Andrew Grill, The Actionable Futurist, visited Speakers Corner, one of the UK’s leading Speaker Bureaus on 9th April to deliver his showcase keynote, Becoming Digitally Curious in the Age of AI, to the bureau’s team.
He opened by asking the entire room to stand and answer five questions about their own digital habits. Googling yourself, listening to podcasts, using two-factor authentication, creating an AI image, and buying cryptocurrency. The exercise, which Andrew has used with tens of thousands of people over eight years, instantly revealed where the room sat on the digital curiosity spectrum and set the tone for everything that followed.
Andrew moved quickly through the history of AI, from Turing’s 1950 question “Can machines think?” through the 2017 Google transformer paper that made ChatGPT possible, before moving into live demonstrations that left the room with concrete, immediately usable takeaways.
He showed how AI found Wally in a complex “Where’s Wally?” beach scene, condensed a 17,000-cell company SWOT analysis that would have taken a human analyst ten days, generated a full podcast episode from a PDF of his book, and convincingly cloned a voice using a five-pound tool.
His framework was consistent throughout. AI is augmented intelligence, not artificial intelligence. It replaces tasks, not people. Digital curiosity is rocket fuel. And the data you need to get started is almost certainly something your organisation already holds.
He closed the keynote section with his “Curious Five”, five specific experiments every attendee could run that afternoon, and a custom Speakers Corner resource page at curious.click/sc that has attracted over 15,000 return visits since launch.
The second part of the session covered Andrew’s “beyond the keynote” product suite, including an eight-week online course, a leadership strategy boot camp and closed-door board briefings, giving the Speakers Corner team ready-made packages to offer clients after the initial keynote booking.
The Q&A ran significantly over time. Nobody seemed to mind.
