Hidden Power

Hidden Power is the featured author keynote, drawn from the book published on 1 November 2026 by Amplify in association with Thinkers50.

It begins in the rooms where the decisions actually get made — sovereign boards, cabinet offices, executive committees — and it makes a single argument. Artificial intelligence is producing two plausible futures at once: dread, displacement and the quiet surrender of human authority, or a period of prosperity and human possibility without precedent. Nothing in the technology decides which one arrives. Leadership choices do.

Dr Kate Barker sets out what she calls the hidden power: judgement, cognitive agency and relationship capital, the human advantages that decide who wins the AI era and that almost no organisation is measuring. The keynote moves between the evidence — doctoral research across six thousand executive leaders — and the stories from inside the most consequential rooms in the world, and it ends where the book ends, on the fight for what we value most.

Available with signed copies for delegates. Especially suited to mainstage keynotes, annual conferences, leadership summits and author events.