Belinda Parmar

Belinda Parmar OBE helps leaders understand what only humans can do in an age when artificial intelligence is absorbing more of the cognitive work organisations once relied on people to perform. A qualified barrister, World Economic Forum Young Global Leader, and OBE recipient, Belinda is currently writing a leadership playbook for Penguin Random House on practical empathy in the AI era. As CEO of The Empathy Business and a Non-Executive Director for the Ministry of Defence, Belinda has spent two decades turning empathy into a commercial advantage for clients including Lloyds Bank, Barclays, Lexus, Toyota, and AGL. Her Global Empathy Index, published in the Harvard Business Review, links empathy rankings directly to earnings, productivity, and retention. Belinda's results are backed by the numbers. An Empathy and Empowerment Programme she delivered, training over 200 Fraud & Complaints advisers, produced a 9% uplift in net promoter rates and a 7.5% reduction in call handling times. Her work with AGL cut customer complaints by 20.9% and saved $1.7 million. In 2026, She won the New Possible British HR Award for Change Management Initiative of the Year — recognition of the culture transformation work she has implemented in her role as Empathy-in-Residence at Barclays.  Audiences leave Belinda's sessions with a clear framework for making the leadership calls AI can't, a method for measuring empathy as a performance metric, and the confidence to lead the transition to human-AI collaboration rather than be led by it. Book Belinda when your organisation needs one of the world's leading authorities on empathy, technology, and business performance, to help drive measurable business change.