AI Speakers You Need To Book Now

Jeff Kirchick — AI in sales

Jeff Kirchick is the author of Authentic Selling, which won the 2021 Independent Press Award for Sales & Marketing and predicted AI's impact on sales before the shift actually happened. As a sales leader, he guided Y Combinator startup Next Caller through its acquisition by Pindrop Security and has been part of three company exits and one IPO. His talks help sales teams work out where automation genuinely helps and where a human still needs to close the deal, built around discovery techniques for uncovering what a customer actually needs.

Kate Ancketill — AI in retail

Kate Ancketill is CEO and founder of trends consultancy GDR, where she has spent more than three decades advising brands including Microsoft, Google and Tesco on where retail is heading next. She was named among BizTech Magazine's top 30 IT influencers and won Best Speaker on AI and Technology at the London Speaker Awards. The National Retail Federation has booked her trends keynote for ten years running, translating AI and consumer behaviour shifts into strategies retailers can act on immediately.

David Awad — AI in law

David Awad is an investor, attorney and software engineer who founded Awad Law P.C., specialising in AI and software compliance. Alongside his legal work, he has held CTO roles at Tumblr and Ecoverse and made investments in deep-tech ventures including SpaceX. A member of the IEEE's Artificial Intelligence Policy Committee, he speaks to the legal, technical and commercial sides of AI risk in the same session, a combination most law-focused speakers can't offer.

Clara Shih — AI in financial services & CRM

Clara Shih founded Hearsay Systems, AI-powered client engagement software built for financial advisors, and grew it to $70 million in revenue before it was acquired. She went on to lead Salesforce's Agentforce business, and now serves as Senior Advisor and Founder of Business AI at Meta. She is the author of The Facebook Era and a former Starbucks board member, and her talks focus on putting AI to work in customer-facing roles without losing the human relationship underneath it.

Daria Rudnik — AI in HR

A former Chief People Officer, Daria Rudnik now works as an executive leadership coach with organisations including Raiffeisen Bank and Owens & Minor, helping leaders build teams that hold together through disruption. She is the author of CLICKING: A Team Building Strategy for Overloaded Leaders and co-author of The AI Revolution, and her keynotes focus on where AI genuinely strengthens a team's judgement and creativity, rather than just its headcount.

Mark Kelly — AI in recruitment

Mark Kelly is Chief Customer Officer at AI and data recruitment firm Alldus International, and founder of AI Ireland. His podcast has interviewed more than 700 executives from companies including Amazon, Microsoft and Google, giving him a wide view of how organisations are actually hiring for and structuring AI teams. His keynotes translate emerging AI trends into frameworks that leadership teams at any level can act on.

Manuel Maqueda — AI in sustainability

Manuel Maqueda teaches Applied Circular Economics at Harvard and co-founded the Plastic Pollution Coalition. He also co-founded Viento.ai, which uses machine learning to help communities anticipate and respond to climate disasters. His talks connect circular economy thinking with the places AI can genuinely support climate resilience, drawn from more than one hundred international speaking engagements for organisations including Google and NASA.

Cien Solon — AI in regulated industries

Cien Solon is the founder of an AI agent platform built for regulated industries, drawing on a background in fraud prevention and risk in financial services. A LinkedIn Top Voice in AI and a Techstars mentor, she has trained hundreds of non-technical professionals to build their own AI agents and advises clients including Zilch and Lowell on governance and guardrails, not just adoption.

Daniel Kraft MD — AI in healthcare

Daniel Kraft MD is a Stanford and Harvard-trained physician-scientist with more than 25 years across clinical medicine, research and entrepreneurship. He founded NextMed Health and chairs the XPRIZE Pandemic & Health Alliance, with research published in Nature and Science. His talks cover how AI, big data and robotics are moving medicine toward earlier detection and genuinely personalised care, drawn from a career that also includes NASA-published aerospace medicine research.

Interested in booking Daniel? Get in touch with the PepTalk team.