Michael Chase, AI keynote speaker.Keynotes for rooms that decide things.

Main stage Fasten Your Seatbelts or Kill the Pilot  ·  Board meeting Superintelligence, Minus the Hype  ·  Leadership offsite Exquisite Corpse  ·  Investor day or family office Show Me the Multiples  ·  Plant and operations leaders Rehearse in Software. Build in Steel.  ·  Marketing teams Brand Is the Last Moat

1. 01

   Fasten Your Seatbelts

   The flagship. It opens with the Exquisite Corpse: the surrealists' parlour game, and the monster most companies have built by letting every department draw its own piece of AI without unfolding the paper. Then the map: where AI is taking the market in the next eighteen months, across the models, the agents, the money and the factories. Real examples, no slideware. You leave with that map and the three moves your company makes this quarter.

2. 02

   Exquisite Corpse

   In 1925 the surrealists invented a parlour game. One person draws a head, folds the paper, passes it on. The next draws a torso without seeing the head. The third draws the legs. Unfold it and you have a monster. That is how most companies are deploying AI right now: finance on one tool, creative on another, operations on a third, IT approving a fourth, and nobody sharing context, memory or outputs. The AI does not know what the AI is doing. This talk names the condition, shows the shadow AI and vendor lock-in making it worse, and lays out the designed alternative: one knowledge backbone, one context model, bridges into the systems you already run, and someone accountable for the whole body. The surrealists made their monster on purpose. You made yours by accident. The room leaves with a one-page map of its own monster and the first joint to fix.

3. 03

   Kill the Pilot

   Why 2026 is the year proofs of concept die and production begins. The companies that crossed all hit the same wall: data in eleven places, nobody owning the workflow end to end, a sign-off from someone who never watched the tool run. They crossed anyway, because the software stopped waiting to be asked. Agents now hold context, use the systems you already run and finish the work. This talk names the pattern, maps where agents earn their keep and where they fail, and hands you a ninety-day test you can run yourself. You leave knowing which workflow goes first and who owns the outcome.

4. 04

   Show Me the Multiples

   AI as a capital allocation problem. Compute, energy, data and distribution are the four scarce things, and the market is still learning who captures value and who rents it. A capital strategist's read on the market for people who have to put money somewhere. You walk out able to ask which layer a company actually owns.

5. 05

   Rehearse in Software. Build in Steel.

   Plants that practise in software before they change on the floor. Michael led the Nvidia digital-twin work for the BMW and Mercedes-Benz EV plants. This talk is what that work taught him about simulation, sensing and the plants that will run themselves. Plant leaders go home with a shortlist of decisions to rehearse first.

6. 06

   Superintelligence, Minus the Hype

   A plain-language session on frontier models: what is real, what is marketing, what the labs are actually racing toward, and the decisions a board can no longer defer. Built for directors who are asked to govern a technology they are told is moving too fast to govern. It is not. The board leaves with the five questions to put to management at the next meeting, and a deck it can keep.

7. 07

   Brand Is the Last Moat

   When agents do the shopping and content costs nothing, brand is what is left. One of Forbes' 100 most-followed CMOs, and the man who built Cup of Jo into a franchise with millions of views, on what still moves people, what the feed did to attention, and how to organise a marketing team now that the medium has an opinion. The team leaves with a way to rebuild its own production system around a point of view.