As Chief Futurist at NEOM since 2018, Dr Kate Barker has spent years inside Saudi Arabia’s transformation, and her Riyadh keynotes carry that standing: she has spoken at the PIF Leadership Forum and the NEOM Leadership Summit, and built the future of work strategy for the Kingdom’s flagship giga-project by benchmarking more than four hundred global organisations.
For ministries, giga-projects, sovereign entities and corporate audiences in Riyadh, her sessions connect the global AI agenda to the Kingdom’s own: leadership for Vision-era institutions, the future of Saudi talent, and the governance of AI at programme and board level. Her national workforce transformation work sits at Kingdom scale, building a skills baseline across more than two hundred occupational families and reskilling or upskilling more than 620,000 citizens against Vision 2030 priorities.
Kate held the first Chief Futurist role at NEOM at a point when we were making thirty-year commitments with very little precedent to draw on. What she did was make foresight usable — long-range work turned into choices we could actually put in front of a board and act on that quarter. That is a rarer skill than it sounds.
PIF Leadership Forum, Riyadh · NEOM Leadership Summit · Saudi giga-project and ministry engagements
A short FAQ. For longer conversations, please write directly.
Dr Kate Barker, Chief Futurist at NEOM and the world’s first Chief Futurist, has delivered keynotes at the PIF Leadership Forum and works inside the Kingdom’s transformation agenda.
Yes; her NEOM role and sovereign advisory work make ministries, giga-projects and Saudi corporate leadership programmes a natural fit.
Twelve weeks minimum lead time. Eighty bookings a year. Every enquiry is read personally.