Dr. Mark van Rijmenam
- Founder of Futurwise—the fastest path to your next insight
- Author of six books, including “Now What? How to Ride the Tsunami of Change”
Dr. Mark van Rijmenam Speaker Biography
Dr. Mark van Rijmenam is The Digital Speaker, a world-leading futurist and global AI keynote speaker who helps leaders decide what AI, and the technologies that follow it, mean for their organization. He speaks to conference audiences worldwide and, through his Intelligence Age Readiness Briefing, to leadership teams at retreats, offsites and board meetings.
He calls himself an optimistic dystopian, embracing technology’s promise with a healthy skepticism about its risks. His WAVE framework (Watch, Adapt, Verify, Empower) gives leaders a way of deciding that they keep using long after he has left the room. His Intelligence Age Scorecard measures how ready an organization is across the four WAVE pillars, in confidence, from the people closest to the work.
He has given more than 200 keynotes in 32+ countries, with an average keynote rating of 9.2 out of 10, and is trusted by leaders at Microsoft, Dell, Nestlé, Mastercard and EY. He speaks in person, virtually or live as a life-size hologram, and gave a TEDx talk in virtual reality (TEDxNijmegen).
He holds a PhD from the University of Technology Sydney, is a Certified Speaking Professional, Global Speaking Fellow and LinkedIn Top Voice, and was ranked #1 futurist by Global Gurus in 2025 and #3 in 2026. Salesforce named him among 16 leading AI voices. He has written six books, most recently the award-winning Now What? How to Ride the Tsunami of Change. He writes the Synthetic Minds newsletter and founded Futurwise. You can talk to his digital twin on WhatsApp.
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Speech Topics
Riding the Tsunami of Change: the flagship keynote on exponential change and the WAVE framework.
From Insight to Execution: The Operating System forExponential Change. The future is not on the horizon. It is crashing down like a tsunami. AI, automation, and robotics are not distant possibilities — they are transforming every industry right now. The question is not whether change will affect your organization. It is whether your leaders have a system to navigate it.
In this high-energy, thought-provoking keynote, Dr. Mark van Rijmenam takes audiences inside the Intelligence Age — the era where technologies do not just advance, they converge, amplify, and cascade across every facet of business and society. Drawing from his latest book Now What? How to Ride the Tsunami of Change, real-world breakthroughs, and the WAVE Framework (Watch, Adapt, Verify, Empower), Mark delivers a practical operating system for leaders who need to act decisively in a world where playbooks expire faster than committees can update them. This is not a tour of tomorrow’s gadgets. It is a strategic reset for how your leadership team thinks about change itself.
Leading in the Intelligence Age: the AI keynote on strategy, governance and operationalization.
Cut Through the Hype. Build the Bionic Organization. Lead with Confidence. Generative AI has taken the world by storm — but the real challenge is not the technology. It is what leaders do with it. Most organizations are somewhere between panic and paralysis: overwhelmed by vendor promises, uncertain about governance, and unclear on where AI creates genuine value versus expensive noise.
In this fast-paced and commanding keynote, Dr. Mark van Rijmenam cuts through the noise of AI hype to deliver what senior leaders actually need: a clear-eyed assessment of where AI creates real value, where it introduces real risk, and how to operationalize it responsibly at every level of the organization. Drawing on case studies from global enterprises, his WAVE Framework, and his recognition by Salesforce as one of 16 leading voices in AI, Mark shows how the organizations that will thrive are not the ones that adopt AI fastest — they are the ones that adopt it most intelligently. He demystifies the journey from generative AI and autonomous agents to digital twins and human-machine collaboration — illustrating the path to a bionic organization where AI augments human judgment rather than replacing it.
Becoming the Architect of Tomorrow: when technologies collide and industries transform.
AI Is Just the Beginning. The Real Disruption Happens Where Technologies Meet. AI dominates the headlines. But the forces reshaping industries do not operate in isolation — they converge, amplify, and cascade. When AI meets spatial intelligence, when robotics meets the metaverse, when brain-computer interfaces meet the workforce, when quantum computing meets your data infrastructure — the disruption is not additive. It is exponential.
In this cutting-edge keynote, Dr. Mark van Rijmenam takes audiences beyond the AI conversation to the convergence that defines the Intelligence Age: the moment when multiple exponential technologies collide and create entirely new industries, business models, and ways of working. Drawing from his annual Technology Trends research, his book Now What? and a decade of advising Fortune 500 companies across six continents, Mark maps the intersection of AI, spatial intelligence, digital twins, autonomous agents, robotics, brain-computer interfaces, and quantum computing — not as a technology tour, but as a strategic landscape that demands a new kind of leadership. This keynote reimagines work, collaboration, and value creation in a world where the boundary between physical and digital dissolves, where decentralized systems and autonomous agents reshape the employee experience, and where the organizations that thrive will be those that see the connections others miss.
All three are available as an in-person keynote, a live virtual keynote, a holographic keynote or a half-day workshop.
Books
