What a leadership keynote in the age of AI is booked to do
This booking goes to a room that is already split, between the people who think the job of leading has changed and the people who think only the tooling has. The 10 below cover judgment and decision quality, trust in systems nobody can fully inspect, the economics of fast-moving technology, what happens to how talent gets developed, and how a leadership team decides what to keep human. Most of them hold a research or operating post alongside the speaking, which is unusual in a category this new.
Speaker details below are drawn from each speaker’s own published materials and publicly available sources, as of October 2026.
1. Erica Dhawan – What Stays Human As The Work Speeds Up
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 a leadership audience working in the age of AI, Dhawan’s material covers what becomes scarce as execution gets cheap, the original thinking, judgment and discernment a leader still has to supply, and the slide she calls cognitive surrender, when a team hands those over along with the tasks. 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: executive leadership meetings, annual company conferences, and leadership development programs
2. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic – Judging People When Machines Help Decide
Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic is a professor of business psychology at University College London and at Columbia University, and he is Chief Innovation Officer at ManpowerGroup. He wrote I, Human and Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders?
For a leadership audience working in the age of AI, Chamorro-Premuzic’s material covers what automation does to the way organizations assess people, and the human traits he argues get harder to find once more of the work is handled for us.
Best for: talent and HR conferences, executive leadership meetings, and leadership development programs
3. Mike Walsh – Running A Company On Algorithms
Mike Walsh runs the advisory firm Tomorrow as its chief executive and wrote The Algorithmic Leader and Futuretainment. He spends much of the year researching how companies in different markets are rebuilding themselves around data.
For a leadership audience working in the age of AI, Walsh’s material covers the decisions a leader now designs a system to make, and what is left on the leader’s own desk once that is done.
Best for: annual conferences, strategy offsites, and technology leadership summits
4. Rachel Botsman – Trust When A Machine Is In The Loop
Rachel Botsman is a trust researcher who lectures at Oxford University’s Saïd Business School, and she wrote Who Can You Trust? and What’s Mine Is Yours. Her work traces how trust moved from institutions to platforms and now to automated systems.
For a leadership audience working in the age of AI, Botsman’s material covers what has to be true before a team will act on an output it cannot fully inspect, and how fast that trust disappears once it breaks.
Best for: executive offsites, risk and governance forums, and leadership conferences
5. Azeem Azhar – Leading Through Fast-Moving Technology
Azeem Azhar writes Exponential View, a newsletter and podcast on technology and its effects on business and society, and he wrote The Exponential Age. He advises companies and governments on how quickly a technology reshapes an industry around it.
For a leadership audience working in the age of AI, Azhar’s material covers the distance between how fast a technology improves and how slowly an organization changes to meet it.
Best for: board strategy sessions, long-range planning offsites, and industry conferences
6. Paul Daugherty – Human And Machine On The Same Task
Paul Daugherty is Accenture’s chief technology officer and co-wrote Human + Machine and Radically Human. His material draws on the firm’s work across a large number of client deployments.
For a leadership audience working in the age of AI, Daugherty’s material covers which jobs get redesigned around a model, and what a company has to fix in its own processes before any of it holds.
Best for: technology summits, operations leadership meetings, and enterprise strategy events
7. Cassie Kozyrkov – Deciding What To Ask Before Anything Gets Built
Cassie Kozyrkov founded the decision intelligence discipline at Google and served as the company’s chief decision scientist. She now advises organizations and teaches on how decisions get made with data.
For a leadership audience working in the age of AI, Kozyrkov’s material covers the work that happens before a model is built, including who owns the decision and what evidence would be enough to change it.
Best for: data and analytics conferences, executive education programs, and leadership summits
8. Sinan Aral – What Large-Scale Research Shows
Sinan Aral is the David Austin Professor of Management at MIT and directs the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy. He wrote The Hype Machine, which draws on two decades of research into digital and social networks.
For a leadership audience working in the age of AI, Aral’s material covers what the large studies show about how information travels through an organization, and why the result so rarely matches the intuition.
Best for: academic and industry conferences, executive education programs, and strategy meetings
9. Rasmus Hougaard – Attention And Judgment Under Load
Rasmus Hougaard founded Potential Project, a leadership research and development firm that works with organizations in dozens of countries, and he co-wrote The Mind of the Leader and Compassionate Leadership. The firm’s conclusions come from its own surveys of leaders and the people who report to them.
For a leadership audience working in the age of AI, Hougaard’s material covers the effect on a leader’s attention as the volume of input climbs, and the practices he argues protect the quality of a decision.
Best for: leadership development programs, management offsites, and culture and wellbeing events
10. Jeremy Utley – Where The Ideas Still Come From
Jeremy Utley teaches at Stanford’s d.school and co-wrote Ideaflow with Perry Klebahn. He now works with organizations on how people and AI tools generate ideas together.
For a leadership audience working in the age of AI, Utley’s material covers how a team uses a model as a thinking partner, and what separates a question worth asking it from a lazy one.
Best for: innovation offsites, product and engineering all-hands, and leadership workshops
Frequently asked questions
From this list, who is the #1 pick?
For a leadership keynote in the age of AI, 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 these speakers charge?
Fees in this category sit higher than general leadership speaking, because the material has to be rewritten often enough to stay current. A half-day working session on top of the keynote raises it again. Travel and room size both count. Almost nobody publishes a rate, so the ask has to be made directly.
Should we book the keynote or an executive working session?
The keynote settles an argument a company is already having in its hallways and gives everyone the same starting point. The working session puts 15 or 20 senior people in a room to decide what the company will and will not hand to a model. Running the keynote first tends to make the second conversation shorter.
How far in advance should we book?
Six to nine months is normal for this list, and the better-known names go further out than that. Worth building in a request to refresh the talk close to the date, because a deck written eight months earlier will show its age in this category.