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Daniel Strode
Daniel Strode helps organisations navigate AI transformation without losing their human core. An adjunct professor at IE University and author of four books, he serves clients including ABB, NielsenIQ, and AECOM as a leading AI keynote speaker and leadership culture expert.
Daniel Strode is an author, leadership strategist, and AI expert who helps organisations reshape culture and leadership as technology transforms the way people work and make decisions.
As an adjunct professor at IE University Business School in Madrid, Daniel combines academic insight with practical leadership experience. He led the global culture transformation at Santander, supporting 220,000 employees across 32 countries through its shift to a digital banking model. He is the author of four books, including The Quiet Reckoning and The Culture Advantage.
Daniel's work focuses on the gap between strategy and behaviour, showing organisations why transformation programmes often fail and how leaders can create lasting change. Drawing on experience advising executive teams and delivering programmes worldwide, he helps leaders respond to AI by redesigning work, strengthening trust, developing capability, and building cultures that support innovation. His signature framework, The Quiet Reckoning, identifies five shifts that AI is forcing on every leader and every HR function, whether they notice or not.
Audiences leave with a clearer understanding of how AI is changing leadership and HR, practical tools for embedding culture into business strategy, and simple ways to improve decision-making, innovation, and organisational performance. Daniel equips leaders with approaches they can apply immediately within complex organisations.
For businesses preparing leaders, strengthening culture, or navigating AI-driven change, Daniel brings practical experience that translates directly into business action.
Topics, sessions and talks
Daniel Strode argues that AI isn't threatening HR but revealing what it was always meant to be. As automation absorbs administrative work, HR leaders must evolve across five dimensions: from process owners to work designers, service providers to strategic interpreters, policy enforcers to trust architects, training coordinators to developmental debt owners, and compliance functions to culture stewards. Attendees will leave with a clear map of these five shifts, language to articulate AI's impact on their roles, and one concrete next move.
Daniel Strode argues that AI doesn't change what leadership is; it reveals whether you were actually doing it. In this session, he walks through five critical shifts every leader must make, from Work Delegator to Work Designer, and from Tool Adopter to Culture Steward. The work that used to fill the day is disappearing, and what remains is the work only you can do. Attendees will leave with a personal diagnostic across all five shifts and a clearer sense of where their leadership attention belongs right now.
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frequently asked questions
Something we've not covered here?
Daniel Strode structures his sessions around a five-shift diagnostic framework drawn from his book The Quiet Reckoning, which maps the transitions AI forces on leaders and HR functions — such as from Work Delegator to Work Designer and from Policy Enforcer to Trust Architect. Attendees receive a personal diagnostic tool to assess their position across all five shifts and identify one concrete next action.
Daniel Strode speaks on AI's impact on leadership and HR, the five shifts redefining how leaders and HR functions must operate as automation absorbs administrative work, and the relationship between organisational culture and lasting transformation. He led the global culture transformation at Santander across 220,000 employees in 32 countries and is the author of four books, including The Quiet Reckoning, while serving as an adjunct professor at IE University Business School in Madrid.
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