Speaker & Press Kit

We're Not in a Technology Crisis. We're in a Listening Crisis.

C-suite and boards. AI transformation summits. Strategy and innovation leaders.

Leaders expect AI to make their people faster. Their people say it has made the work heavier. That gap is costing billions, and better data will not close it. I name what is being left out, and what changes when a room listens to body, soil, ancestral memory and the algorithm at once.

Cartography Is Not Home: AI and the Logic of the Map

Data and technology leaders. Cultural institutions. Arts and innovation festivals. International organisations.

Maps decided what counted. Whatever they left off stopped existing on paper. AI is doing the same thing at scale. Working with original pages from the 1899 Times Atlas, I trace how colonial map logic lives on in the data we train on, and what it costs the people still left off the page. Available as a talk or an immersive experience with sound.

Power That Doesn't Exhaust Itself: The Hidden Cost of Not Listening

CEOs and executive teams. Financial and professional services. Health sector leadership. Organisations rolling out AI at scale.

Poor mental health costs UK employers £51 billion a year. The biggest share is presenteeism: people at work, but not heard. This is not a wellbeing problem to hand to HR. It is where AI investment leaks away. Drawing on my own leadership and lived experience, I show why exhaustion is what performance-based authority costs, and what presence makes possible instead.

What Type of Ancestor Do You Want to Be?

Board retreats. Leadership programmes. Impact investors. Sustainability and ESG leaders.

This question stops executives mid-sentence. It moves leadership from reputation to legacy: the conditions you leave for those who come after. Drawn from my Wiley book, Leadership Legacy, it gives weight to a knowing most leaders already carry.

Right Question, Wrong Problem: Why AI ethics starts with listening

Universities, leadership teams, conferences, policy and public sector audiences

Most AI ethics asks how to make the machine behave. This keynote asks who was listened to before it was built.

"Adah gave a fresh perspective the audience really held onto, and fired us all up to think differently, out of the day-to-day detail."

· Fiona Couper, Chief Marketing Officer, VCCP

"Adah connects across topics to put together the bigger picture. Immediate, actionable learnings and real food for thought. Invaluable."

· Andy Postert, Google

"Adah brought fresh thinking and unconventional exercises, and pushed us all to reflect on what really matters. So much positive feedback from the team."

· Barbara Ryl, Global Brand Manager, Unilever