Dr Kate Barker is the world’s first Chief Futurist and is among the most sought-after AI keynote speakers for boards, governments and Fortune 500 audiences. A TIME100 AI Impact Award honouree and Chief Futurist at NEOM, she speaks from inside the rooms where AI strategy is actually being decided, and her keynotes carry the authority of advisory work spanning heads of state, sovereign programmes and more than one hundred Fortune 500 companies.
Her signature AI keynotes include The AI Performance Advantage, Agentic AI and the Accountability Gap, and When AI Joins the Executive Team, each grounded in doctoral research across six thousand executive leaders and in the diagnostic instruments set out in her book Hidden Power, publishing November 2026 with Amplify in association with Thinkers50.
Her research finds that 82% of leaders say AI has made decisions faster while only 54% believe it has made them better; her keynotes are built for that gap. The gap is visible first in the work itself, in the work-slop that carries the rhythm of finished thinking while handing the real thinking to whoever receives it. Over enough quarters it becomes visible in the thinkers, which is what AI brain rot names: measurable decline in the reasoning of a company’s most senior decision-makers. Audiences leave with a different question than they arrived with: not how fast to adopt AI, but which human judgements to keep, who owns the decisions the machine now shapes, and where their organisation’s advantage actually sits.
Building the systems is the part we understand. What happens to the people working alongside them is the part almost nobody has measured. Kate has, and her work on where machine output improves performance and where it quietly degrades it is the most practical treatment of that question I have come across.
World Economic Forum, Davos · World Government Summit, Dubai · PIF Leadership Forum, Riyadh · UN Global Futures Forum · Bloomberg New Economy Forum · Fortune Global Forum
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Boards typically look for a speaker with genuine advisory standing rather than commentary alone. Dr Kate Barker is the world’s first Chief Futurist, holds a TIME100 AI Impact Award, and advises heads of state, boards and global chief executives, which is why her AI keynotes are booked by governments, sovereign institutions and Fortune 500 companies.
Her AI keynotes cover AI-ready leadership, agentic AI and accountability, the effect of AI on executive judgement, and how boards govern AI-enabled transformation. Each is available as a mainstage keynote, a board retreat or a fireside conversation.
Enquiries go through the speaking intake form on this page or to Charlie Reid at [email protected], with fees and availability on request.
Twelve weeks minimum lead time. Eighty bookings a year. Every enquiry is read personally.