What an AI strategy keynote is booked to do
An AI strategy keynote dates faster than anything else on a conference calendar, so most of these speakers rewrite the talk between bookings. The 10 below cover adoption inside large organizations, governance and risk, what the research shows about the technology at work, the economics of building with it, and how roles get redrawn around it. Several have deployed these systems inside companies, and the rest study how organizations absorb them.
Speaker details below are drawn from each speaker’s own published materials and publicly available sources, as of October 2026.
1. Erica Dhawan – Leadership And Teamwork In The AI Era
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 strategy audience, Dhawan’s material covers what happens to judgment when a team leans on a tool for its thinking, and how a group keeps deciding well when the work is split between people and software. 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: Best for: executive leadership summits, company-wide strategy meetings, and board and operating team offsites
2. Sol Rashidi – Enterprise AI Delivery
Sol Rashidi has held chief data and analytics roles at Estee Lauder, Merck and Royal Caribbean, and was among the first executives appointed to a chief AI officer post. She wrote Your AI Survival Guide, on getting these projects through a large organization.
For an AI strategy audience, Rashidi’s material covers what it takes to move a project from pilot into production.
Best for: Best for: enterprise technology conferences, chief data officer summits, and executive strategy meetings
3. Zack Kass – Applied AI And The Shape Of A Job
Zack Kass led go to market at OpenAI, working with the enterprises that were first to deploy its models. He now advises companies on how the technology changes what a role consists of.
For an AI strategy audience, Kass’s material covers which tasks move first and what is left behind in the job.
Best for: Best for: company-wide meetings, industry conferences, and leadership development events
4. Kay Firth-Butterfield – AI Governance And Risk
Kay Firth-Butterfield is a barrister who served as the World Economic Forum’s first head of artificial intelligence and machine learning. She has spent more than a decade on the legal and governance questions that sit around these systems.
For an AI strategy audience, Firth-Butterfield’s material covers the governance a board is expected to have in place.
Best for: Best for: board meetings, risk and compliance conferences, and policy summits
5. Mike Walsh – Designing The Algorithmic Organization
Mike Walsh is the founder of Tomorrow, a research practice on organizational design, and wrote The Algorithmic Leader. He studies how companies restructure themselves once software is making part of the decision.
For an AI strategy audience, Walsh’s material covers how an operating model is redrawn around automated decisions.
Best for: Best for: executive offsites, operating model reviews, and leadership conferences
6. Rana el Kaliouby – Human Centered AI And Product
Rana el Kaliouby co-founded Affectiva out of the MIT Media Lab, building software that reads human emotion, and later served as deputy chief executive of Smart Eye. She wrote Girl Decoded and now invests through her own venture fund.
For an AI strategy audience, el Kaliouby’s material covers what it takes to build a product people will accept.
Best for: Best for: product leadership meetings, technology conferences, and innovation summits
7. Pascal Bornet – Automation And Process Redesign
Pascal Bornet spent two decades leading automation practices at McKinsey and EY and wrote Intelligent Automation and Irreplaceable. He works on where the technology fits in an existing process rather than on the technology itself.
For an AI strategy audience, Bornet’s material covers the process work that has to happen around a deployment.
Best for: Best for: operations conferences, shared services summits, and transformation program meetings
8. Ethan Mollick – Field Research On These Tools At Work
Ethan Mollick teaches entrepreneurship at Wharton and co-directs its Generative AI Labs, running field experiments on how people perform with these tools. His book Co-Intelligence came out of that work, as does the One Useful Thing newsletter.
For an AI strategy audience, Mollick’s material covers what controlled studies show rather than what vendors claim.
Best for: Best for: executive education sessions, leadership conferences, and all-hands meetings
9. Andrew Ng – Building And Teaching The Technology
Andrew Ng started Google Brain, served as chief scientist at Baidu, and co-founded Coursera, DeepLearning.AI and Landing AI. He also runs AI Fund, a venture studio that starts companies around the technology, and teaches at Stanford.
For an AI strategy audience, Ng’s material covers the gap between a working model and a system a company can run.
Best for: Best for: technology conferences, engineering leadership meetings, and partner and investor events
10. Kai-Fu Lee – Capital And Capability Across Markets
Kai-Fu Lee runs Sinovation Ventures and earlier built Microsoft Research Asia and ran Google China. His books AI Superpowers and AI 2041 set out how the technology develops differently depending on the market it grows in.
For an AI strategy audience, Lee’s material covers why capability and capital concentrate where they do.
Best for: Best for: international business conferences, investor summits, and global strategy meetings
Frequently asked questions
From this list, who is the #1 pick?
For an AI strategy 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 strategy keynote speakers charge?
Fees vary by speaker profile and by engagement format. Research and practitioner backgrounds price differently, adding a workshop raises the figure, and audience size and travel both factor in. Most quote by event rather than publishing a rate.
Should a leadership team book a keynote or a workshop?
A keynote settles what the technology does and does not do, which is usually the argument blocking a decision. A workshop sits a smaller group in front of the tools and ends with something built. Several of these speakers pair the two on a single visit.
How far in advance should we book?
This is the one category where booking too early carries a cost, because a talk written nine months out will need rewriting before it is delivered. Four to six months is a reasonable window, with a content check in the final weeks.