Future of Work Keynote Speakers
AI, organizational redesign, and the operators rewriting what work looks like for the next ten years.
Future of Work has moved from a breakout session to the central planning question every leadership team now faces: how to hire, raise productivity, adopt AI, and decide what the company itself should look like by 2030. Boards want a defensible thesis, operators want a Monday-morning playbook, and employees want to know their job still exists. The speakers below sit inside that conversation rather than around it, drawn from the operating ranks of Netflix, Amazon, LinkedIn, and OpenAI alongside the workforce researchers and decision scientists who study what actually changes. Together they give a meeting planner a full arc, from frontier AI strategy to leadership, culture, and the disruption playbooks that turn uncertainty into a clear set of decisions.
AI & the Reshaped Workforce
Frontier AI voices like Zack Kass, Cassie Kozyrkov, and Jerry Kaplan, built for boards and operating teams deciding which AI investments to fund, kill, or absorb.
Zack Kass
Former Head of Go-To-Market at OpenAI. The only speaker on this list who shipped ChatGPT to the enterprise from the inside, and who can tell a board exactly which of their AI deployment assumptions are right, wrong, or already obsolete.
Cassie Kozyrkov
Google's First Chief Decision Scientist. Trained 18,000 Googlers in how to make calls with data. Gives operating teams a framework for deciding which AI investments to fund, kill, or absorb into existing workflow.
Jerry Kaplan
Fifty years in AI research and invention. Wrote the canonical books on humans-as-a-service economies and what jobs survive automation. The room's long-view voice when the AI conversation gets hype-driven.
Nell Watson
Futurist focused on machine ethics and the governance of intelligent systems. Speaks to boards and product teams that need to deploy AI without tripping the regulatory or reputational wires that have already taken down peers.
Erik Qualman
Author of the Socialnomics series. Wall Street Journal contributor on AI and digital leadership. Strong fit for global all-hands and HR leadership summits framing day-one AI adoption.
Pascal Finette
Lead Faculty at Singularity University. Coaches executive teams from Google, Audi, and BMW on exponential technology strategy. The clearest translator of frontier AI into the concrete moves a Fortune 500 has to make this quarter.
Patrick Schwerdtfeger
Business futurist. Strategic Disruption framework is required reading in MBA classrooms. Pairs pattern-recognition with the this-is-what-to-do-Monday energy a Fortune 500 strategy offsite needs when AI keeps moving the target.
Alison McCauley
Author of Unblocked: How to Lead Your Team Through the Web3 and AI Revolutions. Sorts the acceleration curve into existential vs noise for ops, finance, and HR leaders who have to decide what to deploy this quarter.
Clara Durodié
Fintech strategist and board-level advisor on applied AI in financial services. Author of The Boards of the Future. Built for bank, insurer, and asset-manager boards working through AI adoption with a compliance overlay.
Dr. Geeta Nayyar
Former Chief Medical Officer at Salesforce. Translates AI in healthcare for hospital systems, payers, employers, and consumer health brands. FT and Forbes thought-leadership credentials behind the operator perspective.
Daniel Kraft, M.D.
Stanford and Harvard-trained physician-scientist. Founding faculty chair of Singularity University's medicine track. The keynoter on AI in healthcare, exponential medicine, and what the hospital of 2040 actually looks like.
Leadership for the Next Decade
Culture and leadership strategists including Heather McGowan, Keith Ferrazzi, and Steve Cadigan, for HR summits and leadership offsites redesigning how teams work.
Heather McGowan
Author of The Adaptation Advantage. Maps how the half-life of skills is collapsing and what learning orgs, HR leaders, and CHRO teams must do to stay ahead. Harvard Business Review contributor on workforce reskilling.
Keith Ferrazzi
Two #1 NYT bestsellers (Never Eat Alone, Never Lead Alone). Built the co-elevation operating model now used inside Fortune 100 transformation programs to get hybrid teams to actually function as one unit, not eight Zoom squares.
Steve Cadigan
First Head of Talent at LinkedIn. Scaled the company from 56 to 4,200 employees through IPO. Now advises founders and executive teams on the operating discipline of culture during hypergrowth.
Erica Dhawan
Author of Digital Body Language. Authority on collaboration intelligence for distributed teams. Translates 21st-century teamwork research into the everyday behaviors that determine which hybrid workforces ship and which stall.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel
Chief Strategy Officer at Culture Partners. #1 USA Today bestselling author. Brings the data showing exactly how culture moves financial results, plus the change-management chops to actually shift the dial inside an existing org.
Lindsey Pollak
NYT bestselling author of The Remix and Recalculating. U.S. authority on managing five generations in the modern workforce. Built for HR and operating audiences navigating the Boomer-to-Gen-Z handoff in their own org chart.
Eric Termuende
Future of Work researcher who studies the practices that separate Fortune's Best Places to Work from also-rans. Workshop-ready, concrete, and grounded in a decade of field interviews with high-trust operating teams.
Susan Salgado
Co-author with Danny Meyer on Setting the Table. NYU Stern MBA instructor on hospitality, culture, and leadership. Adapts the unreasonable-hospitality operating model into an employee-experience frame that scales past restaurants.
Robert Safian
Former Fast Company Editor-in-Chief. Host of the Rapid Response podcast. Has interviewed the CEOs and founders reshaping work over the last decade. Distills what they actually believe, not what their press releases say.
MJ DePalma
Microsoft's Global Director of Cultural & Inclusive Business Impact. Speaks from inside one of the largest enterprise inclusion programs in the world. Practical, evidence-backed, built for leadership teams past the slogan stage.
Tyronne Stoudemire
SVP, Global DEI at Hyatt Hotels. Sitting executive running a global program with measurable hire, retention, and customer-experience outcomes. Strong fit for hospitality, retail, and large-employer audiences.
Mallory Brown
Documentary filmmaker. Founder of the World Clothes Line project. Brings a story-driven angle on dignity and meaning at work. Strong fit as opener or closer at workforce or HR all-hands.
Innovation & Disruption Playbooks
Operators who built the models others copy, from Marc Randolph and Danny Meyer to John Rossman, for kickoffs and offsites that want a proven disruption playbook.
Marc Randolph
Co-founder of Netflix. Author of That Will Never Work. Tells the story of how the original operating model and culture got built, idea through global category-defining company, without the post-hoc revisionism most founder talks lean on.
John Rossman
Author of The Amazon Way. Former early Amazon executive. The clearest distillation of how working-backwards, six-page memos, and customer-obsession practices actually function at scale, and what stays useful when other companies adopt them.
Jennifer Fleiss
Co-founder of Rent the Runway. Reframes the consumer-retail playbook around access vs ownership, subscription economics, and operational moats. In active conversation with the biggest CPG and retail strategy teams in the country.
Will Guidara
Former owner of Eleven Madison Park. Author of Unreasonable Hospitality. Translates the EMP operating philosophy into reps and routines any service-driven business, from health systems to airlines, can install on its own team.
Danny Meyer
Founder of Shake Shack and Union Square Hospitality Group. Author of the canonical Setting the Table. The original architect of the hospitality-first business model that Will Guidara and dozens of Fortune-500 service orgs have since built on.
Jay Baer
Researcher. Seven books on customer loyalty and experience, including Hug Your Haters and The Time to Win. Original quantitative research paired with stage craft that drops conversion-relevant takeaways every two minutes.
Crystal Washington
Author of One Tech Action. Practical futurist for non-technical operators. Reframes the future-of-work conversation as a sequence of specific Monday-morning moves a workforce-planning team can actually run.
Ben Casnocha
Co-author of The Start-Up of You with Reid Hoffman. Reframes career strategy as entrepreneurship: assets, allies, risk. Fits sales kickoffs and employee summits where the org wants to invest in its workforce as operators, not seat-fillers.
Gregory Offner
Author of The Tip Jar Culture. Original research on why employees still give discretionary effort and which managers earn it. Built for all-hands and sales kickoffs in service-heavy orgs.
Debra Jasper
CEO of Mindset Digital. Trains Fortune 500 teams on how to communicate across a workforce with 8-second attention spans and 14 platforms in rotation. Demo-driven, immediately useful for comms, sales, and enablement leads.
These are not pundits reading the headlines back to your audience. They are former operators who built the systems everyone else studies, from Marc Randolph at Netflix and John Rossman at Amazon to Zack Kass, who shipped ChatGPT to the enterprise from inside OpenAI, paired with researchers like Cassie Kozyrkov and culture strategists like Heather McGowan and Steve Cadigan. The range means you can match the speaker to the room.
That flexibility covers the full slate of corporate formats: a board strategy offsite, a global all-hands, an HR or leadership summit, a sales kickoff, or a closing keynote that sends people home with concrete next moves. Booking through Rave gets you vetted talent, straight answers on fit and fee, and a team that has placed these speakers for meeting planners many times over.
Call (310) 614-8653 or email [email protected] to check availability and fees.
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