Brazil is building at scale and deciding at speed. Dr Kate Barker works with the judgement that has to hold while both are happening.
Brazil is one of the few large economies adopting artificial intelligence across manufacturing, banking, agribusiness, energy, mining and retail at the same time. That breadth is an advantage, and it is also the difficulty: the same technology arrives in a trading floor, a processing plant and a distribution network in the same quarter, and each of them reaches for it for a different reason. Dr Kate Barker speaks to Brazilian leadership audiences about what happens to human judgement when intelligent systems begin to supply the answer rather than the input, and about how a leadership team keeps its ability to challenge what it is being told.
That work extends to the future of work itself: what changes for the people inside the organisation, what happens to the judgement of the person who used to make the call, and what a leadership team owes them while it is happening.
She is the world’s first Chief Futurist, a role held at NEOM, and a global executive advisor to heads of state, boards and chief executives. Her doctorate examined what generative artificial intelligence does to organisational trust, drawing on evidence from six thousand executive leaders. That research produced a finding that Brazilian executives recognise immediately: eighty-two per cent of leaders say artificial intelligence has made their decisions faster, and only fifty-four per cent believe it has made them better. Speed has arrived. Confidence has not.
Brazilian organisations carry a further complication. Many are national in scale but answer to international investors, foreign parent companies and more than one regulator, so a decision has to be defensible in two languages and under two sets of expectations. Dr Barker’s work is built for exactly that position. It gives a leadership team a way to say who exercised judgement, on what basis and with what authority, in terms that survive translation to a board in São Paulo and a shareholder in New York.
She is available across Brazil for conference keynotes, executive briefings, board sessions and closed leadership conversations, speaking in English. Simultaneous interpretation into Portuguese can be arranged where an event requires it. She works with three decades of practice behind her, including previous roles as Vice President at SAP Asia Pacific and Partner in PwC’s Asia consulting practice, and has delivered more than five hundred keynotes in thirty countries.
Where advantage actually comes from once every competitor has the same tools. For a Brazilian audience running large operations against international benchmarks, this keynote separates the capability that can be bought from the capability that has to be built.
The future of work, treated as a question about people rather than tools. What artificial intelligence does to the people inside an organisation, and what it does to their willingness to raise a problem. Directly relevant where adoption is moving faster than the workforce conversation around it.
A long view for organisations making twenty-year commitments in industry, energy, infrastructure and food production, where the decisions taken now will be judged by a generation that is not yet in the room.
The question Brazilian leaders raise most often is not whether to adopt. It is whether the organisation can still tell when the machine is wrong. That is a question about human judgement, evidence and authority rather than about technology, and it is the subject of Dr Barker’s work.
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Dr Kate Barker is the world’s first Chief Futurist, a role held at NEOM, and a global executive advisor to heads of state, boards and chief executives. She is Adjunct Professor at Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI), UAE, and holds a TIME100 AI Impact Award. She speaks to Brazilian audiences on artificial intelligence, human judgement and business performance.
Dr Barker speaks in English. Simultaneous interpretation into Portuguese can be arranged, and the material is written so the argument holds in translation. For board and closed sessions, most Brazilian groups work in English by preference.
São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Brasília, Belo Horizonte and elsewhere, as a conference keynote, an executive briefing, a board session or a closed leadership conversation. Twelve weeks is the usual lead time.
Twelve weeks minimum lead time. Eighty bookings a year. Every enquiry is read personally.