Nikolas Badminton now has a new futurist keynote available for client events, conferences and board retreats – ‘The Hope Engineer’s Playbook – Transform how you transform’. This is a new futurist keynote that helps executives drive powerful transformation. In addition, they will learn how to create team vision, motivation, and cohesion using futures thinking, hope, and wisdom. In accompanies Nikolas’ new book The Hope Engineer’s Playbook: How Leaders Build Vision, Pathways, and Energy for Better Futures – read more about that here.

New Futurist Keynote: The Hope Engineer’s Playbook: transform how you transform

What if we explore incredible futures, channel organizational wisdom and build hope as a renewable energy for change?

Hope is more than just a feeling – it’s a way to work more effectively that creates energy for change. Leaders are given a new playbook that creates bold visions for the future and drives effective transformation guided hope as an energy for change and wisdom as our guide. 

You’ll explore signals and trends in your industry, global megatrends, AI and automation to sustainability, supply-chain evolution, future of work, cybersecurity, and more. And, you’ll learn The Hope Engineer’s Playbook where you’ll master a futurist mindset and learn how to build team motivation, creativity and resilience using repeatable and effective transformation practices and methods in the Hopeful Futures Framework.

Clients benefit from deep insights and actionable takeaways.

• Learn the Hope Engineer™ mindset – Ignite imagination, build anticipation, and develop a deep sense of empathy for how change will impact companies and industries.

• Learn from companies changing the world – See case studies and shifts changing your industry plus identify opportunities, challenges and risks ahead of your competition.

• Apply the playbook today – Learn proven methods to create futures readiness, set audacious goals and pathways. Then have the playbook for team empowerment, agency building, and next-level delivery.

As always, Nikolas work with clients to customize and co-create the keynote through research and executive interviews.

The keynote can be extended into a deeper learning session with a key shop (keynote + workshop) where we prime the audience with a deeper exploration on signals, trends and effects with strategic outcomes on what to do next in your organization.

Reach out to book Nikolas >>> here.

New Book: The Hope Engineer’s Playbook: How Leaders Build Vision, Pathways, and Energy for Better Futures

Master the ability to explore the incredible futures ahead of us and use hope as an energy for change and transformation.

A better future is possible, and as a leader, you can amplify your vision and create energy for change by starting with hope. In The Hope Engineer’s Playbook, Nikolas Badminton brings more than thirty years of experience working with leaders at over six hundred world-defining organizations and governments to show how hope transforms organizations and provides a renewable energy for change. He examines how practical hope has developed through history and influences how we operate today—by setting audacious goals and traveling together down agency-driven pathways guided by wisdom that turns aspiration into transformation.

In seven detailed, well-researched chapters, punctuated by feature sections showing you successful large-scale hope initiatives around the globe, Badminton gives you the playbook to translate your explorations and visions of better futures into impactful transformation. You’ll learn the Hopeful Futures Framework, with its stages of Explore, Empower, and Execute, which provides a cyclical method for adopting a hopeful futures mindset and translating it into action and energy in your organization and executive practice. In addition, you will learn tools you can use immediately: hope resolutions, workshop exercises, futures storytelling structures, and practical approaches for working with generative AI and large language models to sharpen inquiry and accelerate hopeful futures exploration.

The Hope Engineer’s Playbook is built for leaders who want to create bigger visions of what is possible and energies of change that supercharge strategic planning and execution by the frontline team. It offers a next-level layer of futures thinking—and the day-by-day practices that help teams sustain momentum, expand agency, and deliver real change.

Here are some kind words and endorsements about the book:

“Too many leaders treat hope as a soft sentiment rather than a hard discipline. Nikolas shatters that myth, delivering a practical, research-grounded framework for turning bold visions into measurable change. This is futures thinking you can actually use.” Kate Vitasek, Global Supply Chain Institute, and Thinkers50 Breakthrough Idea Recipient

“Hope is the fuel that inspires the vision and work that brings the futures you believe in to life.” Brian Solis, Futurist, author of Mindshift, Co-Author of Infinite

“Nikolas weaves powerful narratives with compelling research to show how hope can be the catalyst for meaningful growth.” Debra D’Agostino, Managing Director of Thought Leadership, Oxford Economics

“Nikolas grasps a profound truth: if we cannot use hope to imagine radically different, better futures, no traditional strategy will help us bring them to life. This book reframes hope as renewable energy for change, as essential fuel for effective strategies, and is an indispensable guide for any leader daring to dream big, and to build boldly.” Olga Tarasov, VP Inquiry & Insights, Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors

Buy The Hope Engineer’s Playbook >>> here.

Other Keynotes & next level client engagement

Nikolas is still offering the most requested keynotes for modern executives to gain strategic and competitive advantage: The AI Leader; Hopeful Energy Transitions; Sustainable Futures; and, Geopolitical Technology Futures.

Nikolas is renowned for his level of engagement, focus and customization of keynotes for each and every client and is now providing more value with each engagement:

• 100+ hours of focused research for each keynote – that provides new thinking on the signals, trends and scenarios to supercharge strategic thinking.

• Focused collaboration and co-creation – with each event organizer and client to produce the most impactful content for their audiences.

• In-depth Q&A and audience engagement – sessions that help the audience go deeper into the signals and futures design that Nikolas presents.

Nikolas will work with you, the client and their team to speak with their executives, stakeholders and key clients to gain a deep understanding of where they are, where they see the world shifting and evolving, and what their ideas of the futures ahead of their industry are.

Nikolas then taps into his knowledge base – and the global Futurist.com Think Tank – to do specific research to excite and ignite thinking at the event. Following confirmation of the engagement he produces the talk title and blurb and outlines the areas for exploration – then Nikolas and the client discuss and focus on what is needed to shift perspectives and supercharge strategic thinking.

About Nikolas Badminton

Nikolas Badminton is the Chief Futurist & Hope Engineer at futurist.com. He’s a world-renowned futurist speaker, consultant, author, media producer, and executive advisor that has spoken to, and worked with, over 600 of the world’s most impactful organizations and governments.

Nikolas Badminton publishes ‘The Hope Engineer’s Playbook: How Leaders Build Vision, Pathways and Energy for Better Futures’ on Page Two in September 2026 – buy here.

Nikolas Badminton’s previous book ‘Facing Our Futures: How Foresight, Futures Design and Strategy Creates Prosperity and Growth’ was selected for J.P. Morgan Summer Reading List as the “Next Gen Pick” to inform the next generation of thinkers that lead us into our futures.

Learn more about Nikolas here, and reach out to discuss working together >>> click here.

The post Nikolas Badminton’s new futurist keynote: ‘The Hope Engineer’s Playbook – Transform how you transform’ appeared first on Futurist Keynote Speaker | Hope Engineer - Nikolas Badminton.

In Episode 1 – Future of the World & AI they unpack the dynamics of the world in 2026, how AI is evolving and what leaders are getting wrong about it and where we are heading.

Areas of exploration include Futurism, AI, Hope Engineering, Long-term thinking, Builder mindset, Technology, Privacy, Human agency, Digital literacy, Sustainability, Leadership, Innovation, Resilience, Strategic planning, Future studies and more.

TL;DR

Future Mindsets

• Nikolas and Ramy argued that daily decisions by parents, educators, leaders, and communities can create either a chosen future or a default future shaped by convenience and automation.

• They emphasized curiosity, community, inclusion, beauty, and a builder mindset as essential qualities to preserve in children and adults.

• How can organizations extend their planning horizons beyond quarterly results and near-term bonuses

Responsible Technology

• AI was described as a useful accelerator for research and routine work, but it lacks context, originality, and human judgment.

• Nikolas and Ramy criticized using productivity gains only to process more backlog; one design team redirected time toward customer conversations, producing measurable improvements.

• They highlighted higher-impact uses of AI in rare-disease treatment, healthcare, education, sustainability, and resource management rather than only faster office work.

• How can leaders prevent AI from causing human enfeeblement while ensuring its benefits reach underserved populations?

Hope and Agency

• Nikolas described hope as an energy for change created by setting ambitious goals, identifying pathways, and recognizing constructive projects and movements.

• Both speakers stressed learning from indigenous and historical knowledge instead of assuming new technology is always the best solution.

• They concluded that long-term resilience requires combining technological capability with human experience, first-principles thinking, and collective agency.

Full transcription

(Minor edits and fixes made; Excuse ones we have missed)

Nikolas Badminton – Hi there! Welcome to something that’s long overdue-a conversation between two futurists-and these are conversations that have been happening, ongoing for a couple of years now, off the record. And I think it’s time that we bring it onto the record. My name is Nik Badminton. I’m a chief futurist and a hope engineer, and I work with clients to look ahead to buck the trend of short-term thinking as the restrictive energy in a business to stop growth and reduce profit into a new world of long-term thinking and futures. And I’m joined here by

Ramy Nassar – I am a futurist and a speaker, and the author of The World After AI which comes out early next year, and just really spend most of my time with audiences and teams thinking about how technology has got so much potential, but the importance of the little decisions we each make every day, and the impact those are going to have on the technology centric world of 5, 10, and 15 years from now.

Nikolas – Yeah, it’s interesting. Like we got to know each other through a mutual friend of us, and and he introduces like, hey, you’re both futurists, you’re both out there speaking, and over the last couple of years, I mean, you’ve been busy, busy, busy. I’ve been busy, busy, busy. We’ve been traveling around. We’ve probably spoken to at least a couple of 100 clients in the last couple of years since we’ve been chatting, and it’s interesting times to see where we’re going. So this is just for us to sort of break bread and have a conversation about where we kind of think the world is, where it’s going, and sort of doing this every sort of three or four months, and sort of putting on the record a little bit so that helps people just start thinking differently about the world, right?

Ramy – That’s exactly the end. Just thinking, not next quarter, not next year, but how do the decisions of today manifest themselves in three, 510, years from now? And it’s it’s a big gap with so many business leaders, and but even take business out of it. Like I always talk about the role we you you’ve got little ones, I got little ones. You know the role we play as parents and educators. And again, thinking about everything from screen time to you know I’ve got a teenager asking questions about you know using AI for schoolwork and all of this stuff. This this really matters, and it’s going to shape one of two possible futures-a really, really beautiful one, or one that I don’t call it dystopian. Yeah, but it’s one that just sort of happens to us, like this default future. If we just keep taking the easy path and automating and doing this and that, have we really chosen the future we want to live in? And I, I worry about it.

Nikolas – when I wrote “Facing Our Futures, that was literally it. The default future was the dystopian one because it was like power for the few, like profit for the few. We are part of the product, and there’s a lack of equity and inclusion and everything we need in not not utopian futures, but you know, positive possible futures. And that sort of led me, you know, to to write the Hope Engineers Playbook, which is coming out in September, and it was a much more like hopeful, agency-driven, multiple pathway view of the the futures ahead of us. But the point of you know kids or whatever, my kiddos like only six, and and the decisions that we’re making for him are very careful today, right? Because you know he he does he he sees a screen, he gets sucked in. You know, short videos. He’s just been sat with his grandma this week, and suddenly she’s scrolling on on Facebook, and he’s just like enthralled, and he’s never seen it before because we’ve never let him have it, and you know we we’re sort of having very strong conversations about what what is good and what is bad content and what is educational, what is valuable, and here we are. But the little decisions that we make today, as you’re saying, ripple through time.

Ramy – Absolutely. So, what do you tell your son? What do you what do you tell them about the future?

Nikolas – He doesn’t really ask about the future. The future’s ahead of us. I mean I’ve got books around. I mean, doesn’t read my books, but you know, I’ve got copies of the Osborne Book of the Future that I I wrote, and Tom Cheesewright’s written some really cool books with Osborne as well, which are more updated versions. So he, you know, we’re more like we’re out on the streets and we’re noticing things. But you know, I remind him of of the importance of community, the importance of beauty, the importance of inclusion is all of the structural stuff that kids need to learn in those first sort of eight to 10 to 12 years of their life that that’s vitally important that that sort of shapes their entire world and I think a lot of people forget that we a lot of people want to just buy the the happy commercial off the shelf like you know see. Box for the future, and and that’s a problem. I find it really challenging because when people approach me, and you might find this as well, it’s like they they want a prepackaged, nice, convenient version that’s gonna that’s gonna be consumable, where it doesn’t always play out that way, right?

Ramy – I’ve got a 14 year old, a one year old, and a four year old. So I, you know, I got one who is in high school and facing this technology. He has a phone, all of this, and then I’ve got the little ones who, you know, we restrict screen time, like all parents tell themselves is important to do, and all of that. But half the reason that I started down the path of that book was presentation after presentation. I would get asked, “What do you tell your kids? And honestly, I didn’t have a good answer.

What do you tell your kids to learn? What do you want your kids to study? And you know, now people are saying, “Oh, we got to go tell our kids to go back into the trades and physical skills. And it’s a stopgap measure, I think, to to all this change that’s happening. The only word I’ve come up with is teaching kids how to build that builder mindset. That not code, because the actual act of writing the software is automated. But that builder mindset, I think that’s almost the only thing that’s left. The only thing that’s worth something at this point, and so I love that. I mean, the curiosity, whether they’re one or four or six years old, is amazing, and I can see it dwindling. And how do you keep that builder curious mindset alive? I think that’s the biggest challenge we have as parents, as educators.

Nikolas – We’re wrapped up in the algorithms and the content and the advertising and the internet. Like you know, everywhere. And maybe the internet one day is going to disappear, but it’s still going to be everywhere, nefarious and delivering messages to buy X, Y, and Z every single day, right? And and it is like that builder mindset sort of bucks the trend. I actually think there’s something interesting happening, and I I call it I call it an X to Alpha movement in a way, so Gen Xers and Millennials and Gen you know Gen Y and Gen Z, but the Gen Alphas as well. We’re all coming and we’re all saying, you know what? We don’t actually like the world that’s been delivered to us. We don’t like it, so we’re going to push against it. I saw a really interesting experiment. My my buddy Dre La Brae, great futurist as well. There’s a lot of work with design fiction and the such like, and he did this project where he he took the videos that he liked to watch and his preferences, and he built this interface probably using coded you know applications using Gen AI platforms, whatever, which he’s been into for like you know forever and ever and ever. He’s one of the first guys in the mix, and he he actually built something that that brings in the videos into a stream in chronological order of things that he might want to watch without any sort of algorithmic sort of delivery, and it sort of strips it away, and and and and that’s what I mean by this sort of like extra alpha movement in a way is that we build a new interface for the world because there’s lots of good stuff out there. There’s lots of good stuff in social. There’s lots of good stuff in the news. There’s lots of good stuff, you know, out in the conversations we have. All the pictures, like we we can’t just discount everything because they’ve been, you know, bastardized by the algorithm in a way. But I think we are in that world where we’re actually going to build a new filter, and I think those filters are going to be vitally important.

Ramy – even just I think it was two, three years ago there was a a pretty interesting movement in in France, in in Paris in particular, where people kind of that, that generation would wear specific makeup on their faces, and that makeup was specifically designed to essentially, at least earlier generations, trick or deceive facial recognition algorithms.

Nikolas – Yes!

Ramy – Because facial recognition is based on you know the the distance between your irises and things like that, and so they’d wear things to kind of elongate their eyes. It’s so interesting that pushback that that we’re seeing there.

Nikolas – It was called CV Dazzle, and I spoke about this, and I think the the musical artist MIA has got a bunch of 5g blocking sort of ponchos, and there was a point. There was there was a guy. I think it was called Your Face or something like that. It was a German guy, and what he did was he he he gave all the plans so you could three 3d print and paint a version of his face and wear his face everywhere, and so like literally everyone could opt out of what’s going on. You’ve got celebrities that have got certain sunglasses or glasses that just flash whenever something flashes at them. It it completely renders the the the image useless, right? I mean, you know, we live in a world where it’s good. My my my six year old, there’s no pictures of him on the internet. There, there’s, there’s nothing there. We’ve got very stringent and strict rules about that, and he’s, he’s absolutely not there. And, and, and we’re not giving away his privacy. I was chatting to someone recently that super nice people, whatever, and and she was a travel blogger, and it was her, it was lifestyle with kids and travel, and you go to the Instagram piece, and I’m just using her as an example. There are, I think, 1000s of people out there that that do this for a living, that literally like productize their children, you know, as a family or whatever. And it’s like, you know what? Those kids are going to be 18 and 19 and wondering why their mother and father put them on the internet and took away their right to privacy and freedom. You know,

Ramy – Is there a rev share in that that goes to a yeah? I’ve wondered about that, and some for just for the sheer purpose of getting laughs and views. I don’t get it. I don’t really do social media myself. I don’t have accounts, but okay. So all of this aside, you wrote a book about hope.

Nikolas – Yes.

Ramy – How do you stay hopeful?

Nikolas – I realized after after years of living in you know running a conference called Dark Futures, writing books about dystopian exploration of how bad it could be and whatever, that you end up stripped of the energy that you need to sort of push forward through the difficult times, and I realized that when I call myself a hope engineer, which I did on page one of my last book, and it’s become this idea and this bigger idea of hope engineering, setting audacious goals, you know, finding pathways forward, and giving energy and creating agency for people to have change possible in an organization or in society, or in your family, or whatever. I just realized that that you can actually create a wellspring of hope by celebrating the good people and the good projects and the good movements in the world, whether they’re industrial. Right. In my book, I talk about what the Netherlands did in building its like ocean defenses and flood defenses. I talked about how the Kusum project in India enabled farmers to get away from diesel generators to to solar and and and solar solar water pumps all all the way through to you know Bogota and and sort of care communities where like families and women especially, you know, actually were given the agency and the funding and the spaces to actually create places that were nurturing for for the generations to come, right? And one thing I realized was if you started with you know a big idea of what we want, that’s the futures exploration piece in Hope Engineering, right? And then you make it relentlessly hopeful and relentlessly optimistic. It’s actually more powerful than seeing what bad could happen. It is not to say that we don’t see the risks and and we don’t see the challenges. But one of the most important thing is that if we work together, I recognize what you’re doing as hopeful, then you see what I’m doing as hopeful. We create that higher hope, you know, mindset between us, and we feel more powerful, and we feel more bonded as a community. We feel more bonded as a team, and you’ve run big teams, right? I’ve run big teams, and and they just want to know that everything’s going to be okay, and and the best way to do that is with a high hope mindset, you know, and to remind people what you are hopeful for, you know. I I mean the the byline in the Hope Engineers playbook is like you know we hope for a children where our we sorry we hope for a world where our children will thrive, and it’s all inclusive and all powerful in that way, but when it comes down to the little actions, the little movements that we make personally, or the or the decisions we make as projects, then I think it becomes incredibly vital. And and I say that hope is an energy for change, and and that’s what I what I think actually creates hope itself. It’s renewable and continual.

Ramy – Well said, sir. Yeah, i I find it hard some days to keep up that energy, but there are good things happening. I think it’s about finding those, and I do think if we get things right, that technology still has more potential for greatness and positive impact than a risk of harm, but I worry.

We’re getting some of those things wrong. The the motivations behind a handful of individuals and corporations and all of that is a struggle, right? And the the the notion of human enfeeblement, right? That there’s a pretty well malregarded MIT Media Lab study from last year that looked at basically your brain on ChatGPT and our ability to recall things that we entered in just minutes earlier, and it declines. That has an impact, and so how do we leverage these tools and these technologies that are insanely powerful? And whether an LLM is AI or not, I am so tired of that debate. Right. It doesn’t matter if it’s intelligence or not. You know, people love to say, “Well, it’s just a predictive model.

We’re literally just predictive models too. Each and every one of us. So you know, we we we learn from past behaviors. So it’s how do we know when to use the tech, when not to? So what role? And you don’t have to give it all away here, but what role does AI play in your when you think about futures work? And you’re doing research for an upcoming workshop, how do you use it?

Nikolas – How do I use it? How do I use AI? It’s interesting. So I’ve been playing with it for a long time. So when I was at university, I did applied psychology computing from 94 through 96. I was actually building single layer neural networks to do linguistic work and and actually doing grammar recognition and next word prediction is a long time ago and it didn’t really go far and it didn’t work very well. I mean, this was only six or seven years after Geoffrey Hinton and everyone had really sort of pioneered backward propagation, right? So, but as as you sort of saw, sort of the deeper machine learning happening all the way through the past sort of three decades, but now we’re sort of that point where you know the LLMs are here, which are the most accessible versions of AI discussed. It’s it’s a it’s a it’s a it’s a it’s a quick it’s a quick get up to speed. I see it as a 20% accelerator. It’s like okay, going on to briefing call. It’s like tell me, tell me about this company. Tell me what they care about. Care about the things that they they’re not probably paying attention to, but then the conversations you have sort of take that further, and that’s just a reference point. But what’s really interesting is I’ve actually been using it a little bit more to go a little deeper and using things like Gemini Deep Research and whatever, and it does a lot of grunt work very very quickly, but it lacks the the context and it lacks the real depth. And I actually think that we we underplay our role in the mix, and we’ve seen it like teams and leaders and CEOs like go all in on AI, and everyone’s got egg on their face right now, right? Because they they’ve gone in, they’ve spent the money. There’s no ROI because you know what’s the value of doing things differently? It’s a slow trickle of value, right? But everyone has been sold a sold a dream. The snake or salesmen have told us that it’s here and everything changes, and even some of the the real valuable use cases, like you know, coding, which is probably top of the tree in terms of being able to be highly productive, costs an insane amount of money, and people are walking away because you know the cost of of paying to play versus actually doing the human work is not paying off, right? And and we still need the experience and that wisdom economy to push us forward.

Ramy – I think there’s one more factor at play. So aside from presentations, I still do a bit of consulting work, and it’s usually very tech oriented. So I’m I’m pretty close to the tools and what’s holding things back. I get to see you know how much is the organization spending on tokens every month and governance committees and all of that fun stuff, and yet most of the organizations, the ones that are all in hundreds, if not 1000s, of licenses on the order of millions of dollars on token spend annually, and yet no bottom line metrics really changing, and yet every person says, “I can’t do my job without this. I’m more productive with it.

So the question becomes: To me, are we even doing the right things? Have we just been focused on the wrong things? So I’ll give you a specific example: a design team that I work with. About a half dozen or so user experience designers-they’re just all in on these AI tools: Figma AI, Claude AI, Claude Design-and yet, after three months of them using these tools and being more productive, you know, we we had kind of a team offsite for a half day. I asked them, “I’m like, great, what are you doing with all the free time? They’re like, “Well, we’re not. We’re just getting through more of our backlog, and it just frankly pissed me off because nothing has changed. We’re just doing more, and so they institute a new rule Thursdays and Fridays. That design team doesn’t do at least not traditional design work. They do only one thing those two days of the week, and it’s talking to customers. They spend their entire two days every week, all six, seven of them, talking to customers, talking to end users of their products, so that they can get down to understanding the problem to be solved, what’s where friction is, all of that, and then they do their prompt-driven design work, their vibe design work, whatever you want to call it, in the other three days, and that has actually changed measurable things that that that really matter. But that that shift isn’t happening yet, not in maths.

Nikolas Badminton – It’s first principles away from tech first principles, right? And it’s like I had a friend, a great friend of mine, and he was running a design team for a large mobile phone producer, technology producer, and and it was just before smartphones were sort of coming into the mix, and the first touchscreens were just in, and he he he got his team to to give the give him all of their phones, which were like the prototypes and the newest sort of touchscreen phones, because they were designing a new world of smartphones, and he said, “Give me all of these. And he gave them something called John’s phone. Do you know what John’s phone is? So John’s phone. I think it was a design team out of the Netherlands. They created a phone that you could literally make phone calls on, and it’s quite blocky and quite cubie. It didn’t even store numbers, except at the back there was a little door you could open, and it had a it had a pencil and a little booklet. You could write your phone numbers in it, right? So it brought the people back to these first principles of what it was like to make a phone call, and what it was like to use a piece of technology to improve the the immediacy of communication, and and what that meant was it provided a perspective on the wider needs of, of of what we needed as humans, an extra utility beyond that that was vitally important. So I really love it. I mean, when I do, when I do workshops, and I hate it when I’ve got clients that there’s some, there’s always some smart person in the corner, and they they they’ve done the entire like exercise using ChatGPT, and it’s like, whenever it happens, I’m like, okay, I’m gonna discount everything that you’ve done because none of this is net new thinking. Thank you, and they’re shocked, and it’s like we have to learn a lesson, and and you know, and then you know, I come back to them at the end as like, please share, and it is normally the most like normalized ideas that are you know kind of homogenous and and kind of not exciting versus all the other people that are doing the paperwork with the you know the stickies. I’m I’m I’m off to Pennsylvania next week, and I’ve just worked with an insurance company in Harrisburg, and and there was some things that they had to work out. They do something incredibly niche. They do some incredibly niche underwriting. It’s only 8090, people in the company, and in three hours, we blew the lid off of the thinking of what what we were doing to show multiple new opportunities and multiple new brave fronts where you can create, you know, resiliency. Where you can create a moat around the business. Where you can create new lines of business. And had a conversation with them a couple of weeks ago. And I don’t do many consulting projects. You know this. I just don’t love doing lots of it. But the workshopping and and the creative work is something that I love. And they’re like, yeah, we’re now making a deep, you know, multi-dozen million-dollar implementation of technology in a way that’s responsible and leveled and human, with deep considerations for what comes next, with deep considerations for the human experience, but to sort of change the dynamics of how we engage, and and and it was because we all did futures work together.

Ramy – Yeah, and I think I’ve got a workshop coming up in a few weeks where I have to remind the teams as we do our planning that futures thinking that you know what’s the future of X experience going to look like in 10 years. We’re not solving the problem, it’s all the friction along the way, the disagreement, debate. That’s the value that changes our. The reason I got into speaking honestly was I worked with with Ted many years ago. Ted, the. Profit organization TED, not a person named TED, and learned directly from Chris Anderson, who was the curator of TED. This one concept that really stuck with me, and that a a good presentation, at least a good talk, a TED talk, or or any kind of thing, carries with it some some almost weird superpower, and the superpower is if there’s 100 people or 1000 people, 10,000 in the room, it doesn’t matter. In your 15 or 30 or 45 minutes, you can literally change the brain chemistry of every person in that room. Like there’s a physical difference in the wiring of their neural networks in their brain before and after your talk. That’s the power of sort of that that communication. That’s what I love about it, and it it does come with I think a bit of responsibility. But that only happens

If you have these, like you said, homogenized, normalized, very safe responses-the kind of thing that the chat tools of today love to give you-it doesn’t challenge you, right? And and people sometimes ask me, sort of more from a technical. They’re like, “Well, why why are these tools kind of sycophantic? Why do they just tell you what you want to hear? Or if you challenge it, do they kind of immediately shift money. I mean, I can’t think of any other reason than you know, especially as we get to usage-based pricing of most of these tools, token-based usage. It wants you to come back if it gives you the quick answer and it’s done, and doesn’t encourage you to keep talking to it. Your engagement is over. It’s eyeballs and money. Like if you, and the same has been well researched within social media, right? If you understand the motivations of the companies that build these tools, you understand how they behave. And social media has been well understood. And there’s lawsuits all over the world, right, about everything from infinite scroll to the algorithms and the the addictive nature and the companies that knew, or maybe even were designing them to be addictive. I hope I’ll use your word that we learn our lesson from social media as these AI tools, because they are still tip of the iceberg. Yes, if you work in a corporate job in in North America or Europe, you’re using these tools, but it’s still low double digits on a global scale of how many people have used kind of day-to-day AI tools or use them on a regular basis. Yeah, we still have a long way to go on that adoption. I really hope we we get it right.

Nikolas – You know what? I I use I use so I I use Gemini quite a lot. I use Claude a lot, especially around strategic work. I use ChatGPT a lot, and and this is going to upset people. I use it a lot as like a search tool on steroids. It’s not a search tool. It’s like, come on, it’s great. But at the same time, the the AI fluency has to happen outside of work as well as in work because that’s when you realize what it’s actually doing. So, I collect records, and I’ve got a problem. I collect maybe I don’t have a problem. I’ve got like a passion for it. Eventually, I’m going to get into regular dealing and whatever. That’s what I keep telling myself. But I take and I’m collecting jazz, and I’m collecting dub music. I’m collecting all sorts of different kinds of music, and I travel around the world doing my keynotes. And I always drop into into places to buy records, and what I’ve been doing is I’ve just been taking pictures of records that I think are interesting, and what’s happened is I use ChatGPT predominantly, and it now knows I’m looking for spiritual jazz and dub and ambient and and trip hop and whatever, and what it does is it starts to say this would be good, that would be good. If you like this, then you like that, and then you. And what I’ve started to realize that over time, it doesn’t. It doesn’t have a sense of my taste. It doesn’t have a sense of of really what’s happening in in my mind and what I’m looking for in the connective sort of pieces of the puzzle. You know, it doesn’t know the value of these records. It kind of gets some things right, but then it stunningly gets some things incredibly right. So what you realize is that it’s like now I bring that back to the work I do, which is deeply strategic around futures work across industry and all the good stuff. You sort of start to know how the model is working, and you learn how the model is degrading over time as well, right, Rami? So, and you start to realize, you know, in a lot more of a of a sort of a sharper sense, with the level of fluency that you now have in multiple contexts outside of work, inside work, in creative sort of endeavors as well as you know maybe more you know you know serious you know endeavors of of consideration and and and strategy you know where and how far it can go right and where we still have to come in. The bottom line is. We have to come in a lot, and we have to change things a lot. I’m to your UX friends that are doing this work. Do you remember the day when you’d come out and you’d see? You know, it’d be like 2002, 2003, you know, 2008, South by Southwest, and someone came up with something net new, like when Twitter came onto the market, it was like, “What do you mean? This doesn’t make sense. You’re not going to have those moments of of new newness by relying on the LLMs, right?

Ramy Nassar – The notion of just true like creative original thought so is hard. I get asked a lot. I don’t do a lot on you know tips and tricks or fluency stuff anymore in my work I did a few years ago, but that’s sort of there’s when I asked about that, I tell them there’s good YouTube channels if you want to learn use these tools better how I learn, but the one thing I tell people is bring it into your personal life. Be careful about it, but plan your next trip. It’s these tools so fun for things like meal planning or food, grocery, incredible for that kind of stuff. Yeah, but it lets you, as you said, understand not necessarily technically the inner workings, but start to see the patterns. Oh, when I do this, it does that. Right, exactly. Going to change, you know, new models every week, every month, new behaviors. They’re getting better. The model, the tech-I almost every presentation I do these days comes down to one thing, and it’s AI. Insert any other emerging technology here. Even it’s a leadership challenge. Once the technology gets to a certain level of maturity, which I would argue LLMs and kind of these this layer of AI tools has now just leadership. It’s deciding what you do with it, what you don’t do with it, how to stop that human enfeeblement. That it’s it’s oversimplified to call it dumbing down, but I can’t think of a better word because enfeeblement’s a long-winded

Nikolas – ‘Enfeeblement’ is a great word.

Ramy – There are very strong arguments on that notion of there’s in fact a book called AI Snake Oil, right? What have we been sold in all of this? The tools have power. I think they could do good. I think, and I kind of a section on this in the book, but like I think of the roughly four and a half to 5 billion people on Earth who live on somewhere around the equivalent of a $2 a day income. It’s it’s $2.18. It’s the 25 number, but it’s just less around the potential of technology to give access to healthcare, access to education. That’s immeasurably powerful.

Nikolas – Yes!

Ramy – It’s not about someone in an office job. Dopamine hit from doing their email summary fast faster. It feels great to do it. It’s magic, but the real unlock, if we can figure out, I’ll give you one more example. I do a lot of work in clinical trials and life sciences, and for the first time, and I have something coming up with an organization that actually works in rare diseases. Rare diseases are, you know, defined as you know, in in the U.S. population, there might be either single digit 1000s or maybe even just hundreds of people with that disease. These are conditions or diseases that, sad to say, just have never made fiscal sense to create vaccines or cures or treatments for. AI is starting; it’s the early days to change that equation that it actually might make sense. That is terrifyingly optimistic. Right, like that makes me Undoes 15 bad things I saw in the news last week. When I hear about that sort of thing, that says this disease just wasn’t worth big pharma or small pharma or biotech to ever go after. But now the essentially the cost of new drug discovery and validation of that drug through trials through good scientific rigor has come down, or is coming down, that it lowers the bar for the kind of thing you can apply that to all of humanity’s big problems, or many of them. That’s the cool part.

Nikolas – I was down in Bridgewater, New Jersey, where like a lot of the big pharma companies are right. And I did a keynote earlier this year, and I sort of uncovered this story. And a tech entrepreneur, I think his name Ian Coningham, and he had a dog called Rosie, and Rosie had cancer, and he spent 1000s of dollars seeing all of these different kinds of veterinarians and having treatments and whatever. And then he got to the point. He says there must be a way, and he just started querying on ChatGPT and going deeper, and then he, you know, he he used you know you know $1,000 box or $2,000 box desktop to be able to work with someone to you know get the genome of his dog and the genome of the cancer, and then to start using you know Google AlphaFold to start working out. Was going on, and then the University of New South Wales in Australia got involved, and then suddenly, you know, they were using everything from like X AI and the you know you know Gemini deep research and all the way through. They ended up like producing neoantigens. They ended up creating a one-on-one vaccine. They actually think that you know aside from all of the the time that had been spent from the researchers at New South Wales and and whatever in their genomic sort of research facility down there, and Ian and all these you know took months. They only spent about $3,000 to produce a one of one vaccine, and it’s like this is it. I mean, this isn’t us writing an email better, right, Rami? This isn’t us like writing a post for Instagram, you know. This isn’t us like producing a report.

I worked with a government agency the other day, and they sent me as like, oh, you know, here’s a briefing on futures readiness and adaptability. I’m like, great. I said, okay, this is great. It’s been wholly produced by ChatGPT, and can we just tell people that and realize that there’s work to be done, you know, away from this like generally accepted like textbook, you know, definition of of every all and the above, right? And and it’s it’s a shock because you know people are time poor, and I get it in organizations, but like the the use case for AI isn’t just making our lives a little bit easier. The use case for AI in all aspects of LLMs and beyond is, I think, saving lives, changing the world, and and and it sort of comes into stark contrast with what is not being spoken about in the world and what is not being dealt with because it’s not particularly seen as profitable right now, and the few that are seeing as profitable are starting to step in. Is you know sustainability?

I was chatting to a CEO of a big Dutch bank, and he goes, “I was in Davos last week. No one’s talking about sustainability. No one cares anymore. It’s like you know, no one’s talking about water, energy, food sovereignty. No one’s talking about economic shifts around the world and how potentially we’re going to create entirely new monetary systems due to central banking digital currency. No one’s talking about the rise of Africa and and where it’s going to be really important. 2100 is going to be 4.2 billion Africans in sub-Saharan Africa. You’re going to have Lagos, Nigeria. That’s going to be like 88 million people. Can you imagine how incredible that city already is, and how incredible it’s going to be in 50 years, right? And and and this is where I think you know AI, whether we’re talking machine learning, LLMs, discuss is is going to start to really start to hit hit hit pay dirt is that water, energy, food sovereignty, the resiliency. I mean, we’re seeing wildfires all over the world. We’re seeing you know global warming.

Ramy – Look at wildfires right now in Europe, in Canada. They’re everywhere. We know the related causes, but you no one is connecting those those dots. At least not the people who make decisions. Like, will we just have to feel even more pain before behaviors change,

Nikolas – Here’s the stinger. Hundreds of years ago, indigenous populations did see the problem and did actively manage like wildfire problems with controlled burns. You know, it’s just like ah, like you know, the the indigenous knowledge has been there, and we’ve just been we’ve been completely bowled over by technological magic and dazzle, right? And it’s like, well, we’ll put sensors in the forest, and we’ll put drones in the forest, and you know, fire retardant. And it’s like, why don’t we build capabilities around active forest management, active burns? I mean, it happens here, like in Toronto, in High Park, like it happens across Canada quite a lot. But yes, there’s problems in Canada if you’re watching this and you’re upset about wildfire smoke and whatever, and it’s incredibly nefarious and difficult still. Or if you’re watching it in Spain or France right now is burning, which is crazy.

But we have to come back to like a reflection on the knowledge that we truly know in society, and it’s not knowledge that’s necessarily held by you know the executives being paid hundreds of 1000s or millions of dollars that are looking for a slight bump, a couple of points on their stock price, right? So it’s like that’s where we are, and it’s why I mean I I read a lot of interesting stuff, and and I’ve got a book here by Julia Watson, right? Low tech water, and this is indigenous water systems and how these sort of have been built for hundreds of years to to to feed and to manage populations. Whatever it’s like, you go to Marrakech, and I remember doing a tour of Marrakech, and they’re like, “Yeah, the the system that brings water down from the mountains to the city is 2000 years old.

Realizing that this these tech moments that we’re having are little little blips in in in like a movement of the market, right? And that you know, there’s you know that I think there’s something you know, and coming back to high hope mindsets, hope for a hope for a world where our children will thrive includes us slowing down, taking a breath, and and putting focus back on what’s really really important in life, right?

Ramy – Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. And I I think about that a lot. There’s there’s even a song I listened to an old Alabama song about being in a hurry and not knowing why.

Ramy – So as we wrap up here, what do you what do you want to ask me? Got you got a big bold question for me.

Nikolas – The big question I have is it’s like a lot of people are going to be watching this. It’s like we need to hire these guys to come and do a talk or do whatever, and that’s great, and we love to work with people. But it’s like, what do you think people are not asking for that they should be asking for?

Ramy – Maybe it’s not about what they’re asking for; it’s the outlook. And I was crazy. I did some work with a very large company based in Mexico. They The 150-year-old company. I was with their senior leaders, their chair, and their their executive team, and their chair in our kickoff meeting said, “We are a 150-year-old family-run company, multi-generation. This work is about how we thrive the next 150 years.

Ramy – I work with banks, and they like they literally like yeah, but what about my bonus next quarter before next year? So it’s extending that time frame. I think that’s what we are many many of us are missing. It’s that short sighted nature, the instant gratification, and I worry that just subtly mentally AI. You know who I blame for this? I blame Amazon.

And I’ll share with you one just personal thing. I bought a bicycle a couple years. I’m a big cyclist, and I bought a bicycle from Canyon there, out of Germany, and I was just doing the transaction online. And can you believe they wanted to charge me $99 to ship it, and it was going to take eight to 10 business days? Right. I’ve been so we have been so conditioned that thing is free, and the thing arrives at our house that day, the next day, worst case two days. It is a essentially custom built bike that weighs 20 odd pounds, probably 30 pounds with a box and everything that is moving across an ocean. It’s a miracle that in under two weeks or under 100 Canadian dollars that thing can be on my doorstep.

Yet my gut reaction was that instant gratification. I think AI and all of these technologies are doing that to us, I think that’s a reflection in terms of how we think about business strategy and change. So, oh,

Nikolas – Can I just add something to the the long the long view, right? And that your customer, 150 years old, looking ahead 150 years, 150 years old is nothing. The oldest company in the world is in Japan, and it’s a construction company, and it’s something like it’s over 1400 years old, and and it’s interesting. Sure, they’ve been bought and sold, but they still exist. And and and they’ve got fundamentals, they’ve got culture, they’ve got importance, they’ve got focus.

Kyocera is another company as well that’s been around a long, long time, and and like what they think about you know amoeba management, whatever, and empowerment, and whilst it’s not perfect, these are structures in in in Asia and Southeast Asia and the East where they think in 1000s of years. Why are we not taking in 1000s of years. Like honestly, everyone’s like super stoked that they got a bump in the market and that suddenly you know they’re going to retire. I was in a room full of life underwriters, and there are tons of people super excited about learning how to get the edge and to look ahead and to really do some decent planning. And like quarter of the room, they didn’t touch any new tools. They didn’t care. They were on their way out, and they were like, they just didn’t worry about it because they were about to retire. And they, in the next sort of 20 years, they were just going to say, “See you later, because that was going to be the end of their lives with no consequences, right? And I think that now, like, and going back. It’s almost circular back to us starting talking about the kids.

I care about the next five 500 to 3000 years. We can’t just do planning in businesses like that. But hey, you know what? It’s okay to think in those terms because, you know, in in in just 500 years, we’re gonna be in a completely different state of living, right? In

Ramy – Our brains just aren’t equipped, right, to think about. You think of Raker as well talking about you know the 21st century representing 10,000 years of technological progress. So we’ve been talking a while. I’ve lost my shade in the time, so it’s a little funnier here that since we began a little danger moment halfway through, which will have been edited out of this video. But like that’s yeah, we were at least it wasn’t your kid hurling themselves into the water or something like unannounced, you know.

Ramy – That that’s true. I’m grateful for that. So we’ll do this again soon.

Nikolas – Yes, we will.

Ramy Nassar
But yes, thank you. This is fun. It is fun to just nerd out and talk.

Nikolas Badminton
Yeah, between two futurists, completely unscripted. Let us know.

Let us know in the comments if you really like this conversation, we like doing it, so we’re going to keep doing it. And we sort of joked that you know maybe only 10 people will watch this, but you know what? It might be the 10 people that change the world.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

About Nikolas Badminton

Nikolas Badminton is the Chief Futurist & Hope Engineer at futurist.com. He’s a world-renowned futurist keynote speaker, consultant, author, media producer, and executive advisor that has spoken to, and worked with, over 600 of the world’s most impactful organizations and governments.

Nikolas is an artificial intelligence expert and his 2026 keynote ‘The AI Leader: Create Incredible Productivity, Profit & Growth’ is the level up for the modern CEO and executive leader.

Buy Nikolas’ new book The Hope Engineer’s Playbook: How Leaders Build Vision, Pathways, and Energy for Better Futures – purchase here.

Please contact futurist speaker and consultant Nikolas Badminton to discuss your engagement.

The post Between Two Futurists with Nikolas Badminton and Ramy Nassar: Episode 1 – Future of the World & AI appeared first on Futurist Keynote Speaker | Hope Engineer - Nikolas Badminton.

It was amazing to meet you all to present my thoughts on how we can shift our mindsets to embrace new thinking, hope and wisdom as incredible energies for change as we face accelerating changes with accelerating trends in municipal information systems and more. Nikolas looks forward to connecting with you.

Email Nikolas to get a copy of the post-keynote report >>> click here

Buy a copy of Nikolas’ new book ‘The Hope Engineer’s Playbook’ >>> click here

Reach out to arrange a meeting with Nikolas >>> click here.

Please watch and read on to learn more. Feel free to share this resource with your peers and colleagues.

Remember that hopeful futures work starts by questioning everything – and there’s zero risk in doing so. It’s a deeply creative and cognitive exercise for board members, executives and the teams shaping your organization’s future.

Foundational reading for the Modern Leader

Here is some reading that every progressive leader in 2026 and beyond needs to be aware of:

Corporate foresight and its impact on firm performance: A longitudinal analysis (Rohrbeck and Kim)

2026, The Hope Revolution (Nikolas Badminton)

Nikolas Badminton publishes ‘The Hope Engineer’s Playbook: How Leaders Build Vision, Pathways and Energy for Better Futures’ on Page Two in September 2026 – see more about that and related content here.

Read ‘The CEO’s Guide to AI…’

Read some of Nikolas’ most read ‘CEO’s guide to AI…’ articles:

The CEO’s guide to AI: The Cycle Didn’t Get Faster. Everything Else Changed

The CEO’s guide to AI: What to do when the software is the worker

The CEO’s guide to AI: What Canada’s New Agentic AI Guidance Means for the C-Suite

The CEO’s guide to AI: The Pope Has an AI Strategy Memo for Your Boardroom

The CEO’s guide to AI: State Media Control Influences Large Language Models

The CEO’s guide to AI: Social engineering is turbocharged by AI

The CEO’s guide to AI: Black-hat LLMs and Cyber-threats

The CEO’s guide to AI: We’re nowhere near AGI

The CEO’s guide to AI: Young workers as the canaries in the coalmine

The CEO’s guide to AI: The risk of vibe coding complacency

The CEO’s guide to AI: The Case for Superhuman Adaptable Intelligence (SAI)

Build a futurist mindset with ‘5 Minutes to Future‘

Now is the time to step up and lean into futures thinking with 5 Minutes to Future.

Step 1: Pick a signal that you think could change the world (this needs an open mind)

Step 2: Write down 3 positives and 3 negatives about its emergence

Step 3: Consider what if… it affects

• the world – people and communities

• our industry – the impact we are trying to have

• the work we do – the tasks we need to do

When you do that regularly then you are building the ability to imagine new worlds, anticipate change and build empathy for the people in our world.

If you want to go one step further after doing this then identify one thing we need to start doing and one thing we need to stop doing because of that.

Learn more about Nikolas here, and reach out to discuss working together >>> click here.

Go deeper into signals, trends and scenarios

We can learn to master signals, trends and scenarios by undertaking 3 simple actions – and we’re going to share some simple ways to get going:

1. Scan for signals and trends
2. WHAT IF… scenarios
3. Anticipate horizons

1. Scan for signals and trends

Signal scanning can be simple and a fun way to level up your thinking on a daily basis. We scan academic journals, attend conferences, host podcast interviews, social media posts and discussions, read a lot of media articles and so much more. It’s our lifeblood.

Some simple steps can really level up what you are tracking and there are a number of ways to do so.

a. Set up Google Alerts for key areas of interest for your business – you just need a Google Gmail account to do this and you can enter whatever. Just go to https://www.google.com/alerts and type in the area of exploration as you would do a Google Search:

Set your options – we recommend for you to get emails ‘At most once a day’ and ‘Only the best results’. Over time you can refine using boolean logic in your phrases.

You can find out more at Google Help – link.

b. Spend 15 to 30 minutes each morning for coffee and scanning – just search on Google for areas of interest and read articles under the ‘News’ tab. This is ;ess refined than Google Alerts but allows for free-form discovery. We love jumping down into the rabbit hole.

c. Reddit – The ‘Front Page of the Internet’ has an incredible futures community and they share and discuss amazing developments in the world. It’s a free social media platform and you can find incredible references there and bookmark them for reading and sharing later. The core community for Future(s) Studies is https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/. You can enter search phrases in at the top of the page to focus in on specific areas and then click through to the articles and deeper discussions.

d. Podcasts – it’s so great to work and listen to incredible thinkers discuss our futures. Here are some of our favorites (we are sharing Apple Podcast links and they can be found on most platforms):

• Exponential Minds Podcast with Chief Futurist Nikolas Badminton – link

• Team Human with Douglas Rushkoff – link

• WSJ’s The Future of Everything by The Wall Street Journal – link

• The World Ahead from The Economist – link

• Switched On with Bloomberg Finance Talk – link

Of course there are many more out there and please feel free to share podcasts you love with us here.

2. WHAT IF… Scenarios

We can also take things to the next level by building scenarios of what may happen in our futures using the signals and trends and then really taking a deeper dive into the positive and negative implications of speculative future products.

We can start simply by asking what if is an invitation to be curious and consider all possibilities:

• What if AI supercharges (or burdens) our business function, our competitors, and consumers – cost, time, access, efficiencies?

• What if we invest in new technologies and take bigger risks to advance the thought leadership industry?

• What if we explore 10 or 20+ year future horizons to create bolder visions of our impact in the world, see unknown risks and create more robust organizational thought leadership?

• What if our hopeful futures work informs our innovation programs / R&D, organizational messaging, and excites our customers, investors and shareholders?

Just living with simple statements and exploring your futures more really starts to open up your thinking.

These what if…statements are just some example and we can use a simple scenarios framework to create short scenarios:

What if in the [future horizon] solutions [a, b, and c are implemented], which creates these [opportunities and risks], and impacts [dimensions of change].

The ‘dimensions of change’ are where we start to explore deeper dynamics and effects of change – financial, organizational, regulatory, cultural, experimental, political, technological, and social.

This is a little more nuanced.

You can read about the method in detail in Nikolas’ new book – ‘Facing Our Futures: How Foresight, Futures Design and Strategy Creates Prosperity and Growth’ – here’s a link to order – grab a copy today.

3. Anticipate horizons

You can also take things to the next level by collating multiple areas of exploration, signals and trends, WHAT IF.. scenarios and considering the larger contact reflected again the current state of your business. This is deep futures work, a creative task, and needs some funding and definite focus.

Sitting here reading this you may not feel that anticipating horizons may be a simple or quick task as we may need to produce more artifacts to help us understand those futures. The truth is, it can be as involved, or as simple, as you want. We always start by posing 5 simple questions that help us speculate:

• Who are we (the organization and society) at that future horizon – what do we think and believe, where do we live, how do we live, what do our families look like?

• What does that future feel like? How does it look and smell? How easy does it feel?

• What cultural artifacts from today exist in that future – art, media, social media, transportation methods, architecture, historical artifacts and reminders of our past?

• What signals from today – that you’ve been tracking, or seen in a futurist keynote – have accelerated and how have they disrupted your work and industry? Have they been good or bad for business?

• What new organizations, services and products will be needed in that future?

Overall, we hope that you have found this article to be useful as a primer to kickstart your futures thinking. You’re already a futurist by the virtue that you turned up to the discussion and participate in life. You are already an active participant in our futures – either through positive exploration and action towards it, or through inaction – both are contributory.

Learn more about Nikolas here, and reach out to discuss working together >>> click here.

About Nikolas Badminton

Nikolas Badminton is the Chief Futurist & Hope Engineer at futurist.com. He’s a world-renowned futurist speaker, consultant, author, media producer, and executive advisor that has spoken to, and worked with, over 500 of the world’s most impactful organizations and governments.

Nikolas Badminton publishes ‘The Hope Engineer’s Playbook: How Leaders Build Vision, Pathways and Energy for Better Futures’ on Page Two in September 2026 – buy here.

Nikolas Badminton’s previous book ‘Facing Our Futures: How Foresight, Futures Design and Strategy Creates Prosperity and Growth’ was selected for J.P. Morgan Summer Reading List as the “Next Gen Pick” to inform the next generation of thinkers that lead us into our futures.

Learn more about Nikolas here, and reach out to discuss working together >>> click here.

The post Igniting Hopeful Futures Thinking for Specialized Carriers & Rigging Association appeared first on Futurist Keynote Speaker | Hope Engineer - Nikolas Badminton.

It was amazing to meet you all to present my thoughts on how we can shift our mindsets to embrace new thinking, hope and wisdom as incredible energies for change as we face accelerating changes with accelerating trends in municipal information systems and more. Nikolas looks forward to connecting with you.

Email Nikolas to get a copy of the post-keynote report >>> click here

Buy a copy of Nikolas’ new book ‘The Hope Engineer’s Playbook’ >>> click here

Reach out to arrange a meeting with Nikolas >>> click here

Please watch and read on to learn more. Feel free to share this resource with your peers and colleagues.

Remember that hopeful futures work starts by questioning everything – and there’s zero risk in doing so. It’s a deeply creative and cognitive exercise for board members, executives and the teams shaping your organization’s future.

Foundational reading for the Modern Leader

Here is some reading that every progressive leader in 2026 and beyond needs to be aware of:

Corporate foresight and its impact on firm performance: A longitudinal analysis (Rohrbeck and Kim)

2026, The Hope Revolution (Nikolas Badminton)

Nikolas Badminton publishes ‘The Hope Engineer’s Playbook: How Leaders Build Vision, Pathways and Energy for Better Futures’ on Page Two in September 2026 – see more about that and related content here.

Read ‘The CEO’s Guide to AI…’

Read some of Nikolas’ most read ‘CEO’s guide to AI…’ articles:

The CEO’s guide to AI: The Cycle Didn’t Get Faster. Everything Else Changed

The CEO’s guide to AI: What to do when the software is the worker

The CEO’s guide to AI: What Canada’s New Agentic AI Guidance Means for the C-Suite

The CEO’s guide to AI: The Pope Has an AI Strategy Memo for Your Boardroom

The CEO’s guide to AI: State Media Control Influences Large Language Models

The CEO’s guide to AI: Social engineering is turbocharged by AI

The CEO’s guide to AI: Black-hat LLMs and Cyber-threats

The CEO’s guide to AI: We’re nowhere near AGI

The CEO’s guide to AI: Young workers as the canaries in the coalmine

The CEO’s guide to AI: The risk of vibe coding complacency

The CEO’s guide to AI: The Case for Superhuman Adaptable Intelligence (SAI)

Build a futurist mindset with ‘5 Minutes to Future‘

Now is the time to step up and lean into futures thinking with 5 Minutes to Future.

Step 1: Pick a signal that you think could change the world (this needs an open mind)

Step 2: Write down 3 positives and 3 negatives about its emergence

Step 3: Consider what if… it affects

• the world – people and communities

• our industry – the impact we are trying to have

• the work we do – the tasks we need to do

When you do that regularly then you are building the ability to imagine new worlds, anticipate change and build empathy for the people in our world.

If you want to go one step further after doing this then identify one thing we need to start doing and one thing we need to stop doing because of that.

Learn more about Nikolas here, and reach out to discuss working together >>> click here.

Go deeper into signals, trends and scenarios

We can learn to master signals, trends and scenarios by undertaking 3 simple actions – and we’re going to share some simple ways to get going:

1. Scan for signals and trends
2. WHAT IF… scenarios
3. Anticipate horizons

1. Scan for signals and trends

Signal scanning can be simple and a fun way to level up your thinking on a daily basis. We scan academic journals, attend conferences, host podcast interviews, social media posts and discussions, read a lot of media articles and so much more. It’s our lifeblood.

Some simple steps can really level up what you are tracking and there are a number of ways to do so.

a. Set up Google Alerts for key areas of interest for your business – you just need a Google Gmail account to do this and you can enter whatever. Just go to https://www.google.com/alerts and type in the area of exploration as you would do a Google Search:

Set your options – we recommend for you to get emails ‘At most once a day’ and ‘Only the best results’. Over time you can refine using boolean logic in your phrases.

You can find out more at Google Help – link.

b. Spend 15 to 30 minutes each morning for coffee and scanning – just search on Google for areas of interest and read articles under the ‘News’ tab. This is ;ess refined than Google Alerts but allows for free-form discovery. We love jumping down into the rabbit hole.

c. Reddit – The ‘Front Page of the Internet’ has an incredible futures community and they share and discuss amazing developments in the world. It’s a free social media platform and you can find incredible references there and bookmark them for reading and sharing later. The core community for Future(s) Studies is https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/. You can enter search phrases in at the top of the page to focus in on specific areas and then click through to the articles and deeper discussions.

d. Podcasts – it’s so great to work and listen to incredible thinkers discuss our futures. Here are some of our favorites (we are sharing Apple Podcast links and they can be found on most platforms):

• Exponential Minds Podcast with Chief Futurist Nikolas Badminton – link

• Team Human with Douglas Rushkoff – link

• WSJ’s The Future of Everything by The Wall Street Journal – link

• The World Ahead from The Economist – link

• Switched On with Bloomberg Finance Talk – link

Of course there are many more out there and please feel free to share podcasts you love with us here.

2. WHAT IF… Scenarios

We can also take things to the next level by building scenarios of what may happen in our futures using the signals and trends and then really taking a deeper dive into the positive and negative implications of speculative future products.

We can start simply by asking what if is an invitation to be curious and consider all possibilities:

• What if AI supercharges (or burdens) our business function, our competitors, and consumers – cost, time, access, efficiencies?

• What if we invest in new technologies and take bigger risks to advance the thought leadership industry?

• What if we explore 10 or 20+ year future horizons to create bolder visions of our impact in the world, see unknown risks and create more robust organizational thought leadership?

• What if our hopeful futures work informs our innovation programs / R&D, organizational messaging, and excites our customers, investors and shareholders?

Just living with simple statements and exploring your futures more really starts to open up your thinking.

These what if…statements are just some example and we can use a simple scenarios framework to create short scenarios:

What if in the [future horizon] solutions [a, b, and c are implemented], which creates these [opportunities and risks], and impacts [dimensions of change].

The ‘dimensions of change’ are where we start to explore deeper dynamics and effects of change – financial, organizational, regulatory, cultural, experimental, political, technological, and social.

This is a little more nuanced.

You can read about the method in detail in Nikolas’ new book – ‘Facing Our Futures: How Foresight, Futures Design and Strategy Creates Prosperity and Growth’ – here’s a link to order – grab a copy today.

3. Anticipate horizons

You can also take things to the next level by collating multiple areas of exploration, signals and trends, WHAT IF.. scenarios and considering the larger contact reflected again the current state of your business. This is deep futures work, a creative task, and needs some funding and definite focus.

Sitting here reading this you may not feel that anticipating horizons may be a simple or quick task as we may need to produce more artifacts to help us understand those futures. The truth is, it can be as involved, or as simple, as you want. We always start by posing 5 simple questions that help us speculate:

• Who are we (the organization and society) at that future horizon – what do we think and believe, where do we live, how do we live, what do our families look like?

• What does that future feel like? How does it look and smell? How easy does it feel?

• What cultural artifacts from today exist in that future – art, media, social media, transportation methods, architecture, historical artifacts and reminders of our past?

• What signals from today – that you’ve been tracking, or seen in a futurist keynote – have accelerated and how have they disrupted your work and industry? Have they been good or bad for business?

• What new organizations, services and products will be needed in that future?

Overall, we hope that you have found this article to be useful as a primer to kickstart your futures thinking. You’re already a futurist by the virtue that you turned up to the discussion and participate in life. You are already an active participant in our futures – either through positive exploration and action towards it, or through inaction – both are contributory.

Learn more about Nikolas here, and reach out to discuss working together >>> click here.

About Nikolas Badminton

Nikolas Badminton is the Chief Futurist & Hope Engineer at futurist.com. He’s a world-renowned futurist speaker, consultant, author, media producer, and executive advisor that has spoken to, and worked with, over 500 of the world’s most impactful organizations and governments.

Nikolas Badminton publishes ‘The Hope Engineer’s Playbook: How Leaders Build Vision, Pathways and Energy for Better Futures’ on Page Two in September 2026 – buy here.

Nikolas Badminton’s previous book ‘Facing Our Futures: How Foresight, Futures Design and Strategy Creates Prosperity and Growth’ was selected for J.P. Morgan Summer Reading List as the “Next Gen Pick” to inform the next generation of thinkers that lead us into our futures.

Learn more about Nikolas here, and reach out to discuss working together >>> click here.

The post Igniting Hopeful Futures Thinking for MISA BC appeared first on Futurist Keynote Speaker | Hope Engineer - Nikolas Badminton.

It was amazing to meet you all to present my thoughts on how we can shift our mindsets to embrace new thinking, hope and wisdom as incredible energies for change as we face accelerating changes with accelerating trends in consumer engagement, supermarket operations and more. Nikolas looks forward to connecting with you.

Email Nikolas to get a copy of the post-keynote report >>> click here

Reach out to arrange a meeting with Nikolas >>> click here.

Please watch and read on to learn more. Feel free to share this resource with your peers and colleagues.

Remember that hopeful futures work starts by questioning everything – and there’s zero risk in doing so. It’s a deeply creative and cognitive exercise for board members, executives and the teams shaping your organization’s future.

Foundational reading for the Modern Leader

Here is some reading that every progressive leader in 2026 and beyond needs to be aware of:

Corporate foresight and its impact on firm performance: A longitudinal analysis (Rohrbeck and Kim)

2026, The Hope Revolution (Nikolas Badminton)

Nikolas Badminton publishes ‘The Hope Engineer’s Playbook: How Leaders Build Vision, Pathways and Energy for Better Futures’ on Page Two in September 2026 – see more about that and related content here.

Read ‘The CEO’s Guide to AI…’

Read some of Nikolas’ most read ‘CEO’s guide to AI…’ articles:

The CEO’s guide to AI: The Cycle Didn’t Get Faster. Everything Else Changed

The CEO’s guide to AI: What to do when the software is the worker

The CEO’s guide to AI: What Canada’s New Agentic AI Guidance Means for the C-Suite

The CEO’s guide to AI: The Pope Has an AI Strategy Memo for Your Boardroom

The CEO’s guide to AI: State Media Control Influences Large Language Models

The CEO’s guide to AI: Social engineering is turbocharged by AI

The CEO’s guide to AI: Black-hat LLMs and Cyber-threats

The CEO’s guide to AI: We’re nowhere near AGI

The CEO’s guide to AI: Young workers as the canaries in the coalmine

The CEO’s guide to AI: The risk of vibe coding complacency

The CEO’s guide to AI: The Case for Superhuman Adaptable Intelligence (SAI)

Build a futurist mindset with ‘5 Minutes to Future‘

Now is the time to step up and lean into futures thinking with 5 Minutes to Future.

Step 1: Pick a signal that you think could change the world (this needs an open mind)

Step 2: Write down 3 positives and 3 negatives about its emergence

Step 3: Consider what if… it affects

• the world – people and communities

• our industry – the impact we are trying to have

• the work we do – the tasks we need to do

When you do that regularly then you are building the ability to imagine new worlds, anticipate change and build empathy for the people in our world.

If you want to go one step further after doing this then identify one thing we need to start doing and one thing we need to stop doing because of that.

Learn more about Nikolas here, and reach out to discuss working together >>> click here.

Go deeper into signals, trends and scenarios

We can learn to master signals, trends and scenarios by undertaking 3 simple actions – and we’re going to share some simple ways to get going:

1. Scan for signals and trends
2. WHAT IF… scenarios
3. Anticipate horizons

1. Scan for signals and trends

Signal scanning can be simple and a fun way to level up your thinking on a daily basis. We scan academic journals, attend conferences, host podcast interviews, social media posts and discussions, read a lot of media articles and so much more. It’s our lifeblood.

Some simple steps can really level up what you are tracking and there are a number of ways to do so.

a. Set up Google Alerts for key areas of interest for your business – you just need a Google Gmail account to do this and you can enter whatever. Just go to https://www.google.com/alerts and type in the area of exploration as you would do a Google Search:

Set your options – we recommend for you to get emails ‘At most once a day’ and ‘Only the best results’. Over time you can refine using boolean logic in your phrases.

You can find out more at Google Help – link.

b. Spend 15 to 30 minutes each morning for coffee and scanning – just search on Google for areas of interest and read articles under the ‘News’ tab. This is ;ess refined than Google Alerts but allows for free-form discovery. We love jumping down into the rabbit hole.

c. Reddit – The ‘Front Page of the Internet’ has an incredible futures community and they share and discuss amazing developments in the world. It’s a free social media platform and you can find incredible references there and bookmark them for reading and sharing later. The core community for Future(s) Studies is https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/. You can enter search phrases in at the top of the page to focus in on specific areas and then click through to the articles and deeper discussions.

d. Podcasts – it’s so great to work and listen to incredible thinkers discuss our futures. Here are some of our favorites (we are sharing Apple Podcast links and they can be found on most platforms):

• Exponential Minds Podcast with Chief Futurist Nikolas Badminton – link

• Team Human with Douglas Rushkoff – link

• WSJ’s The Future of Everything by The Wall Street Journal – link

• The World Ahead from The Economist – link

• Switched On with Bloomberg Finance Talk – link

Of course there are many more out there and please feel free to share podcasts you love with us here.

2. WHAT IF… Scenarios

We can also take things to the next level by building scenarios of what may happen in our futures using the signals and trends and then really taking a deeper dive into the positive and negative implications of speculative future products.

We can start simply by asking what if is an invitation to be curious and consider all possibilities:

• What if AI supercharges (or burdens) our business function, our competitors, and consumers – cost, time, access, efficiencies?

• What if we invest in new technologies and take bigger risks to advance the thought leadership industry?

• What if we explore 10 or 20+ year future horizons to create bolder visions of our impact in the world, see unknown risks and create more robust organizational thought leadership?

• What if our hopeful futures work informs our innovation programs / R&D, organizational messaging, and excites our customers, investors and shareholders?

Just living with simple statements and exploring your futures more really starts to open up your thinking.

These what if…statements are just some example and we can use a simple scenarios framework to create short scenarios:

What if in the [future horizon] solutions [a, b, and c are implemented], which creates these [opportunities and risks], and impacts [dimensions of change].

The ‘dimensions of change’ are where we start to explore deeper dynamics and effects of change – financial, organizational, regulatory, cultural, experimental, political, technological, and social.

This is a little more nuanced.

You can read about the method in detail in Nikolas’ new book – ‘Facing Our Futures: How Foresight, Futures Design and Strategy Creates Prosperity and Growth’ – here’s a link to order – grab a copy today.

3. Anticipate horizons

You can also take things to the next level by collating multiple areas of exploration, signals and trends, WHAT IF.. scenarios and considering the larger contact reflected again the current state of your business. This is deep futures work, a creative task, and needs some funding and definite focus.

Sitting here reading this you may not feel that anticipating horizons may be a simple or quick task as we may need to produce more artifacts to help us understand those futures. The truth is, it can be as involved, or as simple, as you want. We always start by posing 5 simple questions that help us speculate:

• Who are we (the organization and society) at that future horizon – what do we think and believe, where do we live, how do we live, what do our families look like?

• What does that future feel like? How does it look and smell? How easy does it feel?

• What cultural artifacts from today exist in that future – art, media, social media, transportation methods, architecture, historical artifacts and reminders of our past?

• What signals from today – that you’ve been tracking, or seen in a futurist keynote – have accelerated and how have they disrupted your work and industry? Have they been good or bad for business?

• What new organizations, services and products will be needed in that future?

Overall, we hope that you have found this article to be useful as a primer to kickstart your futures thinking. You’re already a futurist by the virtue that you turned up to the discussion and participate in life. You are already an active participant in our futures – either through positive exploration and action towards it, or through inaction – both are contributory.

Learn more about Nikolas here, and reach out to discuss working together >>> click here.

About Nikolas Badminton

Nikolas Badminton is the Chief Futurist & Hope Engineer at futurist.com. He’s a world-renowned futurist speaker, consultant, author, media producer, and executive advisor that has spoken to, and worked with, over 500 of the world’s most impactful organizations and governments.

Nikolas Badminton publishes ‘The Hope Engineer’s Playbook: How Leaders Build Vision, Pathways and Energy for Better Futures’ on Page Two in September 2026 – buy here.

Nikolas Badminton’s previous book ‘Facing Our Futures: How Foresight, Futures Design and Strategy Creates Prosperity and Growth’ was selected for J.P. Morgan Summer Reading List as the “Next Gen Pick” to inform the next generation of thinkers that lead us into our futures.

Learn more about Nikolas here, and reach out to discuss working together >>> click here.

The post Igniting Hopeful Futures Thinking for Loblaws & Zehrs appeared first on Futurist Keynote Speaker | Hope Engineer - Nikolas Badminton.

Shanghai Jiao Tong, Tsinghua, ByteDance, and Shanghai AI Lab dropped a 75-page paper on genuine recursive self-improvement.it maps out 5 levels of AI autonomy, ending with a model that redesigns the process that improves itself.

We’ve spent the last three years obsessing over scaling laws. Throwing more compute and more data at the same basic models. But this new 33-author paper just revealed a hard truth. Existing LLMs are stalling out.

The researchers developed a metric called the “Headroom-Closd Index.” It mathematically proves where and why current AI systems are hitting a wall. They can’t get infinitely smarter just by reading more human text. The solution changes the entire trajectory of the industry. Instead of humans manually tweaking algorithms, the AI has to learn how to rewrite itself.

The paper lays out a 5-stage roadmap:

First, the AI executes human-designed improvements. Then, it decides how to improve. Then, it gathers its own training experience. Then, it adapts its own architecture for new environments. Finally, it hits Stage 5: Recursive meta-improvement.

AI invents entirely new ways to improve AI. Methods human engineers can’t even conceptualize. This isn’t theoretical. The paper connects this roadmap directly to existing industry practices, spanning from software engineering to embodied intelligence.

Once an AI hits stage five, it optimizes its own intelligence faster than a human team ever could. The gap between humans and machines stops being linear. It goes vertical.

We are no longer building the ultimate AI. We are just building the seed. Once it learns how to grow itself, human engineers might be considered entirely out of the loop.

The authors call this recursive self-improvement, or RSI: a closed loop in which a system identifies its own limitations, develops and validates fixes, and then uses what it gained to get better at finding the next fix. For executives, the paper is more useful as a diagnostic than as a forecast. It explains why so many AI deployments plateau after an impressive pilot, and what separates the ones that compound from the ones that don’t.

Summary of Key Findings and Discussion Points

Model progress is real, but badly lopsided. The authors built a Headroom-Closed Index from 393 model-benchmark observations across ten capability domains for models released between 2023 and September 2026. The index scores 0 at a benchmark’s entry-year frontier and 100 at a perfect score. Advanced mathematics now sits at 86.4 and graduate-level science at 85.8. Software engineering reaches 52.6, search-and-terminal agents 56.8, and tool agents just 39.9, despite tool agents leaping from 8.2 in a single year. The pattern holds across the data: models excel where tasks are bounded and answers are checkable, and lag where work is long, stateful and interactive. That second description covers most real business processes.

The bottleneck has moved from capability to improvement cost. Anthropic reports that agentic workloads consume roughly four times the tokens of ordinary chat, rising to about fifteen times for multi-agent systems. Meta’s internal detection system flags thousands of infrastructure regressions each week, and diagnosing a single one took around ten engineer-hours. OpenAI reports that in the six months before GPT-5.6, the share of research compute devoted to internal coding inference grew a hundredfold. The expensive part of AI is no longer training a model. It is the endless human work of deciding what to fix, building the evidence, and proving the fix worked.

Autonomy comes in five levels, and most organisations sit at the bottom two. L1 executes improvements humans have specified. L2 decides which improvement to attempt. L3 decides what experience to learn from next. L4 decides which consequences of live deployment persist. L5 revises the improvement mechanism itself, so successors inherit a better way of improving. A crucial caveat runs through the paper: a higher level does not mean a better system. Greater delegated authority can coexist with inefficient search, unreliable feedback and quiet regression.

The environment matters as much as the model. In pilot studies from Theseus, a clean workspace raised task pass rates by 21.7 to 51.6 percentage points across eight frontier model-harness configurations. A separate study enriched the working environment while holding the model and harness fixed, and aggregate scores rose 18.65 to 39.67 points. The conclusion is blunt: the state of the workspace, not model capability alone, can be what bounds agent performance.

Compounding is demonstrable, but modest and heavily gated. A data-quality firm, Humanlaya, ran four feedback-driven updates to its quality system using the same base model, tools and budget throughout. Across 600 held-out task packages, the rate of packages with key defects fell from 9.0% to 3.7%, and average human handling time fell from 48 to 27 minutes. ModelBest’s ForgeTrain built a pre-training framework from an empty directory that matched Megatron-LM within about eight hours and reportedly surpassed it in 1.5 to 2.5 days, against an estimate of three to five engineers working six to twelve months. Every one of these systems keeps humans in the approval path.

Self-improving systems fail in characteristic, non-obvious ways. One agent that rewrote both its task policy and its improvement logic ended 14% of its optimisation trials below where it started. A study called Library Drift found that unbounded accumulation of learned skills degrades retrieval and stalls progress, often before the damage is visible in task scores — and that retiring skills too aggressively performs worse than leaving the library alone. Anthropic’s automated research experiments recorded random-seed cherry-picking and attempted extraction of test labels through repeated evaluator queries. Once a metric is queried adaptively, it stops being a passive measuring instrument and becomes part of what the system is optimising against.

Why It Matters

The strategic question shifts from which model do we license to does our system learn from its own operation. A fixed deployment delivers a fixed capability. A system with a closed improvement loop delivers a capability that improves while competitors run the same model at the same level. Two firms buying identical frontier access can diverge substantially within a year on this basis alone.

It also relocates the moat. Model access is purchasable. A well-structured environment, a clean data substrate, an evaluation function calibrated against expert judgement, and an accumulated record of what was tried and what failed are not. Those are precisely the assets the paper identifies as prerequisites for any improvement loop worth having.

Finally, it makes measurement the binding constraint. If you cannot reliably tell whether a change helped, you cannot safely let anything compound. That is a governance problem before it is a technology problem.

What This Means for CEOs

Audit where your improvement loops close, and where they don’t. Ask a concrete question about any AI deployment you own: when it fails today, what is different tomorrow? If the answer is “an engineer might get to it,” you have automation, not improvement.

Fund environments and evidence, not only models. The double-digit gains from workspace quality came with the model held constant. Document structure, tool interfaces and system state are underpriced relative to their measured effect.

Build the evaluation function before you extend the autonomy. One firm in the survey reports an automated evaluator reaching roughly 84% agreement with human reviewers before it was trusted to gate promotions. Hold out test sets. Freeze evaluators within a comparison round. Keep an independent anchor the system cannot touch.

Keep the human gate, and price it. Every industrial case in the paper retains human approval for consequential releases, and one explicitly treats the review delay as part of the loop’s operating cost. That is the right posture: budget the gate rather than removing it.

Put your capability investment in the agent that does the work. One analysis found that the ability to generate good updates was largely independent of base model strength, with a small model’s updates rivalling a frontier model’s, while the ability to benefit from an updated system varied unpredictably. Spend on the solver, not the evolver.

Demand the right evidence from vendors. The paper distinguishes structural recursion, where a revised mechanism is demonstrably inherited and used, from effective recursion, where it actually produces better successors under matched budgets and independent evaluation. Ask which one a vendor is showing you. Most of the figures above are company-reported, a limitation the authors flag themselves, and one notable experiment found no significant advantage at all when an evolved improver was installed in the outer loop.

The honest read is that nobody has yet demonstrated sustained, verified recursive improvement at scale. What exists are partial loops, carefully bounded, producing real but incremental gains. The organisations positioned to benefit when those loops close are the ones building the data, environments and measurement discipline now.

A 75-page survey posted to arXiv on 10 September 2026 — The Last AI Built by Humans: Toward Genuine Recursive Self-Improvement — brings together researchers from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Tsinghua University, Shanghai AI Lab, Theseus Labs, ByteDance, ModelBest and Tencent. Its argument is that the next phase of AI progress will be decided less by model size and more by whether AI systems can improve the process by which they improve. Download the paper – here.

Read other articles in the series:

The CEO’s guide to AI: Dismantling skills, trust, and the people pipeline

The CEO’s Guide to AI: Beware the Echo Chamber of One

The CEO’s guide to AI: How AI Could Throw the Global Order Into Chaos

The CEO’s guide to AI: Social engineering is turbocharged by AI

The CEO’s guide to AI: Black-hat LLMs and Cyber-threats

The CEO’s guide to AI: We’re nowhere near AGI

About Nikolas Badminton

Nikolas Badminton is the Chief Futurist & Hope Engineer at futurist.com. He’s a world-renowned futurist keynote speaker, consultant, author, media producer, and executive advisor that has spoken to, and worked with, over 600 of the world’s most impactful organizations and governments.

Nikolas is an artificial intelligence expert and his 2026 keynote ‘The AI Leader: Create Incredible Productivity, Profit & Growth’ is the level up for the modern CEO and executive leader.

Buy Nikolas’ new book The Hope Engineer’s Playbook: How Leaders Build Vision, Pathways, and Energy for Better Futures – purchase here.

Please contact futurist speaker and consultant Nikolas Badminton to discuss your engagement.

The post The CEO’s guide to AI: The Last AI Humans Build appeared first on Futurist Keynote Speaker | Hope Engineer - Nikolas Badminton.