for. The register is philosophical. Governance, workforce planning and evidence review all want a different speaker.
Authority rests on. has written a substantive book, built or ran an AI company, lab or function. Territory. AI trajectory, futures and risk.
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 rather than a caveat to it.
Authority rests on. holds an academic post or leads a research programme, built or ran an AI company, lab or function. Territory. Governance, ethics and accountability.
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. How the industry actually operates, including the parts its founders would rather not discuss.
Not the booking for. Not for an optimistic adoption slot, and not for an event a lab is sponsoring.
Authority rests on. has written a substantive book, reports on the field. Territory. Governance, ethics and accountability.
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. The altitude is deliberate and it does not descend.
Authority rests on. has written a substantive book, holds an academic post or leads a research programme. Territory. AI trajectory, futures and risk.
Digital anthropologist and author; Executive Director of the Red Thread Institute. Digital culture and human behaviour.
Best for. Digital culture, human behaviour, and what technology is doing to how we work.
Not the booking for. Governance, regulation and economics belong to other people on this list.
Authority rests on. has written a substantive book, holds an academic post or leads a research programme. Territory. Humans, capability and judgement.
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. How AI is genuinely adopted inside one of the most risk-averse organisations on earth.
Not the booking for. A public research agency is the vantage point, which does not transfer cleanly to a commercial or workforce brief.
Authority rests on. has written a substantive book, built or ran an AI company, lab or function. Territory. Enterprise adoption and transformation.
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. Implementation, tooling and roadmaps are a different specialism and somebody else's booking.
Authority rests on. has written a substantive book, built or ran an AI company, lab or function. Territory. Humans, capability and judgement.
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. An optimistic case with capital and history behind it, rather than optimism as a mood.
Not the booking for. Deliberately optimistic, and mostly unavailable. A room wanting the risks weighted equally should look elsewhere.
Authority rests on. has written a substantive book, built or ran an AI company, lab or function. Territory. AI trajectory, futures and risk.
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. What changes about a firm when AI sits at the centre of its operating model.
Not the booking for. Architecture is the unit of analysis, so people and culture briefs go to somebody else.
Authority rests on. has written a substantive book, holds an academic post or leads a research programme. Territory. Enterprise adoption and transformation.
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 ready to stop thinking in jobs and start thinking in tasks.
Not the booking for. The argument dismantles conventional job architecture, which an audience attached to it will resist.
Authority rests on. has written a substantive book, built or ran an AI company, lab or function. Territory. Humans, capability and judgement.
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 rooms wanting the technology deflated by somebody who helped build a famous piece of it.
Not the booking for. Deliberately deflationary, contested in France, and entirely about the technology rather than its consequences for an organisation.
Authority rests on. has written a substantive book, built or ran an AI company, lab or function. Territory. AI trajectory, futures and risk.
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. Kasparov lost to Deep Blue in 1997 and spent the decades since working out what it meant. That is the talk.
Not the booking for. Rarely available, and the authority is the experience rather than current technical detail.
Authority rests on. has written a substantive book, authority from having done the thing. Territory. Humans, capability and judgement.
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. The optimism is his position, not an accident of mood. Sceptical or evidence-first rooms should book elsewhere.
Authority rests on. has written a substantive book, built or ran an AI company, lab or function. Territory. Enterprise adoption and transformation.
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. An engineer who demystifies AI for a living, without patronising the room. Benelux and European audiences.
Not the booking for. She sits between the technology and the decision-maker, which is not where organisational or workforce strategy happens.
Authority rests on. has written a substantive book, holds an academic post or leads a research programme, built or ran an AI company, lab or function. Territory. Humans, capability and judgement.
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. National AI strategy, smart cities and enterprise adoption, for Asian and Gulf audiences.
Not the booking for. Western labour markets and the psychology of work are somebody else's territory.
Authority rests on. built or ran an AI company, lab or function, has held a government, regulatory or international role. Territory. Enterprise adoption and transformation.
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 bodies and regulators working out how to navigate AI policy and national strategy.
Not the booking for. Policy rather than revenue is the centre of gravity, so a commercial growth brief pulls against it.
Authority rests on. holds an academic post or leads a research programme, has held a government, regulatory or international role. Territory. Governance, ethics and accountability.
UK author and adviser on AI in business; the future of work and business transformation.
Best for. Applied AI cases a business or marketing audience can act on.
Not the booking for. An audience after primary research or academic depth will find it thin.
Authority rests on. has written a substantive book, built or ran an AI company, lab or function. Territory. Enterprise adoption and transformation.
Former Chief Decision Scientist at Google. Decision intelligence.
Best for. Google's former Chief Decision Scientist. The talk is about how decisions actually get made, not how models get built.
Not the booking for. Decision science is the frame. People and culture briefs need a different one.
Authority rests on. built or ran an AI company, lab or function, authority from having done the thing. Territory. Humans, capability and judgement.
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. What changes when AI becomes the operating model rather than a tool sitting inside it. Structural, and aimed at people who can act on structure.
Not the booking for. The firm is the unit, so individual capability and team practice fall below his resolution.
Authority rests on. has written a substantive book, holds an academic post or leads a research programme. Territory. Enterprise adoption and transformation.
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. A serious account of what human intelligence has that machine intelligence does not, from somebody who builds the machines.
Not the booking for. His argument concerns the nature of the thing. Implementation and organisational change are not in it.
Authority rests on. has written a substantive book, holds an academic post or leads a research programme, built or ran an AI company, lab or function. Territory. Humans, capability and judgement.
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. Deep learning from one of the three people who shared a Turing Award for it, plus a sceptical read on how close current systems really are.
Not the booking for. Architecture rather than the workplace, and hard to book. Workforce and culture briefs are a poor fit.
Authority rests on. holds an academic post or leads a research programme, built or ran an AI company, lab or function. Territory. Frontier AI and the science.
Author of AI Superpowers. The global AI picture.
Best for. China in particular, and the global picture around it, from somebody who has worked inside both.
Not the booking for. A brief confined to one Western domestic market wastes the vantage point.
Authority rests on. has written a substantive book, built or ran an AI company, lab or function. Territory. AI trajectory, futures and risk.
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. How AI is being regulated outside Europe and the United States, from the person who drafted Brazil's law.
Not the booking for. Law, rights and public policy. Workforce and capability questions are not his.
Authority rests on. holds an academic post or leads a research programme, has held a government, regulatory or international role. Territory. Governance, ethics and accountability.
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 cost of exponential change, in German or English.
Not the booking for. Ethical and long-range. Teams wanting operational detail or an implementation plan will be frustrated.
Authority rests on. has written a substantive book. Territory. AI trajectory, futures and risk.
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. Science and humanism from the same person, told through the history of how the field actually arrived here.
Not the booking for. Scientific and civilisational in frame, and her diary is close to impossible. Organisational and workforce briefs are the wrong ask.
Authority rests on. has written a substantive book, holds an academic post or leads a research programme. Territory. Frontier AI and the science.
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. Robotics and machine creativity from a lab that builds the things rather than writing about them.
Not the booking for. What machines can physically and creatively do. Workforce and governance sit outside that.
Authority rests on. has written a substantive book, holds an academic post or leads a research programme. Territory. Frontier AI and the science.
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 now want the technical objections put by somebody qualified to make them.
Not the booking for. Sceptical and unsoftened. An event wanting enthusiasm has booked the wrong person.
Authority rests on. has written a substantive book, holds an academic post or leads a research programme. Territory. Frontier AI and the science.
Author and adviser on AI in business and strategy.
Best for. A clear, accessible map of AI in business, for a large mainstream audience.
Not the booking for. A specialist room that has already read the overviews will be ahead of him.
Authority rests on. has written a substantive book, built or ran an AI company, lab or function. Territory. Enterprise adoption and transformation.
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. Executive and motivational in register, which is not what a research or evidence brief wants.
Authority rests on. has written a substantive book, built or ran an AI company, lab or function. Territory. Enterprise adoption and transformation.
Future-of-work strategist; co-author of The Adaptation Advantage and The Empathy Advantage. Workforce adaptability.
Best for. Adaptability and the shape of future work, for workforce, HR and leadership audiences.
Not the booking for. A technical audience wanting depth on the systems themselves should look further down this list.
Authority rests on. has written a substantive book. Territory. Humans, capability and judgement.
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. Hundreds of interviews with the people who built this, turned into the human history of how it happened.
Not the booking for. Journalism about the past. Strategy and capability briefs want something forward-facing.
Authority rests on. has written a substantive book, reports on the field. Territory. Frontier AI and the science.
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. Semiconductors, geopolitics, and the physical supply chain everything else quietly depends on. Chip War won the Financial Times Business Book of the Year.
Not the booking for. Semiconductors and statecraft, not workforces and organisations.
Authority rests on. has written a substantive book, holds an academic post or leads a research programme. Territory. Economics, jobs and labour markets.
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. A working scientist's account of what these systems can and cannot do, with neither hype nor dismissal.
Not the booking for. Machine cognition is the subject, which leaves business and workforce questions untouched.
Authority rests on. has written a substantive book, holds an academic post or leads a research programme. Territory. Frontier AI and the science.
Wharton professor; author of Co-Intelligence. The practical use of AI in daily work.
Best for. Teams who want practical, evidence-led guidance on using AI well, from somebody who keeps testing it.
Not the booking for. He works at the level of the desk rather than the economy, so macro and policy briefs overshoot.
Authority rests on. has written a substantive book, holds an academic post or leads a research programme. Territory. Humans, capability and judgement.
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. Murgia was the Financial Times's first AI editor and reports what these systems do to actual people.
Not the booking for. Journalism, and the unit is one person's life. Strategy and technical briefs ask for something else.
Authority rests on. has written a substantive book, reports on the field. Territory. Governance, ethics and accountability.
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. The product is the altitude, not the institution, so board and policy rooms are pitched wrong.
Authority rests on. has written a substantive book, built or ran an AI company, lab or function. Territory. Enterprise adoption and transformation.
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. Human readiness is the subject. Technical and frontier briefs go elsewhere.
Authority rests on. has written a substantive book, holds an academic post or leads a research programme. Territory. Humans, capability and judgement.
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. A clear-eyed practical read from somebody who has built, taught and funded across the whole field.
Not the booking for. Builder-optimistic by disposition, and seldom free. Philosophical or risk-framed briefs will not suit.
Authority rests on. has written a substantive book, holds an academic post or leads a research programme, built or ran an AI company, lab or function. Territory. Frontier AI and the science.
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. AI at population scale, and what digital public infrastructure makes possible in emerging markets.
Not the booking for. A country is the unit of analysis, which is several orders of magnitude above individual capability or team practice.
Authority rests on. has written a substantive book, built or ran an AI company, lab or function, has held a government, regulatory or international role. Territory. Economics, jobs and labour markets.
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 what the field genuinely knows.
Not the booking for. Education and research are the frame, so business and workforce briefs sit awkwardly.
Authority rests on. has written a substantive book, holds an academic post or leads a research programme, built or ran an AI company, lab or function. Territory. Frontier AI and the science.
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. AI research and safety framed around human benefit, from inside the European research community.
Not the booking for. Scientific and public-interest in vantage point. Commercial adoption is not the brief for her.
Authority rests on. holds an academic post or leads a research programme, has held a government, regulatory or international role. Territory. Governance, ethics and accountability.
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. Philosophical in register and deliberately sceptical. Adoption guidance and evidence reviews are not on offer.
Authority rests on. has written a substantive book. Territory. AI trajectory, futures and risk.
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 already have seen.
Not the booking for. Deliberately accessible, which a technical or research audience will find slight.
Authority rests on. has written a substantive book, built or ran an AI company, lab or function. Territory. Enterprise adoption and transformation.
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. Robotics and AI from the person running one of the field's largest laboratories.
Not the booking for. Workforce and strategy briefs are the wrong ask, and her diary is the harder problem.
Authority rests on. has written a substantive book, holds an academic post or leads a research programme, built or ran an AI company, lab or function. Territory. Frontier AI and the science.
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. He wrote the textbook everybody learned from, and Human Compatible sets out why steerability is the hard part.
Not the booking for. How to build systems that stay steerable. Adoption, culture and capability belong to other people here.
Authority rests on. has written a substantive book, holds an academic post or leads a research programme. Territory. AI trajectory, futures and risk.
Author of Deepfakes. Generative AI and synthetic media.
Best for. Generative AI, synthetic media, and what they do to trust and information. Strongest with audiences worried about what they can still believe.
Not the booking for. Workforce, skills and labour economics are not her subject.
Authority rests on. has written a substantive book, reports on the field. Territory. AI trajectory, futures and risk.
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. Deep learning explained by one of the people who built it, alongside how brains actually learn.
Not the booking for. The science is the subject, which leaves organisational and commercial questions untouched.
Authority rests on. has written a substantive book, holds an academic post or leads a research programme. Territory. Frontier AI and 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. Consciousness and machine minds, thought about carefully, with neither mysticism nor dismissal.
Not the booking for. The questions are philosophical and unresolved, so a practical adoption brief will feel unanswered.
Authority rests on. has written a substantive book, holds an academic post or leads a research programme. Territory. Frontier AI and the science.
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. Comic in register and deliberately small-scale. Board and strategy rooms want a different weight.
Authority rests on. has written a substantive book, holds an academic post or leads a research programme. Territory. Frontier AI and the science.
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. Trusted AI made practical, from a business school rather than a computer science department.
Not the booking for. Executive education is the register, which research and frontier briefs will find light.
Authority rests on. has written a substantive book, holds an academic post or leads a research programme, built or ran an AI company, lab or function. Territory. Enterprise adoption and transformation.
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, in Norwegian, by the author of the country's best-selling book on it.
Not the booking for. Explanation is the strength rather than implementation, so an organisational change brief misses.
Authority rests on. has written a substantive book, holds an academic post or leads a research programme. Territory. Frontier AI and the science.
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. Very few people running a frontier lab will argue in public that containment is the problem. Suleyman does.
Not the booking for. He runs Microsoft AI. Almost every booking fails on availability before anything else.
Authority rests on. has written a substantive book, built or ran an AI company, lab or function. Territory. AI trajectory, futures and risk.
Economist at Oxford; author of A World Without Work. The economics of AI and work.
Best for. Policy, professional-services and public-sector audiences who want the economics of work done properly. The professions are unusually well covered.
Not the booking for. An operational audience looking for what to do on Monday will not get it.
Authority rests on. has written a substantive book, holds an academic post or leads a research programme. Territory. Economics, jobs and labour markets.
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. A physicist rather than a futurist on what happens if this keeps going.
Not the booking for. Decades are the horizon and that is deliberate. Teams wanting near- term guidance should look elsewhere.
Authority rests on. has written a substantive book, holds an academic post or leads a research programme. Territory. AI trajectory, futures and risk.
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. The philosophical case made rigorously, and a serious account of what these systems actually are.
Not the booking for. Philosophical by intent. Adoption guidance and metrics are not what she offers.
Authority rests on. has written a substantive book, holds an academic post or leads a research programme. Territory. Governance, ethics and accountability.
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 will be underfed.
Authority rests on. has written a substantive book, built or ran an AI company, lab or function. Territory. Enterprise adoption and transformation.
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. Ethics put plainly by a working AI scientist rather than by a commentator. Public-interest by instinct.
Not the booking for. Scientific and public-interest in register, which a commercial adoption brief pulls against.
Authority rests on. has written a substantive book, holds an academic post or leads a research programme. Territory. Governance, ethics and accountability.
Founder of the Future Today Institute. Strategic foresight.
Best for. Structured foresight and scenario work, for boards and strategy teams. Method rather than prediction, which is the useful distinction.
Not the booking for. Foresight works at longer range than an audience wanting near-term operational answers.
Authority rests on. has written a substantive book, built or ran an AI company, lab or function. Territory. AI trajectory, futures and risk.
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. Research behind the human-plus-machine argument, rather than the headline version of it.
Not the booking for. He is usually the research half of a pair, so a single-keynote brief does not suit.
Authority rests on. has written a substantive book, holds an academic post or leads a research programme. Territory. Enterprise adoption and transformation.
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. An honest account of what the field has and has not achieved. He includes the ideas that failed, which almost nobody bothers to do.
Not the booking for. The discipline itself is the subject. Organisational and workforce questions are somebody else's.
Authority rests on. has written a substantive book, holds an academic post or leads a research programme. Territory. Frontier AI and the science.
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. Inside China's research and industry establishment, rather than describing it from outside.
Not the booking for. Western workforce and culture briefs do not fit, and most commercial bookings founder on availability.
Authority rests on. holds an academic post or leads a research programme, built or ran an AI company, lab or function. Territory. Frontier AI and the science.
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. She built the lab that does exactly that.
Not the booking for. Accountability and regulation are the frame, not commercial adoption.
Authority rests on. has written a substantive book, holds an academic post or leads a research programme. Territory. Governance, ethics and accountability.
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