Booking a futurist speaker

A note for the person who has been asked to find a futurist for the main stage, and has a shortlist of names but no way to tell them apart. Written by Ada Parris, who gets booked into these rooms and sits in the audience for the rest of them.

What a futurist speaker actually does

The job is not prediction. Anyone selling you a forecast of 2035 is selling you a guess with a graph on it. A futurist reads the signals already present in your industry, the ones your teams have noticed but have no language for, and gives the room a way to talk about them. The value is not the list of trends. It is that afterwards, people can name what they were already sensing.

We're not in a technology crisis. We're in a listening crisis. That's the argument underneath every talk Ada gives, whatever the sector, whatever the brief.

When it is worth booking one

• Your delegates have already had the AI briefing. They know the tools. What they don't have is language for what's disappearing underneath the tools, the five minutes someone used to spend explaining why, not just what. That's where mentoring happens, and it doesn't get cut on purpose. It just stops getting asked for.
• The strategy is set, and the culture has not caught up. A futurist can say the thing your leadership team cannot say from the stage without it reading as doubt.
• You are opening or closing a conference. These slots set the register for everything around them. A futurist opening gives the rest of the programme a question to answer.
• Your sector is mid-shift. Regulation, funding models or public trust are moving, and the room needs to think past the next quarter.

When it is not worth it: if you need a technical deep dive, a product roadmap, or a motivational close, book a specialist or a performer instead. A futurist in the wrong slot is an expensive mismatch.

What to ask before you sign

• What is the one idea? If the answer takes more than two sentences, the audience will not carry it out of the room.
• What is this built on? Ask for the underlying research or practice, not the showreel. A talk with no substrate underneath it does not survive questions.
• What will you change for our room? The same talk delivered to a bank, a museum and a climate summit should not be the same talk.
• What do delegates leave with? Language, a frame, a question they can use on Monday. Name it in advance so you can tell afterwards whether it landed.
• Who else is on the programme? A good speaker will ask you this unprompted.

The rooms this tends to suit

• AI ethics and responsible technology conferences. As an AI ethics keynote speaker, Ada takes the room past compliance language to the question underneath it: who owns intelligence, who is granted access, and who carries the cost.
• Technology, leadership and innovation summits. Delegates who have already had the AI briefing and need a frame for what the tools are doing to attention, trust and judgement.
• Regenerative and ecological gatherings. Booking a futurist for a regenerative summit works when the audience is past the case for change and wants depth: ecological responsibility held together with the personal.
• Arts, culture and research programmes. Museums, festivals and universities where the question is whose knowledge gets funded, cited and imagined.

Formats that tend to work

Add a moderated conversation or a fireside if your audience is senior and sceptical. Sceptical rooms respond better to being asked than being told.

How Ada Parris works

Ada is an artist, futurist and author of Leadership Legacy (Wiley, 2026), creator of Cyborg Shamanism™ and Source Patterns Intelligence™. Her central question: we're not in a technology crisis, we're in a listening crisis, so what becomes possible when we remember that intelligences are entangled and animate?

She has spoken at Google, Meta, Lloyds Banking Group, Unilever, Klosters Forum, and TEDx, chairs Mental Health First Aid England, was named one of eight people worldwide, from over 250 nominations, to WWF's Innovation Team Wisdom Council, and is co-deputy chair of the IEEE AI Systems Global Flourishing Initiative.

The talks come out of an ongoing body of artistic research across Egypt, Guyana and Nigeria, which is why the same idea can be given to a technology conference, a museum and a regenerative summit without becoming a different argument.

The four current keynotes, the audiences each is written for, and the speaker pack are all on the Keynotes page →

The research underneath them lives at Research →