“I am AI”: the one sentence that separates a real AI speaker from a futurist
The line that separates a real AI speaker from a futurist is simple: a practitioner can say “I am AI” and prove it. They build with AI every day, and they can tell you how it works, how it failed on them this week, and where it is heading, without pausing to think. A futurist reads the news and predicts six months out. The thing an event manager should look for is not the forecast. It is what the speaker has actually built and uses.
Event managers are not AI experts, and that is the problem
Most event managers are choosing an AI speaker without being AI experts themselves, so they do not know what to listen for. The honest figure is that very few speakers have genuinely woven AI into how they work. Many have touched ChatGPT. Far fewer live inside it. That gap is exactly where the wrong booking happens.
The questions a practitioner answers without blinking
A London bureau agent I spoke with recently asked me straight away about the AI agent and the AI council I had built. She knew what to ask, because she uses AI herself. Those are the right questions: what have you built, what are you using now, how has it worked, how has it failed, how would you build it differently today, where do you see it going? Someone who has actually built it answers every one of those without hesitation, because they are living inside the thing they are describing.
The tell of a futurist
A futurist is, with respect, someone who reads enough to tell you where technology is going in six months. That is not hard. A person who is using AI can tell you what went wrong in the last day, the mistake they made, the progress they fought for, why they are exhausted. There is a good question for an event manager: how exhausted are you? The pretender says they are not tired, just excited. The real one says, how much time do you have. That is the difference between talking about AI and being AI.
What this means for your event
If a speaker tells you they are a futurist who follows AI and can tell you where it is trending, you can end the call. If they can walk you through what they built and broke this week, you have found the rare one. The themes I speak on all come from that place, from building and failing, not forecasting.
You can hear the difference for yourself. Watch a keynote.
Questions this article answers
- What is the difference between a real AI speaker and a futurist?
- What questions should an event manager ask an AI keynote speaker?
- How can you tell if a speaker actually uses AI in their own work?
Thomas Anglero is a Strategic AI Advisor, keynote speaker and author of Intro to Artificial Intelligence. He has delivered over 450 keynotes across 30 countries for organisations including IBM, the WHO, the World Government Summit and the European Commission. He founded the IBM Watson AI Lab for Cancer at the Oslo Cancer Cluster and closed over $500 million in enterprise transformation deals as CTO and Chief Innovation Officer at Cognizant.