The Next Human Era
Human potential, creativity and agency unleashed as intelligent machines redefine the boundaries of performance, possibility and progress.
The dominant story about artificial intelligence is a story about subtraction: what will be automated, displaced, replaced. It is the wrong story, and it is producing timid strategy. The more useful question is what becomes possible for people when the routine cognitive load lifts.
This keynote makes the optimistic case with evidence behind it. As machine intelligence becomes abundant, the scarce and valuable human capacities change shape: originality, taste, the ability to frame a problem nobody has framed yet, the relationship capital that moves a decision through an institution. Organisations that invest deliberately in those capacities are seeing performance the automation narrative does not predict.
Dr Kate Barker examines what leaders must protect, what they should redesign and what they can now amplify. She is direct about the conditions required: work redesigned around human contribution rather than around the tool, managers who can develop capability rather than police output, and an honest account of what the organisation is asking people to become.
Especially suited to chief executives, chief people officers, transformation leaders and culture events, and to conferences seeking an evidence-based counterweight to the displacement narrative.
What the room leaves with
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The human capacities that appreciate in value as machine intelligence becomes abundant.
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Why work redesigned around the tool underperforms work redesigned around human contribution.
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What to protect, what to rebuild and what to amplify, in that sequence.
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The leadership behaviours that decide whether people grow into the change or brace against it.
What struck me about Kate was her ability to make a familiar conversation feel entirely different. She takes ideas an audience thinks it understands and finds the question nobody has asked yet. She is dynamic, deeply insightful and compelling on stage, but it is the originality of her thinking that stays with you. You leave seeing possibilities, and consequences, that were not obvious when you walked in.
- Global conferences and leadership summits
- Government and future-of-work forums
- Enterprise audiences seeking a human-centred view of AI
- Keynote address
- Keynote with live audience Q&A
- Fireside chat or moderated panel
- Delivered in person or virtually, worldwide
Book Dr Kate to speak.
Twelve weeks minimum lead time. Each engagement is shaped to the room.