Your performance was first class. Great insights, and you pitched at the right level for our audience. Everyone said it was the best session of the day! It was brilliant.
Zack Kass
AI Futurist, former Head of Go To Market at OpenAI
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Zack Kass
Biography
Zack Kass is an advisor, researcher, keynote speaker, and the former Head of Go-To-Market at OpenAI.
At OpenAI, Zack led the teams responsible for sales, partnerships, and customer success, turning the company’s cutting-edge research into real-world business solutions. He has personally advised executives across dozens of industries on deploying AI at scale.
As an executive business advisor, Zack now works with Fortune 1,000 boardrooms and leadership teams—including Coca-Cola, Morgan Stanley, and Amgen—to help leaders navigate the rapidly evolving AI landscape.
Zack’s mission is to ensure individuals, businesses, and governments are active participants in the AI-powered future by making the technology both understandable and actionable. He is recognized as one of the foremost thinkers in applied AI, with his insights featured in Fortune, Newsweek, Entrepreneur, AdAge, and Business Insider.
Beyond his advisory work, Zack also supports AI education and research at the University of Virginia. He holds a BA from the University of California, Berkeley, and currently resides in Santa Barbara, California.
Zack Kass
Featured Keynote Programs
The Next Renaissance
The Next Renaissance is Zack Kass’s signature keynote and the culmination of 16 years at the vanguard of AI. It is built on firsthand experience shipping frontier technology, three years inside OpenAI, research roles at two leading universities, and more than 500 meetings inside Inc. 5000 boardrooms. The talk invites audiences to examine AI through a new lens and to make specific choices about how they will lead.
At its center is Zack’s groundbreaking theory of Unmetered Intelligence. Just as water, electricity, and the internet transformed access to power and information, AI is driving the cost of cognition toward abundance. When thinking becomes cheap and everywhere, the source of advantage shifts. The question is no longer how smart a team can be on its best day. The question becomes where humans create irreplaceable value.
Zack maps that shift with a set of clear ideas and tools:
- Unmetered Intelligence: cognitive capacity becomes abundant. Expect deflation in the cost of discovery, iteration, and decision support.
- Behavioral Adaptability and the K-curve: the scarce asset is the willingness and ability to change behavior repeatedly. People and firms bend up or calcify.
- The Adoption Gap: technology races ahead of norms and institutions. Leaders must close the gap with standards, training, and review rituals.
- The Natural Language Operating System: work moves from software interfaces to conversation and agentic execution with human approval gates.
- The Automation Boundary: a practical line between what machines should do and what humans must own, grounded in risk, value, and acceptability.
The keynote covers the good, the bad, the ugly, and the wonderful. It celebrates the breakthroughs that abundance unlocks and addresses real risks like dehumanization, identity displacement, and empowered bad actors. Attendees leave with a simple plan that scales from the C-suite to the front line.
What audiences gain
- A shared mental model for AI that reduces hype and focuses action
- A method to select three high-leverage workflows and run ten low-cost pilots
- An automation boundary that protects human judgment and customer trust
- Review checklists and rituals that make agents safe and useful
- Language to align strategy, technology, and culture
Formats and add-ons
- 30, 45, or 60 minutes with Q&A
- Optional live micro-demo
- Custom industry examples for finance, healthcare, retail, manufacturing, public sector, or education
- Follow-on workshop available: pilot design, governance, and measurement
The Next Great Company
Artificial Intelligence is transforming work as we know it—and the stakes for organizations couldn’t be higher. Individuals and companies that don’t adapt run the risk of being left behind. How can you prepare for what’s coming? As the former Head of Go To Market for OpenAI and leading futurist, Zack Kass has helped hundreds of leaders rethink their AI strategy. In this compelling talk, Zack will deliver a comprehensive roadmap on how to build, develop, motivate, and retain high-performing teams and companies in an AI-driven world. Audiences will come away understanding the importance of soft skills, constant learning, and a culture of adaptability to thrive in the new business landscape.
The Next Great Company is a 30-40 minute keynote
Societal Thresholds
Throughout history, we embraced innovation when it clearly made life better—think fire, electricity, antibiotics, the internet. But today, this phenomenon has shifted. As AI races forward, the biggest barrier is no longer what technology can do, but what society is willing to accept. In this provocative keynote, Zack Kass explores the growing gap between technological possibility and societal readiness. Drawing from his experience at the forefront of AI’s evolution, Zack unpacks why cultural, ethical, and institutional resistance—not technical limitations—will define the pace of progress. Audiences will come away with a powerful framework for navigating resistance, rethinking innovation, and leading through one of the most pivotal moments in human history.
Societal Thresholds is a 20-25 minute keynote
Zack Kass
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