Rethinking AI

For 27 years, Daniel Hulme has been doing AI, long before chatbots and large language models made it a boardroom obsession. As CEO of Satalia, Chief AI Officer at WPP, and a TEDx speaker with a doctorate from UCL, he has built AI solutions for some of the world's largest companies and now oversees AI across 110,000 people at the world's biggest marketing organization.

In this keynote, he offers a way of thinking about AI that is very different from what you have heard on LinkedIn.

Hulme argues that organizations do not have insight problems, they have decision problems. He explains why human beings are bounded in our decision-making (yes, you will get the bat-and-ball math problem wrong). He walks through the six categories of AI applications that map to any supply chain in any industry: task automation, content generation, human representation, complex decision making, creativity, and human augmentation. He breaks down four ways to make an AI smart, why agentic reasoning is more powerful than agency, and the four reasons AI projects actually fail.

Then he zooms out. Hulme introduces the steeple of seven macro singularities reshaping society, from the technological and economic to the ethical and existential. He then closes with the concept of a protopia: a world that is incrementally getting better. Watch the full keynote and decide where to place your bets.