Dr Kate Barker is ranked the world’s No.1 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. 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.