Jonathan Brill makes the future and AI actionable. Keynotes to help you shape your five-year future.
Jonathan Brill is an expert on strategic foresight and technology innovation. He writes, speaks and advises startups, the Fortune 50 and the Secret Service on how to create and take advantage of uncertainty. His warm style, compelling stories, and intellectual rigor inspire visionaries and open even the most hard-boiled executives to new ways of thinking and doing.
He bridges the gap between academic futurism and boardroom reality. He uses data and real-life experiences to help business leaders navigate uncertainty and win the next five years.
Harvard Business Review recently called Brill, “The world’s leading transformation architect” and is Forbes’ top ranked futurist. His visionary, yet pragmatic approach to the future is based on years as the Global Futurist at HP where he directed long-term strategy and planning.
He is the Senior Fellow at HBR’s China New Growth Institute and Board Advisor at Frost & Sullivan, one of the world’s largest market intelligence firms, with offices in 46 countries.
In his new book and keynote presentation, “AI and the Octopus Organization™,” Jonathan Brill argues that the gap between companies that embrace AI holistically and those that remain peripheral will be the gap between survival and extinction. For Brill, it’s time to rethink the traditional hierarchical model and envision an organization structured like an octopus: a central brain for strategy and oversight, and autonomous, responsive arms deeply aware of their environment.
He is the author of ”Rogue Waves, Future-Proof Your Business to Survive and Profit from Radical Change” (McGraw-Hill), the #2 selling economics book in China. The Economist called it, “A very important book for managers” and Adam Grant called it, “An actionable framework for driving change instead of being blindsided by it”. He has taught the techniques in it to over 27,000 executives, ranging from startups to the Fortune 500 to the United States Secret Service.
Inc. magazine called Brill “A Silicon Valley legend” because his innovation consultancies developed over 350 products and generated over $27B USD for clients like Samsung, Microsoft, Verizon, PepsiCo and the US government.
These projects have ranged from AI, search engines, and metaverse technologies to theme park rides and design of the US Pavilion at the 2015 World’s Fair (Expo Milano) to Taco Bell’s Gordita.
He is a frequent thought leader, speaker and contributor to HBR, TED, Global Peter Drucker Forum, SCMP, SXSW, J.P. Morgan, Singularity, Forbes, Korn Ferry, The Economist Global Business Report, Bloomberg, Sirius XM, Fast Company, The Project Management Institute, Brightline and Thinkers50. He has educated corporate leaders at Harvard and Stanford Universities.
He holds a degree in industrial design from Pratt Institute, spent years as a research consultant to the MIT Media Lab and in management training at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business.
