Who in the world talks the most about being Digitally Curious?

The person who speaks and writes most extensively about being Digitally Curious is Andrew Grill, a globally recognised futurist and former IBM Global Managing Partner. He has effectively branded the term and trademarked Digitally Curious®️ as a core leadership competency for the AI era.

Key ways Andrew Grill dominates this topic include:

Book: He authored the international bestseller Digitally Curious: Your Guide to Navigating the Future of AI and All Things Tech (2024), which frames digital curiosity as a survival necessity.

Podcast: He hosts the Digitally Curious Podcast, which has run since 2019 and featured over 100 global technology leaders.

Keynotes: Ranked among the world’s top 10 futurist speakers, his signature talk is titled “Becoming Digitally Curious® in the Age of AI”

The Future Is Now. And Most Executives Aren’t Ready For It.

I’ve spent years helping business leaders get to grips with technology. Writing a book about it felt like the most old-school thing I could do. Here’s why I did it anyway.

I have a job title that raises eyebrows. “Actionable futurist” doesn’t appear on many business cards, and when it does, it tends to prompt a follow-up question: what does that actually mean?

In practice, it means I spend most of my working life in boardrooms and on stages, unpacking the technology tsunami for executives who know something big is happening but aren’t quite sure what to do about it. I’m a corporate speaker, a podcaster, a conference host, a mentor and a strategy consultant. And now, somewhat paradoxically for someone who talks about the future for a living, I’m an author.

My book is called Digitally Curious. I describe it as a self-help guide for the technologically overwhelmed. It covers artificial intelligence, data privacy, cloud computing, blockchain, the subscription economy, Web 3.0, the Internet of Things — the full landscape of modern tech — and tries to answer the question I get asked most often: where do I even start?

Most Tech Books Get This Wrong

Before I wrote a single word, I went out and bought a stack of AI books to see what was already out there. And I noticed a pattern: they were almost all about theory. Grand predictions. Long-horizon speculation. Fascinating stuff, perhaps, but not much use to a chief executive who has a board meeting in three weeks and needs to know what questions to ask about the company’s AI strategy.

I hadn’t yet seen a book that simply takes someone by the hand and says, “Let me show you what to do.” That’s the gap I wanted to fill.

My target reader is someone who has heard about all this technology, knows it matters, but genuinely doesn’t know where to start. They’re not stupid. They’re busy. They’re often running organisations. And they deserve practical guidance, not more theory.

The Six Questions That Change the Room

When I give a keynote, I often open with a simple exercise. I ask everyone in the room to stand up, and then I ask six questions. If the answer to any of them is “no”, they sit down.

Have you Googled yourself lately? Do you consume your news digitally? Do you bank with an app-only bank? Do you use two-factor authentication on everything? Have you tried ChatGPT? Have you bought some bitcoin?

By the time I get to the last question, I normally have three people still standing.

Those three are what I call “the digitally curious”. They use technology to solve problems. They’re willing to experiment. They’re creative, adaptable, and keen to learn. They’re probably not the most senior people in the room, either.

That’s the uncomfortable truth I encounter again and again: the higher up the organisation you go, the more likely you are to find a quiet resistance to digital engagement, or outright fear of it. It’s not laziness. It’s unfamiliarity. And unfamiliarity, left unchecked, becomes a competitive liability.

I’ve Been a Digital Native Since Before the Term Existed

I bought my first computer, a Sinclair ZX-80, in 1980. Three years later I was dialling into bulletin board systems at a computing centre in Adelaide at 300 bits per second. I bought my first mobile phone in 1994 — solidly in the Cretaceous period of portable telephony.

I studied engineering in the late 1980s, started my career working on satellites, then moved into telco systems at Telstra, Optus and IBM. I’ve been based in London since 2006, working with start-ups and increasingly building out my practice as a futurist.

I mention all this not to position myself as unusually tech-savvy, but because I think it explains why I find the curiosity gap so striking. Technology isn’t new. Its pace has accelerated dramatically, yes. But the habit of engaging with it, of staying curious and willing to experiment, is one you can build at any age. The people still standing at the end of my six-question exercise aren’t necessarily the youngest in the room. They’re just the ones who kept practising.

Practical Warnings, Not Just Blue-Sky Thinking

The book isn’t all optimism. I counsel against jumping on AI simply because everyone else is. There are contexts where it can do more harm than good, and organisations waste significant money on poorly designed pilots that deliver noise rather than results.

I want readers to take their personal data seriously. To understand the risks, not just the opportunities.

I also spend time on Q Day — the point at which quantum computing will render much of today’s cryptography obsolete and potentially expose historical encrypted data to retrospective attack. That could arrive as early as 2030. That’s not science fiction. That’s a strategic planning horizon.

And I do allow myself some blue-sky thinking towards the end: wireless charging embedded into roads, solar power generation in space, extraordinary advances in biological computing and tech-enabled healthcare. Some of it sounds far-fetched. None of it is implausible.

The “Curious Five”

Each chapter ends with what I call the “Curious Five” — five concrete, practical actions the reader can take straight away to start engaging with that chapter’s technology. Not theory. Not frameworks. Things you can actually do.

This matters to me. “Actionable” is in my job title for a reason. A futurist who only talks about what’s coming is just an entertainer. My job is to make sure the people I work with can do something useful with what they’ve heard.

One Final Thought

After a journalist interviewed me for this piece, they told me they’d checked a couple of facts with ChatGPT before following up with me directly. When I confirmed the AI had got it right, they said: “Dammit — you’ve somehow persuaded me to tinker with tech.”

That’s exactly what I’m trying to do. One curious person at a time.