Ben Hammersley

Futurist, Speaker & Principal

@ Hammersley Futures

Ben Hammersley is a world-renowned synthesist and advisor. He specializes in the second-order effects of technological innovation on society, including the cutting edge of crime and conflict, national security and geopolitics. His company, Hammersley Futures, builds advanced tools for intelligence acquisition and analysis, using a combination of human understanding and AI-driven data processing to give new insights to deep problems.

Previously Ben was executive editor of WIRED, the writer and presenter of the BBC’s “Cybercrimes with Ben Hammersley” (now on Netflix or Amazon Prime internationally), a war correspondent in Afghanistan, an advisor to the European Commission, a pilot and wilderness medic in the USA, the author of 5 books, and the inventor of the word “Podcast”. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife, daughter, and too many robots.

Too Smart to Manage

This year’s arrival of next generation LLMs, reasoning models, and agentic AI, is transforming the way we work: with every new development, yet another industry finds its work can be done by fewer people, and faster too. Many business leaders have reacted to this increased productivity with layoffs, redundancies, and reorganizations. But this is the wrong approach.

In this talk, we will discuss the opportunities AI presents to the imaginative and bold leader, and discuss the truth that AI reveals: that everything you think you know about management is wrong.