Chris Dessi
- Founder, Torque AI
- Fox 5 AI commentator
- Author of ChatGPT for Profit (Vol. 1 & 2) and There
Is No Tomorrow
Chris Dessi Speaker Biography
Chris Dessi is the operator business leaders call when they’ve bought the AI tools and still can’t tell which ones are working. He is the founder of Torque AI, an advisory firm that helps mid-market companies and the firms that serve them (law, accounting, insurance, wealth management, M&A) decide which AI to keep, which to delete, and how to make what’s left pay in 90 days.
He came to AI from the revenue side, not the lab. As a sales executive at a New York fintech, Chris and his team drove $32 million in AI-led revenue; before that he was part of the Buddy Media team acquired by Salesforce for $689 million. That history is why his talks sound like a P&L conversation rather than a technology demo, and why his signature line, “The only way to win with AI is to delete it,” has become the frame CEOs use when they finally get honest about their AI spend.
Chris is the AI commentator New York turns to. He appears regularly on Fox 5 New York and has been featured on NBC, CNBC, CBS, MSNBC, CNN and Bloomberg, translating the week’s AI headlines into what a business owner should actually do about them. He is the author of ChatGPT for Profit (Volume 1 and 2), the practical playbook for using AI in a business, and There Is No Tomorrow, on how executives over forty reinvent themselves when the ground moves.
He hosts AI Summit New York during NY Tech Week and produces LegalCon.AI, InsureCon.AI and WealthCon.AI for the professions he advises.
A founding partner of the NY AI Alliance and a TEDx speaker, Chris has keynoted in 17 countries for audiences from Fortune 500 leadership teams to the United States Marines aboard the Intrepid. He founded the Westchester Digital Summit, which Forbes twice named a must-attend conference, and was named to the Business Council of Westchester’s 40 Under 40.
Chris lives in Chappaqua, New York, with his wife Laura and their two daughters. When Hurricane Sandy cancelled the New York City Marathon, he ran his own 26.2 miles through Westchester anyway, for his father, who had been diagnosed with ALS. Urgency, he’ll tell you, is a better operating system than fear.
Book this SpeakerSpeech Topics
The Only Way to Win With AI Is to Delete It
What the best-run companies are removing, what they’re keeping, and the 90-day path to AI that actually pays.
Roughly 95% of corporate AI pilots return nothing. It isn’t the team’s fault; the solution they were sold is backwards. Most organizations have added four to six AI tools in two years and can’t point to one that changed a client outcome or a margin. This keynote takes the opposite approach to every vendor pitch in the exhibit hall: it starts with what to delete. Chris walks the room through why AI pilots fail, how the firms winning with AI separate the tools that compound from the ones that quietly erode trust and margin, and what never to let AI touch.
Every attendee leaves with the same five-question audit Chris uses with his own clients, ready to run on their business the same week.
Your Audience will Leave Able to:
1. Evaluate every AI tool in the business against a 5-question audit and decide, tool by tool, whether to
keep, consolidate or remove it.
2. Identify where AI reliably compounds in their industry and where it should never be used, and write a
one-page AI position statement for clients, boards and regulators.
3. Build a 90-day implementation sequence, with owners and checkpoints, for the AI that survives the audit.
There Is No Tomorrow
Urgency is a better operating system than fear. How leaders and teams reinvent when the ground moves.
Chris has reinvented himself in public more than once: from the Buddy Media exit to Salesforce, to a $32M AI-led revenue run at a New York fintech, to founding an AI firm on television, while everything he’d built before was being rewritten by the technology he now teaches. This is the talk for sales kickoffs, leadership offsites and annual meetings: the story, the operating system he built out of it, and the daily habits that let a team move before it feels ready. It is built for producers, managers and executives who know the next chapter has already started and want to stop waiting for permission.
Your Audience will Leave Able to:
1. Replace a fear-based planning cycle with an urgency-based one: shorter horizons, visible commitments,
faster feedback.
2. Run Chris’s “no tomorrow” audit on their own role: what they’d stop, start and say if they knew the clock
was real.
3. Lead a team through a reset in 90 days without losing the people who made the old model work
