The question isn't what AI will do.
It's what you'll do with the time it gives back.
Photo: Ross Johnston
Dave Coplin is a global keynote speaker, author of The Rise of the Humans, and former Chief Envisioning Officer at Microsoft UK. For over three decades, he has helped organisations navigate waves of digital transformation - not by predicting the future, but by envisioning it.
In a world awash with AI efficiency announcements, Dave asks the question no one else is asking: not how fast can we automate, but what will we choose to do with the humanity we've got back.
T H E A R G U M E N T
Most organisations are solving the wrong problem.
We inherited a definition of productivity from the Industrial Revolution: output divided by input, refined in the factories of the nineteenth century. We've been applying it ever since - to computers, to the internet, and now to artificial intelligence.
So we use AI to do the same things faster and cheaper. We automate the email, compress the meeting, accelerate the report. And we measure success by how much time we saved.
But time saved is not the point. The point is what you do with it.
The organisations that will thrive in the next decade are not the ones who automate the most. They're the ones who ask a harder question: now that the machine is handling that, what should a human be doing instead?
That shift - from efficiency to effectiveness - is the most important strategic question of the age. And it's the question I've been building my work around for the last ten years.
W H A T D A V E D O E S
Speaking
Keynotes that move from provocation to possibility. Delivered to audiences from 50 to 5,000 - boardrooms, conference stages, academic institutions, and global summits. Dave works with organisers before the event to ensure his contribution lands at the moment of greatest impact.
Workshops & Advisory
When the keynote needs to go further. From half-day strategic workshops to ongoing board-level advisory relationships. The entry point is the keynote. The relationship goes deeper from there.
The Frameworks
Five named intellectual frameworks - developed over a decade of practice - that give organisations a new vocabulary for thinking about humans, machines, and what comes next. Not abstractions. Tested in the room, every week.
What Audiences Say
Dave reminds me of someone. The insight he brings and the authentic way he communicates makes you think he's somehow got hold of the future and brought it back. He's like the modern Marty McFly.
Coplin uses his position and experience to show a different future, giving you a more cheerful view of how to cope with the world of work and the flood of information than the usual headlines. You might also be infected by Coplin's sense of optimism: the idea that technology should be an enabler and an amplifier, a rising tide that lifts everyone.
Stay in the conversation
Every week, three short observations on AI, work, and what it means to be human right now. Sharp enough to share. Short enough to read in the lift.
Subscribe at davecoplin.substack.com - no noise, no funnel, just thinking worth your time.
Ready to explore an event? Dave's speaking calendar is managed by DBA Speakers.
Diana Boulter | DBA Speakers | diana@dbaspeakers.com | +44 7554 440537