Speakers worth watching across seven lanes: job search, entrepreneurship, personal branding, inclusive hiring, disability and accessibility, AI, and tech ethics. Use their topic framing as a model for your own — notice how each one names an audience and a takeaway, not just a subject.
Ethics in AI & Tech
Cognitive scientist; founder of the AI Accountability Lab at Trinity College Dublin
Speaking topics
- Auditing training datasets
- AI accountability
Coach’s note: Her dataset audits are the empirical backbone under a lot of otherwise abstract argument about training data.
Personal Branding & Career Growth
Organizational Psychologist, Wharton Professor
Speaking topics
- Original thinking at work
- Rethinking how we work
AI & Technology
Lead Product Designer for Agentic Experiences at Docusign
Speaking topics
- Beyond AI Slop: A Product Builder's Workflow for Shipping Useful Agentic Experiences
Coach’s note: The most practical speaker on this list for anyone building with AI tools: his "taste.md" idea is about writing your judgment down so the tool can follow it.
Ethics in AI & Tech
Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study; architect of the Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights
Speaking topics
- AI policy and civil rights
- Science, technology and society
Coach’s note: Start with the Blueprint itself — it is short, free and the clearest statement of what rights-based AI policy would actually require.
AI & Technology
Former Tinder Latin America CEO and former L'Oréal Brazil Chief Digital Officer, author of "Between You and AI," helping organizations across Latin America and Europe navigate AI adoption.
Speaking topics
- Digital transformation for leaders
- Human skills in an AI-first company
AI & Technology
VP of Engineering and Deputy CTO at Affinidi
Speaking topics
- AI Systems Are Missing a Trust Layer: How to Build Reliable AI in Production
Coach’s note: Her framing is useful if you work anywhere near compliance: she treats trust as something you engineer into a system, not something you claim in marketing copy.
Ethics in AI & Tech
Professor of Computer Science at Princeton; co-author of AI Snake Oil
Speaking topics
- Telling working AI from overselling
- Predictive systems and their limits
Coach’s note: The best antidote on this page to marketing claims. He is precise about which criticisms are fair and which are not.
AI & Technology
Technology Director, Core Engineering at Wells Fargo
Speaking topics
- Governance by Design: Building Auditable Lakehouse Architectures in Regulated Industries
Coach’s note: Worth hearing if you want to know what "auditable" actually means to a bank — the constraints he works under are the ones most AI demos quietly ignore.
Disability & Accessibility
DEIA Consultant, Speaker, LinkedIn Top Voice
Speaking topics
- Disability inclusion at work
- Inclusive leadership
Ethics in AI & Tech
Mathematician; author of Weapons of Math Destruction; founder of ORCAA
Speaking topics
- Auditing algorithms
- Accountability for scoring systems
Coach’s note: Read her for the practical question nobody asks often enough: who gets to appeal the score, and to whom.
Entrepreneurship & Small Business
Buying and building small businesses, explained in plain language
Speaking topics
- Buying small businesses
- Cash-flow-first entrepreneurship
AI & Technology
Former Google engineering leader who translates innovation from leading companies into practical, team-level AI application.
Speaking topics
- AI adoption for teams
- Decision-making and innovation
Disability & Accessibility
Author, Disability Rights Activist
Speaking topics
- Disability etiquette and allyship
- Telling your own story
AI & Technology
Bestselling author and digital transformation speaker focused on the behaviors and mindsets that separate people who advance with AI from those left behind.
Speaking topics
- Digital leadership
- Ethical use of technology
AI & Technology
Founder and CEO of AI Leadership and author of the #1 bestseller "The AI-Driven Leader," which emphasizes strategic partnership over technical skill.
Speaking topics
- AI-driven decision making for executives
- Thinking like a CEO
Disability & Accessibility
Disability Rights Lawyer, Author
Speaking topics
- Disability justice and inclusive design
- Accessibility as innovation
Ethics in AI & Tech
Professor at Cornell Tech; originator of contextual integrity
Speaking topics
- Privacy as contextual integrity
- Data use and norms
Coach’s note: The idea to take from her: consent to share data in one setting is not consent to use it in another. That single point settles a lot of AI arguments.
Ethics in AI & Tech
Researcher on AI auditing and accountability
Speaking topics
- Auditing AI systems
- AI accountability in practice
Coach’s note: Read her if you want to understand why "we ran an audit" is not the same as "we fixed it".
Ethics in AI & Tech
Founder, Algorithmic Justice League
Speaking topics
- Algorithmic bias and AI accountability
- Who audits the algorithms
AI & Technology
Senior Manager and Engineering Lead, Software Engineering at Capital One
Speaking topics
- Squeezing the Token: A Lean Framework for LLM Cost and Prompt Optimization
Coach’s note: The clearest writer of the group on a problem everyone hits second: your AI feature works, and then the bill arrives.
AI & Technology
Data Science Lead, Ads Business and Marketing at Google
Speaking topics
- From Model Quality to User Value: A Measurement Framework for AI
Coach’s note: If you only take one idea from this conference, take hers: decide how you will measure value before you ship the model.
Ethics in AI & Tech
Chief Ethics Scientist at Hugging Face; lead author of Model Cards
Speaking topics
- Model documentation and transparency
Coach’s note: If you only take one habit from this lane, take documentation: say what a model was tested on and where it does worse.
AI & Technology
AIOps Engineer, AWS Support Engineering at Amazon Web Services
Speaking topics
- The Frugal Context Engineer
Coach’s note: She comes at AI from the support queue, which means she has seen how these systems actually fail rather than how they are meant to work.
AI & Technology
Chief Commercial Officer at Xoople
Speaking topics
- The Last Mile of AI Is Human
Coach’s note: The business-side counterweight to the engineering talks: her argument is that adoption, trust and relationships decide whether any of it earns money.
AI & Technology
Digital anthropologist and author of "Hustle and Float," examining how people actually adapt to technology through a cultural and human lens.
Speaking topics
- Digital anthropology and burnout culture
- How technology reshapes work
AI & Technology
Technology and AI security leader at U.S. Bank
Speaking topics
- Who Dunnit: AI Identity & Action Attribution
Coach’s note: Her question — who did the thing, the human or the agent? — is the one every organization will have to answer in writing before long.
Ethics in AI & Tech
Professor of African American Studies at Princeton; author of Race After Technology
Speaking topics
- Race and algorithmic systems
- Designing technology for justice
Coach’s note: Start here if you want the argument that bias is not a bug to be patched but a design outcome. Her writing is accessible and quotable without being shallow.
Ethics in AI & Tech
Founder and CEO of Humane Intelligence; former head of Twitter's ML ethics team
Speaking topics
- Red-teaming AI systems
- Public evaluation of models
Coach’s note: The most practical person here on actually testing a deployed model rather than debating it.
Disability & Accessibility
Disability Advocate, Speaker
Speaking topics
- Disability inclusion and vulnerability at work
- Resilience after injury
Ethics in AI & Tech
Professor at UCLA; author of Algorithms of Oppression
Speaking topics
- Search, bias and power
- Technology and racial justice
Coach’s note: The clearest available account of how advertising business models shape what you are shown. Useful background before you trust any AI search answer.
Ethics in AI & Tech
Baillie Gifford Chair in the Ethics of Data and AI, University of Edinburgh
Speaking topics
- AI and human character
- Ethics of data and AI
Coach’s note: The most genuinely philosophical voice in this lane, and a useful counterweight to both hype and doom framings.
AI & Technology
Economist — Chief Economist at the Global Electronics Association and founder of the Avrio Institute, formerly Chief Economist of the Consumer Technology Association — who translates tech trends into business strategy.
Speaking topics
- Economic outlook and tech trends
- What AI means for your industry
AI & Technology
Innovation and disruption speaker known for industry-specific AI demonstrations that help non-technical audiences understand change.
Speaking topics
- Disruption strategy for traditional businesses
- Practical AI experiments
AI & Technology
Former Chief AI, Data, and Analytics Officer at Estée Lauder, Sony Music, and Royal Caribbean; speaks on real-world operational AI adoption.
Speaking topics
- Enterprise AI strategy
- Data leadership in practice
AI & Technology
Data Platform Engineering Lead at Target
Speaking topics
- Building AI-Ready Data Platforms: Architecture Patterns for Analytics, RAG, and AI Agents
Coach’s note: The unglamorous prerequisite talk. Most failed AI projects are really failed data platform projects.
AI & Technology
Former Google, GoPro, and Roku executive delivering "AI for All," a keynote built specifically for non-technical audiences.
Speaking topics
- AI for business teams
- Translating tech trends into action
AI & Technology
Fortune 50 executive turned AI super-user and author of "RE-CODED: Upgrade Your Business DNA with AI," focused on practical AI adoption for small business and franchise owners.
Speaking topics
- AI adoption for small business
- Scaling a service business
Ethics in AI & Tech
Co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology; writes and speaks on technology's impact on attention and society.
Speaking topics
- ai ethics
- ai ethics
- ethics
- humane technology
- person to follow
- thought leader
- tristan harris
Coach’s note: A leading voice on humane technology and AI's societal effects.
AI & Technology
Executive Director, Data Science at JPMorganChase
Speaking topics
- Evaluation Driven Development for Multi Agent Enterprise AI Platform
Coach’s note: Evaluation-driven development is the enterprise version of writing tests first — slower to start, much cheaper than finding out in production.
Ethics in AI & Tech
Political scientist; author of Automating Inequality
Speaking topics
- Automated decision-making in public services
Coach’s note: The best reporting on where automated decisions land hardest, and the least abstract book on this list.
AI & Technology
Former Head of Go-to-Market at OpenAI, now Executive-in-Residence at UVA McIntire; focuses on grounded, outcomes-first AI keynotes.
Speaking topics
- The future of work with AI
- AI literacy for organizations
