The Four Stages of AI Maturity: The Path to Becoming an Exponential Business

What does leadership and business model innovation look like in an AI-first world? The answer is ‘exponential.’

Generative AI is affecting the trajectory of all businesses, separating early adopters and high performers from the rest. Brian is on the front lines with leading businesses and has developed a maturity model to accelerate AI-led growth.

Beyond digitizing, automating, and optimizing existing processes, taking out costs, and scaling efficiencies, Brian will share how innovative companies are augmenting work itself. By touring the AI Maturity Model, he’ll demonstrate how to reimagine leadership, supercharge performance, and unlock exponential outcomes and potential.

In this inspiring session, Brian will...

• Reveal how companies fall into the automation trap and how they may miss opportunities for innovation and growth.
• Introduce how businesses are prioritizing digitization and automation initiatives powered by AI.
• Break-down how AI unlocks the ability to do things better and also enable work that couldn’t be done before for iterative, new, and exponential value creation.
• Explore the 4 stages of AI maturity to shift mindsets from one of automation to one of automation + augmentation to create an exponential business.
• Review new roles and models to support AI maturity.

The Race to 2030: Building a Culture of Innovation, to Thrive Against Digital Darwinism

What can we learn from some of the colossal mistakes we have seen from some of the biggest companies in the world? How can you prevent your company from making the same mistakes?

Digital Darwinism is reshaping markets and behaviors, and its only accelerating. With AI, automation, spatial computing, robotics, web3, metaverse, blockchain, and whatever comes next, the time is now to proact against disruption, before it has a chance to disrupt.

Legacy management, rigid processes, fixed mindsets, and risk-averse cultures may be common across every organization, but combined, they make evolving against Digital Darwinism onerous and sluggish. The key is to understand the future to build toward it today, to reimagine yesterday’s business and operational models for tomorrow’s world, right now.

In this exciting and just-in-time session, Brian will help you ensure your business remains not only relevant, but innovative and future-proofed against Digital Darwinism.

Audiences will learn:

• How incumbent companies are making mistakes and what you can do to avoid their fates.
• How to break free from “management” to unlock next-generation leadership.
• How to create a culture of innovation, to identify, lead, and empower business mavericks and change-makers within your organization.
• The role people play in innovation, new skills needed, and new models for collaboration and experimentation.
• How to play a role in leading change and how to embrace creativity and curiosity to show up differently every day.

Hey, Mr. Futurist, WTF (What’s The Future) of…My Industry?

It’s not enough to be a digital-first company anymore. Digital transformation without business model innovation is still business as usual. Innovation cycles are only accelerating, making the next decade among the most pioneering for organizations that embrace the future and disruptive for those that hold on to the past.

As one of the world’s leading digital and business futurists, Brian studies how the evolution of technology, business, and society evolve and reshape markets. He then helps leaders understand the connection between the present and emerging trends to take control of their destiny.

In this custom keynote presentation, Brian will spend time with the team to understand your event theme and objectives, industry challenges/opportunities, and audience. He’ll then share a personalized vision of the future to help your organization understand and embrace the dynamics, important trends, and behavior shifts impacting your industry.

Areas of focus can include:

• Consumer/employee trends | Emergent technology trends
• Best practices from leaders and innovative companies outside your industry
• Industries:
  • Business
  • Retail
  • Financial Services/Insurance
  • Healthcare
  • Automotive
  • Travel and Hospitality
  • Restaurant and QSR
• Disciplines:
  • CX/Customer Service
  • Marketing/Brand
  • Sales
  • HR/EX
  • IT

The Rise of ‘Generation-C’: Learning the ‘6th Love Language’ of Your Connected and Conscious Customers (and Employees)

You’ve heard of Millennials (GEN-Y) and Centennials (GEN-Z), now meet GEN-C, the cross-generational market of more informed, discerning, and conscious customers.

While some pay attention to traditional demographics such as generations and age groups, Brian focuses on psychographic connections between shared and evolving behaviors, interests, and aspirations. This is the difference between digital transformation and relationship transformation. Digital, social, mobile, and now AI represent the biggest catalysts driving irreversible shifts in consumer and employee behaviors, expectations, preferences, and values. This cycle only continues with new every wave of technological disruption.

As one of the world’s pioneers in digital anthropology, Brian Solis will introduce a multi-generational (majority) set of employees and customers and demystify how they make decisions, what matters to them, and what erodes their affinity and loyalty.

More importantly, Brian will share how these digital-centered behaviors represent their “love language” to unlock digital empathy. This secret reveals how to deliver more meaningful products, services, and experience that give any brand the unique ability to connect the soul of the organization to the soul of the customer.

In this fun and inspiring session, Brian will...

• Introduce Generation-C (aka digital narcissists aka accidental narcissists) and their behaviors, characteristics, and values.
• Humanize the new customer to inspire CX, service, marketing, operational, and product innovation.
• Reveal the “6th” love language” and how digital empathy sets the stage for “relationship transformation.”

Ignite Moments! How to Become a ‘Customer Company’

X marks the spot for a new formula to deliver best-in-class customer experiences: BX + CX + UX + EX = X. 

What does ‘great’ look like to today’s customer? How has their digital lifestyle or relationships with industry-leading brands changed their standards for what great customer engagement and services look like?

As ‘the godfather of CX’ and the author of one of the most transformative books on CX innovation, Brian will take audiences on a journey of what it means to become a ‘customer company’ in an evolving hybrid world, one where digital and AI are blurring the lines between physical and online experiences.

It all starts by purposefully becoming a ‘customer company’, putting people at the heart of the business.

In this exciting and captivating keynote, Brian will transform traditional customer touch points into ‘ignite moments.’ He’ll demonstrate how ignite moments deliver personalization, ‘warmth’, and connected experiences that people love, remember, and share. Brian will also connect the dots between meaningful experiences and increased conversation rates and spend, brand loyalty, higher NPS and CLV scores, and advocacy.

Audiences will discover:

• The true meaning of experience and how great experiences connect to people’s hearts and minds.
• How to reimagine touchpoints as ignite moments, to create enchanting, personal experiences that customers will cherish and seek out.
• The Disney and Pixar way to rethink customer journeys as visual story boards.
• The new formula of becoming a customer company: BX + CX + UX + EX = X

Note: This topic pairs well with “Meet Generation-Connected, Your New Customer.”

Think Like a Startup: Embracing a Founder’s Mindset to Innovate the Silicon Valley Way

When it comes to innovation, it’s not uncommon to hear the phrase, “think like a startup.” Every year, executives visit Silicon Valley to visit leading tech companies and to meet leading entrepreneurs. Brian brings that experience, and more, directly to you.

Brian has helped launch over 1,000 startups, advised every major enterprise software company, and continues to work with Fortune 500 businesses on digital and business transformation strategies. KGO called him a “Silicon Valley staple” and “one of the top people to know in Silicon Valley” by Huffpost.”

In this is a very special session, Brian will teach you what it means to “think like a startup” by exploring the mindsets of founders and investors. He’ll prepare a bespoke talk or fireside chat, sharing the lessons, and sometimes the craziest of stories, to inspire the audience with the truest lessons of Silicon Valley (and the Silicon Valley’s around the world). 

The list of companies and founders Brian has worked with is storied It includes  Airbnb, Uber, Tripit, Twitch, Google, Amazon, Meta, and has collaborated with Jack Dorsey (Twitter), Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Loic Le Meur, Mark Cuban, Guy Kawasaki, Justin Kan, Kyle Vogt, Tim Ferriss, Gary Vaynerchuk, and many, many others. Brian has also advised investors and guided celebrities on their startup investments, including Oprah, Shaq, Adrien Grenier, Katie Couric and Ashton Kutcher.

Topics include...

• The founder’s mindset and bold innovation.
• The gravitas of Silicon Valley that drives innovation and disruption.
• The differing roles between iteration and innovation.
• Why failure matters and how to incentivize failing up.
• Defining moments that represent instrumental pivots toward growth.
• How to see and create future markets vs. serving existing markets.
• The Investor’s Mindset: calculating ROI in the absence of existing formulations.

Business (R)evolution in the Novel Economy: Navigating Uncertainty to Lead, Innovate, and Thrive

The future isn’t what it used to be.

Welcome to the Novel Economy, a time without precedence or a playbook for navigating continuous disruption. A new leader and a new playbook are needed to define the next era of business. In this inspiring keynote, Brian will reveal how our future has changed course and define the attributes of the new leaders who will shape the future.

The word ‘novel’ means new and not resembling something formerly known or used. In just the last few years alone, we’ve endured waves of disruption, including a global pandemic, political polarization, media sensationalism, the rise of generative AI and its massive impact on the future of work, Apple’s spatial computing promising to change consumerism, once again, and more.

In a time of uncertainty, going back to the old playbook is to miss the new opportunities afforded by these latest disruptions. This is our Ctrl-Alt-Del moment. This is a time to learn and unlearn, to look ahead, to reimagine our future, to finally break free from the legacy models and thinking that hold us in the past.

In this motivating session, Brian will...

• Introduce the three phases that define the next 36 months and break down how to lead digital transformation and business model innovation initiatives to drive resilience, relevance, and growth.
• Highlight market dynamics that accelerated digital disruption by at least 10 years and what the next wave of disruption looks like.
• Help leaders unlock new value in the Novel Economy by creating space for safety, curiosity, and creativity.
• Motivate the audience to play a role in change, to collaborate and ideate, to believe in themselves, and change work routines that unlock new career opportunities.

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