David Viney
Keynote speaker, CIO, and AI governance expert.
London, United Kingdom
Actions
The poacher and the gamekeeper: 25+ years building enterprise technology at the highest level — WPP, Heathrow, Arup, BBC — and over a decade as a civil society board trustee at Article 19, Privacy International, and the Inspiring Leadership Foundation. The person who built a £250m agentic AI platform (at the world's largest advertising company) is the same person fighting for digital rights and economic empowerment. That tension is what makes the keynotes honest — and what makes David genuinely rare on any speaker roster. Author of two books. Creator of the J-Curve of Change framework, cited across industries for 20+ years. Available for keynotes, panels, and firesides on AI transformation, AI governance, and what responsible leadership actually looks like in practice.
Area of Expertise
Topics
I Am Become Slug, the Destroyer of Words
The real AI singularity is not Terminator. It is averageness, spreading like a cancer through human thought. Human writing has shape — rare, irregular, surprising, unmistakably itself. AI writing is a slug: the weighted average of human creativity, optimised for the median. It eats carrots for breakfast. Breeds. Multiplies.
▲
⦿ Why averageness — not AGI — is the biggest threat to human civilisation
⦿ What the data tells us about the shape of human vs AI writing
⦿ Why defending linguistic distinctiveness is a freedom of expression issue
⦿ What emerging tools exist to deal with the problem
⦿ How journalists, writers, readers, and publishers can join the fight
▼
Available as keynote (45 min), keynote with Q&A (60 min), panel, or fireside chat. Best suited to literary festivals, arts organisations, universities, publishers, and media organisations. David brings both the practitioner perspective — having built enterprise AI at scale — and the civil society perspective as a trustee at Article 19, the global freedom of expression organisation.
Navigating the AI J-Curve
Every AI transformation goes through a J-Curve: performance dips before it rises, costs precede benefits, and the organisations that pull the plug too early... just before the inflection point... are the ones that lose. David's broadly-cited J-Curve framework identifies three novel challenges that make AI change management an order of magnitude harder than anything that came before.
▲
⦿ Why AI transformation is structurally different from every previous digital wave
⦿ The three novel challenges — and what to do about each
⦿ How to read the J-Curve and know if you're in the dip or off the edge
⦿ What boards need to ask — and what honest answers look like
⦿ How to accelerate the benefits while genuinely mitigating the harm
▼
Available as keynote (45 min), keynote with Q&A (60 min), panel, or fireside chat. Best suited to boards and NEDs, CIOs and CTOs, transformation teams, tech conferences, and the investment community. David's J-Curve of Change framework has been cited across industries for 20+ years, most recently by the Tony Blair Institute and Pender Fund.
The Seatbelt Didn't Kill the Car
Every generation of transformative technology has faced the same argument: that safety regulation will slow progress. The seatbelt didn't kill the car. And AI governance, done right, will not kill AI. It will save it. Drawing on direct experience building AI platforms and developing AI standards, this talk demolishes the false choice between innovation and accountability.
▲
⦿ Why the innovation-versus-regulation framing is a false choice
⦿ What AI governance looks like inside organisations doing it well
⦿ How ISO 42001 and the EU AI Act actually create opportunity
⦿ What boards should ask about AI liability — and how to get honest answers
⦿ The governance moves that protect organisations and unlock trust simultaneously
▼
Available as keynote (45 min), keynote with Q&A (60 min), panel, or fireside chat. Best suited to policy makers, regulators, boards and NEDs, legal and compliance teams, and professional bodies. David serves on the AIGAS (AI Governance Standards) board and brings direct implementation experience of ISO 42001 and the EU AI Act.
Don't Be a Lemming Leader
The public mood is turning against AI, because the revolution is happening to them, not for them. And the leaders running fastest toward AI adoption are often running blindly — driven by competitive anxiety rather than strategy, lemmings in good suits leading their organisations toward a cliff they haven't looked over. A tough-love talk that pulls no punches.
▲
⦿ Why the public anger about AI is legitimate — and what leaders are missing
⦿ How to tell whether your AI strategy is vision or herd instinct
⦿ How to restore hope and agency for the young and the disadvantaged
⦿ How to lead a mixed workforce of humans, agents, and embodied AI
⦿ What non-lemming leadership actually looks like — and how to be it
▼
Available as keynote (45 min), keynote with Q&A (60 min), panel, or fireside chat. Best suited to CEOs, CPOs, leadership programmes, diversity and inclusion events, and young people's organisations. David speaks from direct experience — having built enterprise AI at scale and served on civil society boards for over a decade. The poacher and the gamekeeper.
David Viney
Keynote speaker, CIO, and AI governance expert.
London, United Kingdom
Actions
Please note that Sessionize is not responsible for the accuracy or validity of the data provided by speakers. If you suspect this profile to be fake or spam, please let us know.
Jump to top