When the world’s top companies want to understand what’s next for their businesses and how they can create the next big breakthrough in their industries, they turn to world-renowned futurist Sheryl Connelly. Connelly is a global trends and consumer expert whose mastery at identifying what’s coming around the corner and the potential influences on customer attitudes and behavioral patterns that directly impact business strategy is unparalleled. From 1996-2023, she was a cornerstone presence on Ford Motor Company’s global trends and futuring team, working her way up the ranks at the automotive juggernaut and becoming the company’s chief futurist. Connelly draws upon her business foresight expertise and experiences at Ford to help organizations in any industry identify and analyze global consumer trends in order to lay the groundwork for long-term, future-focused planning and strategy across the entire company, and anticipate the ever-evolving needs and desires of the people they serve.

Regarded as the “CEO-Maker,” “DEI Professor,” and the “Cubicle to Corner Office Empress,” Dethra Giles is a workplace and career optimizer who advises organizations and individuals on how to chart their unique paths to success. She is a four-time TEDx speaker who has been named a “Top 100 HR Influencer” by Engagedly, and was selected by HR Gazette’s “HRchat” podcast as one of the “Top 22 Most Influential Figures in HR.” With clients including Kaiser Permanente, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), The Army Corp of Engineers, Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy, the National Basketball Association (NBA), and the Salvation Army, Giles shares a unique blend of advanced education and industry experience that has been described as “university-tested and industry-approved,” and can be implemented by organizations of any size, and across industries.

A passionate advocate for a more human way of working, Melissa Swift is a seasoned HR thought leader and consultant who serves as VP of workforce and organizational change acceleration at Capgemini Invent. Her work helping clients power their workforces for more innovative, higher-performing futures spans across industries and geographies and tackles issues ranging from attracting and retaining top talent to reshaping organizations for greater nimbleness and building futuristic capabilities among today’s employees. She leverages thoughtful data analytics, a humanist view, and a healthy dose of pragmatism to create extraordinary outcomes for organizations. She is the author of the book Work Here Now: Think Like a Human and Build a Powerhouse Workplace, which explores practical strategies to get to a more human future of work. Her research has been published in Harvard Business Review and The Wall Street Journal, and her insights have been quoted in Newsweek, The Washington Post, The Economist, Axios, and more. She has been featured as one of Twitter’s “20 Digital Transformation Leaders to Follow” and named a “Top Influencer on the Future of Work” by Onalytica.

Poppy Jamie is an entrepreneur, influencer, and rising star in the happiness, mental health, and mindfulness space. She is the founder of the mental wellbeing company and app Happy Not Perfect – a source to better brain health. A deeply personal project combining behavioral scientific research, inspiration from her mother, and real life-experience, she created Happy Not Perfect to inspire and empower people to take control of their mental health through products, services, and experiences. As organizations worldwide grapple with how to manage the growing mental health crisis, Poppy provides a clear path to overcoming uncertainty, fears of rejection, anxiety, and burnout to find peace with the past and create a happier, healthier future. She is also author of the anticipated book Happy Not Perfect.

Crystal Washington, CSP works with organizations that want to leverage technology to increase profits and productivity! As a technology strategist and certified futurist, Crystal takes complex social media, app, and web topics, and makes them easy to understand and accessible for everyday people. Crystal’s clients comprise Fortune 500 companies including Google, Microsoft, and GE and as a sought-after keynote speaker, she has entertained and educated audiences around the globe. She has appeared in numerous publications including Entrepreneur, Bloomberg Businessweek, and Forbes and is regularly called on by major television networks as a tech expert. Crystal is the author of the books One Tech Action and The Social Media Why.

Lindsey Pollak is a New York Times bestselling author and one of the world’s leading career and workplace experts. She was named to the 2020 Thinkers50 Radar List, which honors the top global management thinkers whose work is shaping the future of how organizations are managed and led. Lindsey’s next book is a response to the COVID crisis: "Recalculating: Navigate Your Career Through the Changing World of Work." Her other books include "The Remix: How to Lead and Succeed in the Multigenerational Workplace," "Becoming the Boss: New Rules for the Next Generation of Leaders," and "Getting from College to Career: Your Essential Guide to Succeeding in the Real World." Her audiences and consulting clients have included over 250 corporations, law firms, conferences and universities, including Citi, Estee Lauder, GE, JP Morgan, LinkedIn, PwC, Shearman & Sterling, Yale, Harvard, Wharton and Stanford. Often called a translator among generations, she provides a roadmap for the future of work, sharing her insights into how to navigate and thrive in the ever-changing world of work.

Renowned psychology expert and Stanford University professor Michele Gelfand is one of the leading researchers and writers on culture and the impact of culture on behavior. Gelfand uses field, experimental, computational and neuroscience methods to understand the evolution of culture and its multilevel consequences for human groups. Her work has been cited over 50,000 times and has been featured in the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Boston Globe, National Public Radio, Voice of America, Fox News, NBC News, ABC News, and The Economist, among other outlets. Most recently, she is the author of "Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire the World."

Erica Dhawan is the Founder & CEO of Contential and co-author of "Get Big Things Done." She is on a mission to advise organizations and leaders to accelerate the connectedness of your workforce, become masters of connectional intelligence, “spar” in order to reach your goals more quickly, and prepare your global workforce for the future. Through Dhawan's keynote speeches and interactive presentations, she’ll do just that.

Future-of-work strategist Heather E. McGowan helps leaders prepare their people and organizations for the post pandemic world. As a keynote speaker, Heather gives lucidity to complex topics through her research rich, graphic frameworks, and powerful metaphors. In 2017, LinkedIn ranked her as its #1 global voice for education and in 2020 McGowan was listed as one of the Top 50 Female Futurists in Forbes. NYT columnist Thomas Friedman describes her as “the oasis” when it comes to insights into the future of work. McGowan is the coauthor of The Adaptation Advantage (April 2020) and the Empathy Advantage (March 2023).

Jessica Kriegel (KREE-GL) is a workplace culture strategist. She is a Doctor of Leadership & Management and Fortune 100 Thought Leader. She is a dynamic speaker, consultant, Co-Active coach, and is author of Unfairly Labeled: How Your Workplace Can Benefit from Ditching Generational Stereotypes and upcoming book, The Culture Equation. For 15+ years, Jessica has been guiding global, national, Fortune 100 and other organizations on how to create intentional cultures that power your strategy and accelerate performance.

Authors of the best-selling book When Generations Collide, Lynne Lancaster and David Stillman provide a comical and intuitive perspective on recruiting and managing four generations. True to their own Boomer and Xer personalities, Lancaster and Stillman offer strategies for marketing and selling to customers of each generation.

When entrepreneur and former top brand executive Michelle Cordeiro Grant set out to start her own company, she did so with the mission to create a brand, experience, and community that empowers women. What followed was Lively, the ultra-successful activewear-inspired lingerie brand that she built into an industry leader and disruptor in less than 10 years. Introducing "Leisurée" to the world, Cordeiro Grant identified opportunities to turn the apparel market on its head and redefined approaches for leading an organization to success.