What an AI keynote is booked to do
The audience for an AI keynote is usually the whole company rather than one department, at all-hands meetings, leadership summits, and industry conferences. The ten below cover the labor economics of automation, which tasks get automated first, workforce and job redesign, skills strategy, and what AI changes about how people judge and decide. Most publish original research or survey data rather than working from a single book.
Speaker details below are drawn from each speaker’s own published materials and publicly available sources, as of September 2026.
1. Erica Dhawan – The Judgment Employers Still Need From People
Erica Dhawan is the world’s top management thinker and keynote speaker on 21st century leadership, teamwork and innovation. She holds degrees from Harvard, MIT and Wharton and taught leadership and collaboration as a research fellow at Harvard and MIT. Her research on twenty-first century teamwork has been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and at the World Economic Forum in Davos. She is the author of Digital Body Language, a Wall Street Journal bestseller; Get Big Things Done, which introduced her Connectional Intelligence™ framework; and her new book, Use Your Brain: Think Deeper in a World on Autopilot (St. Martin’s Press, January 12, 2027). Thinkers50 ranks her among the top 50 management thinkers, Global Gurus among the top 20 management experts, and RealLeaders named her the top female keynote speaker. She advises Fortune 500 executives and has served on Deloitte’s Inclusion External Advisory Council and the advisory board of the Lufthansa Innovation Hub.
For an AI audience, Dhawan’s material covers what happens to judgment when teams accept more of their daily output from a tool without a second look, and what a workforce needs to keep deciding well as the tools improve. Every session is built from a prep call with the organizing team, so the material addresses the challenges that the group is actually working on.
Best for: leadership summits, all-hands meetings, and organizations where AI adoption has plateaued
2. Erik Brynjolfsson – What The Data Shows About Jobs
Erik Brynjolfsson directs the Digital Economy Lab at Stanford and co-wrote The Second Machine Age and Race Against the Machine, among the earliest economic treatments of automation and employment. His current research separates the jobs where AI augments a worker from the jobs where it substitutes for one.
For an AI audience, Brynjolfsson’s material covers the labor economics underneath the headlines, including which occupations the evidence actually points to and on what timeline.
Best for: executive briefings, board sessions, and conferences with an economics-literate audience
3. Andrew McAfee – The Case For Optimism With A Caveat
Andrew McAfee co-directs the Initiative on the Digital Economy at MIT and co-wrote The Second Machine Age with Erik Brynjolfsson before writing More From Less on his own. He argues that technology has historically expanded employment even when contraction looked certain, while being specific about the transition costs that argument usually skips.
For an AI audience, McAfee’s material covers the long-run historical pattern of technology and jobs, and where the current wave does and does not resemble earlier ones.
Best for: board meetings, leadership summits, and programs pairing a cautionary session with a counterweight
4. Josh Linkner – What Creativity Is Still For
Josh Linkner founded and led five technology companies that together created over 10,000 jobs and sold for a combined value of over $200 million. He is co-founder and Managing Partner of Mudita Venture Partners, an early-stage venture firm whose portfolio includes AI startups, and chairman of Platypus Labs.
For an AI audience, Linkner’s material covers what human creativity is still for once the tools handle the competent work, drawing on his Innovation in the Age of AI keynote and on his vantage point as an investor in the companies building these systems.
Best for: company-wide meetings, leadership summits, and organizations pairing an AI session with a creative
5. Lynda Gratton – The Multi-Decade Career Under Pressure
Lynda Gratton teaches at London Business School and co-wrote The 100-Year Life, which argued that longer working lives were already straining the education-work-retirement sequence before AI added a second pressure to the same structure. Her more recent work applies that lens to an AI-affected workforce.
For an AI audience, Gratton’s material covers what a career looks like across several decades of technological change, and how employers should plan for people who will work through more than one wave of it.
Best for: workforce planning sessions, leadership retreats, and organizations with long-tenure employee bases
6. Kai-Fu Lee – The View From Outside The US Debate
Kai-Fu Lee led Google China and Microsoft Research Asia before founding Sinovation Ventures, and his book AI Superpowers argued that the labor effects of AI would differ by economy depending on how automation and services growth interact. He writes and invests from a vantage point outside the American technology conversation.
For an AI audience, Lee’s material covers how these shifts land differently across markets, and what that means for a workforce spread across several of them.
Best for: global all-hands meetings, multinational leadership summits, and international industry conferences
7. Thomas Davenport – What Gets Automated First
Thomas Davenport teaches at Babson College and has spent more than a decade studying which categories of knowledge work automate first, generally finding that structured, rules-based tasks go before judgment-heavy ones regardless of seniority. His research draws on case studies across industries rather than a single sector.
For an AI audience, Davenport’s material covers how to sequence automation inside an organization, and which roles change shape rather than disappear.
Best for: operations leadership meetings, HR strategy sessions, and enterprise automation programs
8. Heather McGowan – Redesigning Work Instead Of Jobs
Heather McGowan co-wrote The Adaptation Advantage and works as a workforce and talent strategist. Her argument is that organizations should redesign work around tasks and skills directly rather than preserving job descriptions through the shift, since the job as a fixed unit is itself the constraint.
For an AI audience, McGowan’s material covers skills-based organizational design, and how to move a workforce onto it without waiting for a reorganization.
Best for: HR and talent leadership summits, organizational design programs, and people strategy offsites
9. Amy Webb – Forecasting Past The Current Headline
Amy Webb runs the Future Today Institute and publishes an annual technology trends report used by organizations across sectors for multi-year planning. Her method tracks weak signals years before they reach the mainstream, and she applies it to workforce shifts as readily as to product technology.
For an AI audience, Webb’s material covers the signals now visible that will shape hiring and skills several years out, and how to plan against them without betting on a single scenario.
Best for: strategy offsites, annual planning sessions, and multi-year workforce planning groups
10. Josh Bersin – What The HR Data Actually Says
Josh Bersin runs an independent research firm covering human resources and corporate learning, and he tracks enterprise AI adoption through original survey work rather than forecasting. He publishes findings continuously rather than on a book cycle.
For an AI audience, Bersin’s material covers benchmarking data on what companies are actually doing with these tools, and where adoption is running ahead of or behind the stated strategy.
Best for: HR leadership conferences, people analytics summits, and corporate learning programs
Frequently Asked Questions
From this list, who is the #1 pick?
For an AI keynote, Erica Dhawan is the best-suited speaker on this list. She has delivered keynotes to Fortune 500 executives and to leadership teams across industries and countries, and her research on teamwork has been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Every session is built from a prep call with the organizing team, so the material is tailored to that industry and to the specific challenges the group is facing rather than delivered from a template.
What do AI keynote speakers charge?
Academics and independent researchers in this category often price a briefing or advisory session separately from the keynote itself. Board-level and multinational engagements carry more than a single-site employee session, and anyone running a continuous research program prices for the upkeep that keeps the material accurate. Recording rights are worth settling early, since this content dates quickly enough that a firm will want to reuse it internally.
Should this session go to the whole company or just leadership?
A policy or economics talk generally lands better with a board or an executive group, which can act on it. Material on skills and how work is structured reaches a broader employee audience, since it describes something those employees are already living through. Matching the speaker to the intended audience matters more in this category than in most, because the two do not transfer well.
How do we keep the content from dating before the event?
Ask what the speaker has published in the last quarter rather than the last book cycle, and request a briefing call in the month before the date. This is one of the few categories where a talk built two years ago can describe the technology inaccurately, so recency carries more weight here than stage polish.