Greg Williams

Editor, WIRED UK
Greg Williams
  • Transformative trends expert who knows what’s next first
  • Distills complex changes into entertaining, engaging, and accessible insights
  • Challenges audiences to rethink business models in ways that capitalize on disruptive technologies

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Greg Williams is an authority on technology trends and the ways they impact business and society. As editor-in-chief of WIRED magazine, Greg meets the innovators, thinkers, scientists, entrepreneurs, and creatives who are changing the world and writes on a variety of subjects, including innovation, technology, business, creativity, and ideas. WIRED World, The annual trends report he edits, is an essential briefing for senior leaders who want to understand the forces shaping the global business landscape. He is currently at work on a book on the nature of influence and how to nurture and grow it both professionally and personally.

Exclusively represented by Leading Authorities, Inc. speakers bureau, he possesses a unique combination of storytelling expertise and an in-depth knowledge of the future of technology and how it will impact every sector of business. This enables him to transform complex information into entertaining and accessible insights that prepare audiences for what’s coming next. Greg primarily speaks on what’s new and what’s next and how organizations and individuals can best prepare themselves for what’s on the horizon. He also has extensive experience as a conference facilitator and moderator, having interviewed world leaders and CEOs of some of the world’s best-known companies at high-level summits, such as the World Economic Forum in Davos.

He speaks on the technology and trends shaping the world — from artificial intelligence to the blockchain, sustainability to fintech, cybersecurity to personalized healthcare, automation and robotics to the space industry, and the future of work to the next wave of disruptive forces impacting every organization. In every presentation, Greg identifies the challenges and opportunities for organizations in every sector to innovate in an accelerating culture where norms are shifting.

Having delivered incisive, actionable insights, Greg’s dynamic presentations have received praise from clients in multiple areas of industry, including finance, retail, travel, healthcare, apparel, software, manufacturing, mobility, security, energy and consulting.

Spending his days scanning the horizon for world-changing technologies, ideas and companies, Greg is constantly on the lookout for genuinely transformative trends. His dynamic presentation style enables his audiences not only to understand these shifts, but also inspires them to implement the changes they need to make in order to move their businesses and brands forward is a fast-changing landscape.

Greg has delivered keynote speeches at technology and corporate events throughout Europe, the Middle East, North America, and Asia. He has interviewed CEO-level business-people at both private and public events and has moderated panels with executives from FTSE 100 and Fortune 500 companies at high-profile conferences and private gatherings. Greg enjoys an international career — he has lived in both London and New York — and travels regularly in search of the people and ideas that are transforming our world.

His essay on neuroeconomics was featured alongside essays by Bill Gates and Joseph Stiglitz in the book, Connecting Minds, Creating the Future. Greg's success as a long-form storyteller in novels — he has had six published — and journalism means that he has a particular interest and expertise in the power and role of content as traditional media channels transform and new ones proliferate.

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Speaker Video

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2018 London Showcase Recap

Generative AI & Its Impact on Business and Society. Whenever a new technology or innovation emerges, observers like to say, “This changes everything.” But in the case of humankind’s quest to develop machine intelligence, the arrival of generative AI might actually be a gamechanger. Why? Because ChatGPT and other generative AI products, including DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion, demonstrate an enormous leap forward in artificial intelligence capability — one that will have a lasting impact on the ways businesses operate, and how we approach our daily lives. In this talk, Greg Williams outlines the challenges and opportunities artificial intelligence presents to us today, and as we look toward the future. Speaking to AI’s applications within organizations, industries, and communities, he talks audiences through the ethical concerns and risks that have arisen as AI has integrated so quickly into our daily lives, while also highlighting its benefits — such as increased innovation and productivity — and sharing strategies for how organizations can adapt to an increasingly AI-centric environment. As Williams puts it, understanding the implications of these rapid advances in technology could not be more urgent for business leaders, government, and civil actors.

The Technology Trends Disrupting Your Business & How to Flourish In The Digital Age. If your organisation hasn’t been disrupted yet, it’s only a matter of time before someone rethinks your business. From commerce to finance, energy to automotive, healthcare to travel, every vertical has changed beyond recognition over the past decade. Greg argues that the pace of change will accelerate even further in the coming years as technology and data are used in unprecedented ways and that the only way to thrive in this dynamic environment is to embrace change.

In this fascinating talk, Greg looks at the key trends in technology, science, and ideas that every organisation needs to know about, from artificial intelligence (AI) to virtual reality (VR), shifting demographic patterns to how every organisation is now a software business, why external data offers unparalleled opportunities for enterprise, how automation and robotics are reshaping manufacturing and services, the rise of mission-driven enterprises, why additive manufacturing will relocalize economies and how technology is reshaping geopolitics. This is a talk that is guaranteed to enable organisations to prepare for the future and to make the most of emerging opportunities.

The World is Spiky, Not Flat: How Geography, Politics and Technology Will Shape the Future.

The digitisation of economies famously brought about the idea that you could hire someone in Iceland to look after your computing stack, run your business through an Estonian government identity system, outsource back-office operations to India and manufacture your products in a Chinese factory you’ve never visited. The world, it was said, was levelling up and flattening out.

While, to some degree, this remains true, 15 years after the publication of Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat, the fracturing of the US-China relationship, the rise of populism in Europe, Brexit, a nationalist India and Russia decoupling itself from the global network has led to a fracturing of the internet and global supply chains. To add to this, global organisations are now being impacted by events on the other side of the world and information warfare practiced by rogue states, facial recognition technology, the introduction of digital currencies, and issues such as privacy; anti-trust; and the ethics needed to safely implement artificial intelligence all require international cooperation, policy alignment, and cross-border governance. In this timely and compelling talk, Greg demonstrates that technology, politics, and international affairs are now intertwined as never before and that how this plays out will shape economies and geopolitical alignment for years to come.

The Future of Work: Gaining a Competitive Advantage in the Modern Landscape. We have witnessed the biggest experiment in working practices and business realignment since the beginning of the information age, as working virtually has become the norm for millions of people. This enormous change in the way that enterprises operate has led to many organizations re-assessing much of what they assumed about their business practices and the efficiency of their workforces, questioning where investments should be made in the enterprise and how they measure productivity in circumstances that require adaptability and fresh thinking.

Most organizations with the capability to work remotely have learned – remarkably – that productivity remains the same or increases when employees are working from home. In this respect, technology and human ingenuity has created a new normal, one that is likely to impact the way we work and — crucially — where and how we work, for the foreseeable future. But there are also significant questions that need to be asked. How will our workplaces change and how will we use office space? How will teams maintain the sense of purpose and togetherness? How will new ways of working impact innovation and the generation of new ideas?

In this presentation, Greg will share insights and best practices for organizations to optimize this new way of working for maximum engagement and productivity. He will discuss:

  • Why purpose must be at the core of everything your organization does
  • Why organizations need to press reset with their people
  • Why futureproofing your business is more important than ever
  • How to integrate increased automation within organizations
  • Moving KPIs from productivity to adaptability
  • How organizations should think about innovation as they look toward the future

 

Successful Leadership in the Ever-Evolving Workplace. The evolving workplace presents managers with new challenges for building and maintaining successful teams. Decisions need to be made with urgency in order to adapt to current operating conditions. The choices of today will have an outsized impact on the business, so it’s clear that organizations need leadership, not just management. This is because the disruption to business-as-usual also presents a significant opportunity for organizations to rethink their purpose and to shift priorities in order to adapt to new realities. Workers are open to this: a recent Ipsos Mori piece of research demonstrated that the majority of people trust the leaders of their companies more than their government.

In this presentation, Greg will discuss what he’s learned from his conversations with several business leaders from across the globe. Having interviewed leaders in a variety of industries – from technology to financial services, healthcare to retail in territories across the globe – Greg shares learnings and best practices that can be applied to any organization preparing itself for what’s next. Topics covered will include:

  • Leading and communicating with distributed workforces
  • How principles and values will replace hard objectives
  • Why trust, empathy, and agility will be the most powerful currencies for successful leaders
  • How leaders can best position teams to drive innovation in the new era of work
  • Driving cultural change through collaboration and technology adoption
  • Why now is the time to launch new products and services

 

Cyber Security & Emerging Threats. Today, every organisation is in the software business—this means great opportunities, but also significant vulnerabilities as the more connections there are on the network, the more chances there are for the bad guys. Digital ubiquity has left us vulnerable, whether that’s personal (one study suggested that there were 885 million data breaches in the US in 2019), societal—such as the power grid being compromised—or our civic institutions coming under attack from state actors. Technology offers us not only the opportunity to tackle some of the greatest challenges known to man, it also means we are subject to significant, emerging threats—the dangers are many and significant and will only increase as nascent technologies such as wearables and the internet of things become mainstream. In this arresting talk, Greg—who curates WIRED’s highly-respected Security conference—examines emerging threats from hackers, criminals and foreign actors and defines the hazards of the future – from biology to satellites – that every individual and organization needs to be aware of.

Your Corporate Social Responsibility Program Isn’t Enough: Why Today’s Organisations Will Succeed by Becoming Purpose Driven. Today’s decision makers must shift from focussing on shareholders to having purpose at their core. A significant number and range of businesses — from start-ups like Warby Parker, to multinationals such as Unilever — are embracing the idea that being ‘mission-driven’ will be a necessity for forward-thinking organisations. This trend will only accelerate, with institutional investors being put under pressure to ensure that they are decarbonising their portfolio, smart employers changing mindset to view employee welfare as an investment rather than a cost, consumers abandoning brands that take a stand on issues such as the environment, diversity and ethical practices in the marketplace. In this engrossing and powerful presentation Greg examines this accelerating trend and offers insights into organisations that are implementing long-term thinking, establishing meaningful goals and pursuing positive change.

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