The ranking of leadership in the age of AI keynote speakers

1. Erica Dhawan

Erica Dhawan holds degrees from Harvard University, MIT, and the Wharton School, and went back to teach collaboration and leadership as a research fellow. Her advisory work is with Fortune 500 executives, and she wrote Get Big Things Done, which set out her Connectional Intelligence™ framework, and Digital Body Language, which reached the Wall Street Journal bestseller list.

On this subject Erica Dhawan is the strongest name here. She was studying how people lead and work alongside one another well before the AI framing arrived, so her keynotes cover judgment, collaboration and original thinking as the part of the job tooling has not resolved. Global Gurus lists her in its top 20 management experts, and Thinkers50 has named her among the top 50 management thinkers. Each booking starts from a conversation about what the group is dealing with.

Best fit: leadership summits, company-wide meetings, and association main stages

2. David De Cremer

David De Cremer is a behavioral scientist who led Northeastern University's D'Amore-McKim School of Business as its Dunton Family Dean. He wrote Leadership by Algorithm and The AI-Savvy Leader, both of which examine what happens to management authority once machines are producing the recommendations.

His work addresses where responsibility sits after a system has produced an answer, and what a manager is still accountable for once that answer is on the table. Because he comes from behavioral science, the sessions deal with how people actually defer to a machine and how quickly they stop checking it. For a leadership audience he covers the governance questions that arrive with adoption, including which decisions a company should decline to automate at all. The material fits organizations partway into a rollout and still arguing about who signs off on what.

Best fit: executive committee sessions, board strategy days, and technology governance forums

3. Karim Lakhani

Karim Lakhani teaches at Harvard Business School, where he also chairs the Harvard Business Analytics Program as its founding head. He co-wrote Competing in the Age of AI with Marco Iansiti, which argues that the operating model is what holds most companies back.

He covers what has to change structurally before any of this produces results at scale, and why organizations built around human bottlenecks struggle to absorb it. His earlier research on open competitions and outside contributors adds a second line of argument about where a company should expect its best answers to come from. For a leadership audience the material is about the architecture of the firm itself, from how decisions flow to where the data sits. It suits teams who have run pilots and want to know why the results stopped there.

Best fit: strategy offsites, senior leadership programs, and industry conferences

4. Josh Linkner

Josh Linkner spent his operating career founding technology businesses and now divides his time between Platypus Labs, where he is chairman, and Muditā Venture Partners, an early-stage fund he co-founded alongside his brother Ethan. Four books carry his name, among them Disciplined Dreaming™, and he has twice taken EY's Entrepreneur of The Year award.

For a leadership audience he works on how an organization keeps producing original ideas while the tools underneath it keep changing, and what a leader does once people have stopped offering them. His vantage point comes from running businesses through more than one technology transition, and from backing young companies building in this space today. The session is built to carry a large mixed room, which fits a company-wide meeting better than a closed executive session.

Best fit: company-wide meetings, leadership conferences, and innovation summits

5. Rasmus Hougaard

Rasmus Hougaard runs Potential Project, a firm he founded that delivers leadership development inside large global organizations. He co-wrote Compassionate Leadership and More Human with Jacqueline Carter, both published by Harvard Business Review Press, the second on what AI does to the human side of leading.

His argument is that automating the administrative half of a manager's job hands back time for the half only a person can do, and that most leaders quietly spend it on something else. For a leadership audience he covers awareness, wisdom and compassion as working skills with measurement behind them, drawn from assessments his firm has run inside large companies. The content suits organizations rolling out AI tools and worried about what happens to their middle managers in the process.

Best fit: leadership development cohorts, HR and people summits, and executive retreats

6. Thomas Davenport

Thomas Davenport is a distinguished professor at Babson College and a visiting scholar at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy. He has written or co-written more than 20 books, among them Competing on Analytics, Only Humans Need Apply and All-in on AI.

He has tracked enterprise adoption of analytics and AI for three decades, which gives him an unusually long view of what gets promised at the start of a cycle and what gets delivered by the end of it. For a leadership audience he covers where companies are actually seeing returns, how roles change around the technology, and the distance between a working proof of concept and anything in production. It fits audiences who want the evidence base before the exhortation, and it suits a briefing format as readily as a stage.

Best fit: technology leadership forums, executive briefings, and data and analytics conferences

7. Rachel Botsman

Rachel Botsman is a trust fellow at Oxford University's Saïd Business School, where she designed the first course on the subject. She wrote Who Can You Trust? and What's Mine Is Yours, and she writes the newsletter Rethink on how confidence moves between people and systems.

Her subject is how trust transfers from people and institutions onto technology, and what happens when the thing being relied on is a machine nobody in the room can fully explain. For a leadership audience she covers why employees and customers extend or withdraw confidence, how fast it disappears when something fails, and how an organization rebuilds it afterward. The material suits organizations asking their own people to depend on a system they did not choose, and it lands with customer-facing teams as readily as with internal ones.

Best fit: leadership summits, industry conferences, and customer and brand events

8. Paul Daugherty

Paul Daugherty is Accenture's chief technology officer and group chief executive for technology, and he sits on the board of Accenture Global Solutions. He co-wrote Human + Machine and Radically Human with James Wilson, both of which deal with how work gets redivided between people and systems once a deployment is actually underway.

He covers the practical side of large-scale rollout, including the roles that get reshaped, the ones that disappear, and the new ones that appear around the technology. The material draws on implementations across many industries at once, which gives it a breadth that a speaker describing a single company cannot match. For a leadership audience it fits executives planning a rollout and trying to anticipate the workforce consequences early, while there is still time to do something about them.

Best fit: technology summits, executive leadership days, and transformation kickoffs

9. Erik Brynjolfsson

Erik Brynjolfsson is a professor at Stanford University and the director of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab. He co-wrote The Second Machine Age and Machine, Platform, Crowd with Andrew McAfee, and his research measures what automation does to productivity, wages and employment.

He covers the economics underneath the current moment, including why measured productivity lags adoption by years and what that same delay looked like in earlier technology shifts. For a leadership audience he brings numbers to claims that are usually made without any, which is useful in a room that has heard a great deal of assertion. The material suits main stage audiences and policy-adjacent events that want the macro picture before anyone turns to org design, and it gives a mixed room a shared set of facts to argue from.

Best fit: main stage conferences, policy forums, and economic outlook events

10. Reid Hoffman

Reid Hoffman co-founded LinkedIn and is a partner at Greylock, and he sat on the board of OpenAI in its earlier years. He co-wrote Blitzscaling and The Startup of You, published Impromptu on working alongside large language models, and hosts the podcast Masters of Scale.

He covers how companies grow through a technology transition and what founders and executives consistently misjudge about the pace of one. For a leadership audience the draw is a practitioner who has invested in and built inside the industry producing these tools, which puts him somewhere quite separate from the researchers elsewhere on this list. The material works for flagship events and for audiences that mix founders with corporate executives, where the conversation tends to run wider than any single company's situation.

Best fit: flagship conferences, founder and executive audiences, and innovation events