Biography

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Forbes heralded Brian Solis as “one of the more creative and brilliant business minds of our time.” He was recently named a “top futurist speaker,” by ReadWrite. ZDNet called him “one of the 21st-century business world’s leading thinkers.”

Brian Solis helps audiences understand the evolving, complex landscape of digital trends and how they impact our work, markets, and business over time. Whether it’s generative AI, AR/VR or and spatial computing, web3, the metaverse, IoT, digital twins, or quantum computing, Brian humanizes each wave of emergent disruption to help audiences understand trends and see themselves productively shaping the future. He helps shift people’s mindsets from being overwhelmed, confused, or intimidated to moving forward with curiosity, excitement, and imagination.

Digital Anthropologist: Brian Solis is one of the industry’s first digital anthropologists who helped define the practice and humanized the trends. He observes how technology changes people’s behavior as leaders, employees, or customers and understand their aspirations, their values, how they make decisions, and how they want to work.

Through this research, Brian Solis helps audiences empathize with different generations (Gen-Y, Z, Alpha) and understand how technology creates a cross-generational superset of people with similar behaviors, interests, and aspirations. Brian coined these important groups as Generation-Connected and Generation-Novel.

ServiceNow: Currently, Brian Solis serves as the Head of Global Innovation at ServiceNow. In his role, he sets the strategic direction and programming for ServiceNow’s Innovation and Executive Briefing Centers in Silicon Valley, New York, London, Paris, Sydney, and Singapore. Additionally, Brian designs and delivers engagements with customers to advise on digital and business innovation strategies. He writes for leading publications to help executives and customers understand technology and market trends and inspire business model innovation.

United Nations: Brian Solis serves as a special adviser to the UN global innovation team. He develops workshops and keynotes that explore emergent trends and future scenarios, scenario strategies, skills development, and culture and leadership.

Salesforce: As the leader of Global Innovation at Salesforce, Brian Solis gained a reputation as the “CxO Whisperer” because of his ability to translate shifting technology and market trends into actionable strategies. He also has a deep understanding of the challenges and opportunities facing companies and helps leaders think differently about current priorities and investments to future proof their organizations. Brian also partnered with leading brands to develop innovation pilots in service, L&D, and commerce, including applications that featured digital humans, 3D/immersive shopping and e-commerce powered by augmented reality.

Brian is personable approachable and engaging. And as one event organizer recently put it, “Brian has a special gift to engage people and help everyone believe they can be part of change.” The Conference Board said it this way, “Brian is the futurist we all need now.”

He’s an eight-time, bestselling, and award-winning author. Brian Solis has published more than 60 research reports on the future of business, work, digital transformation and innovation across industries such as retail, healthcare, financial services, insurance, and public sector. He’s currently working on his ninth book due out later in 2023.

His blog, BrianSolis.com, is among the world’s leading business online resources to his 800,000 followers. Brian Solis also contributes to FastCompany, ZDNet, Forbes, Techonomy, CIO, and Singularity University.

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AI is Eating the World: How to Reimagine Your Business in an AI-First World

Since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, generative AI has become the world's fast-growing technology and the subject of much debate regarding the threats and opportunities that come along with it. The truth is that no leader has experienced a technology like genAI before, one that performs tasks as good as or better than humans. What’s clear, we have now catapulted toward a post digital transformation era. AI has forever changed the trajectory of business evolution, putting ‘business as usual’ in the rearview mirror. Leaders now face an entirely new set of prospects and challenges that will test their creativity, resilience, and vision.

In this rousing keynote, world-renowned futurist and best-selling author Brian Solis will share why this is the moment for leaders to reimagine their organizations for an entirely new future. He will explore why automation is no longer the goal, but instead the norm, and why augmentation will be the key to differentiation and how leaders can forge the mind shift required to unlock a new future as an AI-first exponential growth business.

In this session, Brian will explore...
- What post digital transformation and AI-first eras of business evolution look like and why.
- How to build a foundation for AI-First models and mindsets.
- How to reassess decision-making and processes with an AI-first perspective.
- How to reframe our mindset for a world we do not yet know by starting with different questions starting with #WWAID (What would AI do?).

The Four Stages of AI Maturity: The Path to Becoming an Exponential Business

What does leadership and business model innovation look like in an AI-first world? The answer is ‘exponential.’

Generative AI is affecting the trajectory of all businesses, separating early adopters and high performers from the rest. Brian is on the front lines with leading businesses and has developed a maturity model to accelerate AI-led growth.

Beyond digitizing, automating, and optimizing existing processes, taking out costs, and scaling efficiencies, Brian will share how innovative companies are augmenting work itself. By touring the AI Maturity Model, he’ll demonstrate how to reimagine leadership, supercharge performance, and unlock exponential outcomes and potential.

In this inspiring session, Brian will...
- Reveal how companies fall into the automation trap and how they may miss opportunities for innovation and growth.
- Introduce how businesses are prioritizing digitization and automation initiatives powered by AI.
- Break down how AI unlocks the ability to do things better and also enable work that couldn’t be done before for iterative, new, and exponential value creation.
- Explore the 4 stages of AI maturity to shift mindsets from one of automation to one of automation + augmentation to create an exponential business.
Review new roles and models to support AI maturity.

The Race to 2030: Building a Culture of Innovation, to Thrive Against Digital Darwinism

What can we learn from some of the colossal mistakes we have seen from some of the biggest companies in the world? How can you prevent your company from making the same mistakes?

Digital Darwinism is reshaping markets and behaviors, and its only accelerating. With AI, automation, spatial computing, robotics, web3, metaverse, blockchain, and whatever comes next, the time is now to proact against disruption, before it has a chance to disrupt.

Legacy management, rigid processes, fixed mindsets, and risk-averse cultures may be common across every organization, but combined, they make evolving against Digital Darwinism onerous and sluggish. The key is to understand the future to build toward it today, to reimagine yesterday’s business and operational models for tomorrow’s world, right now.

In this exciting and just-in-time session, Brian will help you ensure your business remains not only relevant, but innovative and future-proofed against Digital Darwinism.

Audiences will learn:
- How incumbent companies are making mistakes and what you can do to avoid their fates.
- How to break free from “management” to unlock next-generation leadership.
- How to create a culture of innovation, to identify, lead, and empower business mavericks and change-makers within your organization.
- The role people play in innovation, new skills needed, and new models for collaboration and experimentation.
- How to play a role in leading change and how to embrace creativity and curiosity to show up differently every day.

Hey, Mr. Futurist, WTF (What’s The Future) of…My Industry?

It’s not enough to be a digital-first company anymore. Digital transformation without business model innovation is still business as usual. Innovation cycles are only accelerating, making the next decade among the most pioneering for organizations that embrace the future and disruptive for those that hold on to the past.

As one of the world’s leading digital and business futurists, Brian studies how the evolution of technology, business, and society evolve and reshape markets. He then helps leaders understand the connection between the present and emerging trends to take control of their destiny.

In this custom keynote presentation, Brian will spend time with the team to understand your event theme and objectives, industry challenges/opportunities, and audience. He’ll then share a personalized vision of the future to help your organization understand and embrace the dynamics, important trends, and behavior shifts impacting your industry.

Areas of focus can include:
- Consumer/employee trends | Emergent technology trends.
- Best practices from leaders and innovative companies outside your industry.
- Industries: Business, Retail, Financial Services/Insurance, Automotive, Healthcare, Travel and Hospitality, Restaurant and QSR

Disciplines:
- CX/Customer Service | Marketing/Brand | Sales | HR/EX

The Rise of ‘Generation-C’: Learning the ‘6th Love Language’ of Your Connected and Conscious Customers (and Employees)

You’ve heard of Millennials (GEN-Y) and Centennials (GEN-Z), now meet GEN-C, the cross-generational market of more informed, discerning, and conscious customers.

While some pay attention to traditional demographics such as generations and age groups, Brian focuses on psychographic connections between shared and evolving behaviors, interests, and aspirations. This is the difference between digital transformation and relationship transformation. Digital, social, mobile, and now AI represent the biggest catalysts driving irreversible shifts in consumer and employee behaviors, expectations, preferences, and values. This cycle only continues with new every wave of technological disruption.

As one of the world’s pioneers in digital anthropology, Brian Solis will introduce a multi-generational (majority) set of employees and customers and demystify how they make decisions, what matters to them, and what erodes their affinity and loyalty.

More importantly, Brian will share how these digital-centered behaviors represent their “love language” to unlock digital empathy. This secret reveals how to deliver more meaningful products, services, and experience that give any brand the unique ability to connect the soul of the organization to the soul of the customer.

In this fun and inspiring session, Brian will...
- Introduce Generation-C (aka digital narcissists aka accidental narcissists) and their behaviors, characteristics, and values.
- Humanize the new customer to inspire CX, service, marketing, operational, and product innovation.
- Reveal the “6th” love language” and how digital empathy sets the stage for “relationship transformation.”

Ignite Moments! How to Design and Deliver Innovative Brand Experiences in Moments that Matter

X marks the spot for a new formula to deliver best-in-class customer experiences: BX + CX + UX + EX = X.

What does ‘great’ look like to today’s customer? How has their digital lifestyle or relationships with industry-leading brands changed their standards for what great customer engagement and services look like?

As ‘the godfather of CX’ and the author of one of the most transformative books on CX innovation, Brian will take audiences on a journey of what it means to become a ‘customer company’ in an evolving hybrid world, one where digital and AI are blurring the lines between physical and online experiences.

It all starts by purposefully becoming a ‘customer company’, putting people at the heart of the business.

In this exciting and captivating keynote, Brian will transform traditional customer touch points into ‘ignite moments.’ He’ll demonstrate how ignite moments deliver personalization, ‘warmth’, and connected experiences that people love, remember, and share. Brian will also connect the dots between meaningful experiences and increased conversation rates and spend, brand loyalty, higher NPS and CLV scores, and advocacy.

Audiences will discover:
- The true meaning of experience and how great experiences connect to people’s hearts and minds. •
- How to reimagine touchpoints as ignite moments, to create enchanting, personal experiences that customers will cherish and seek out.
- The Disney and Pixar way to rethink customer journeys as visual story boards.
- The new formula of becoming a customer company: BX + CX + UX + EX = X.

Note: This topic pairs well with “Meet Generation-Connected, Your New Customer.”

The Wheel of Disruption: Exploring Disruptive Tech Trends (AI, Web3, Spatial Computing, Metaverse, Tokens) and Innovative Business Opportunities

Every great innovation changes behavior. In 2014, Brian Solis introduced his first “Wheel of Disruption,” which tracked disruptive technologies and explained their potential impact on markets and society. In this bespoke session, Brian will develop a customized “Wheel of Disruption” for your event to explore the disruptive trends and potential impact scenarios to help audiences humanize trends and inspire them to dream bigger.

In this eye-opening and motivating session, Brian will…
- Work with executives to understand the state and future potential of the company.
- Explore the trends that matter to the organization and how they’ll help achieve business goals and success.
- Explore challenges and opportunities and how to overcome them.
- Help you learn how to track, make sense of, and prioritize emerging trends and technologies.

Think Like a Startup: Embracing a Founder’s Mindset to Innovate the Silicon Valley Way

When it comes to innovation, it’s not uncommon to hear the phrase, “think like a startup.” Every year, executives visit Silicon Valley to visit leading tech companies and to meet leading entrepreneurs. Brian brings that experience, and more, directly to you.

Brian has helped launch over 1,000 startups, advised every major enterprise software company, and continues to work with Fortune 500 businesses on digital and business transformation strategies. KGO called him a “Silicon Valley staple” and “one of the top people to know in Silicon Valley” by Huffpost.”

In this is a very special session, Brian will teach you what it means to “think like a startup” by exploring the mindsets of founders and investors. He’ll prepare a bespoke talk or fireside chat, sharing the lessons, and sometimes the craziest of stories, to inspire the audience with the truest lessons of Silicon Valley (and the Silicon Valley’s around the world).

The list of companies and founders Brian has worked with is storied It includes Airbnb, Uber, Tripit, Twitch, Google, Amazon, Meta, and has collaborated with Jack Dorsey (Twitter), Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Loic Le Meur, Mark Cuban, Guy Kawasaki, Justin Kan, Kyle Vogt, Tim Ferriss, Gary Vaynerchuk, and many, many others. Brian has also advised investors and guided celebrities on their startup investments, including Oprah, Shaq, Adrien Grenier, Katie Couric and Ashton Kutcher.

Topics include...
- The founder’s mindset and bold innovation.
- The gravitas of Silicon Valley that drives innovation and disruption.
- The differing roles between iteration and innovation.
- Why failure matters and how to incentivize failing up.
- Defining moments that represent instrumental pivots toward growth.
- How to see and create future markets vs. serving existing markets.
- The Investor’s Mindset: calculating ROI in the absence of existing formulations.

Testimonials

On behalf of the entire Executive Board and the organizing committee, I want to extend our heartfelt gratitude for your outstanding contribution to the Executive Board Leadership Forum. Your presentation was not only informative but also inspiring, offering valuable perspectives on approach towards transformation and change. It is evident that your deep knowledge and passion for this subject matter greatly resonated with our audience. The feedback we received from our participants has been overwhelmingly positive, with many expressing their appreciation for your thought-provoking session. Your dedication to advancing leadership excellence is commendable.
– Subrato Basu, The Executive Board

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