Human Skills Trinity - Dave Coplin — Keynote Speaker, Author & AI Strategist

A tattered white flag flying from a wooden pole against an overcast grey sky, torn and fraying at the edges as it whips in the wind, beneath bold white headline text reading "The Rise of Cognitive Surrender?" with "COGNITIVE SURRENDER" emphasised in heavier type.

September 3, 2026

Dave Coplin

Are We Still Thinking?

The big fear I'm hearing from chief executives isn't whether AI will get things wrong, or whether it'll cost too much. It's that their people will keep getting the right answers without any idea how those...

Silhouetted treeline and hills beneath a dense, star-filled night sky with a faint meteor streak, above bold white headline text reading "We Are All of Us in the Gutter" with "ALL OF US" emphasised in heavier type.

August 27, 2026

Dave Coplin

Confidence and Curiosity

Ask Londoners where they learned to use AI and the answer is stark. Three-quarters taught themselves by experimenting. Educational institutions accounted for 8%. Libraries and community groups, 4%. Incandescent...

A tall weathered wooden ladder leaning against a bare concrete wall in an empty room. The lower half of the ladder has no rungs at all — just two bare side rails rising from the floor — with the rungs beginning only above head height, so the ladder cannot be climbed from the ground. Overlaid text reads "Not a bang but a whimper?"

August 20, 2026

Dave Coplin

The Jobs Apocalypse

Last week in the UK, the A-level results landed and just as happens every year, hundreds of thousands of students and their parents/carers began the scramble to pass through one of the final gateways...

A robotic hand types on a laptop keyboard in front of a row of humanoid robots, under the title "How I Make This" — header image for Dave Coplin's essay on writing with AI.

August 6, 2026

Dave Coplin

How I Make This

The way things are going these days, that sentence is currently supposed to sound like a confession. Like I’ve been trying to hide something that’s not polite to mention in public or be proud of. Except...

A herd of wildebeest splashing through a muddy river during the Serengeti migration, with the title 'When Wisdom Walks' overlaid at the top.

July 16, 2026

Dave Coplin

When Wisdom Walks

The wildebeest thunder across the Serengeti. The caribou cross the Canadian tundra in their hundreds of thousands. And every July, with startling reliability, LinkedIn fills up with the annual Microsoft...

Chalkboard-style chart titled 'A Relationship, Not a Skill,' plotting confidence against knowledge as AI users move from novice to expert—confidence spikes early, dips through a trough of realistic understanding, then climbs gradually toward genuine competence.Chalkboard-style chart titled 'A Relationship, Not a Skill,' plotting confidence against knowledge as AI users move from novice to expert—confidence spikes early, dips through a trough of realistic understanding, then climbs gradually toward genuine competence.

July 2, 2026

Dave Coplin

A Relationship, Not a Skill

But for me, the pearl in this particular oyster was buried on page 17, and it has nothing to do with adoption. 80% of education leaders rated their institution’s AI guidance as clear. Half of students...