About
Thomas Anglero
Strategic AI Advisor to Executive Leaders and Boards · Keynote Speaker · Author
Your board has questions about AI that did not exist two years ago, and the people answering them have never run the thing they are advising on.
Thomas Anglero is a Strategic AI Advisor to executive leaders and boards, and the author of Intro to Artificial Intelligence. He advises boards on AI while running a company whose engineering team is AI agents rather than people. That is where his material comes from: what AI actually costs, what breaks, and what it demands of the person responsible for it. It is a scarcity boards feel directly: in BDO’s 2025 survey of more than 200 public company board directors, 13% of directors and 12% of management teams said they lack the skill or experience to oversee emerging technology, and 44% said they plan to look outside the boardroom to fill that gap.
Before founding MerkabaPhi AS in Oslo, he was Nordic Chief Technology and Innovation Officer at Cognizant, where he led AI and enterprise transformation strategy across the Nordic region and closed over USD 500 million in deals. At IBM he was Nordic Director of Innovation and global spokesperson for IBM Watson. He founded the IBM Watson AI Lab for Cancer at the Oslo Cancer Cluster, one of the first AI cancer laboratories on a European cancer campus, and led innovation inside the Norwegian Tax Administration.
He has delivered over 450 keynotes across 30 countries for organizations including IBM, the WHO, the World Governments Summit and the European Commission, and writes the weekly newsletter Clarity at the Top on AI strategy, governance and the decisions leadership teams avoid.
Three times the industry changed. Three times, Thomas was already there.
1995: Among the first to make a voice call over the internet
Before broadband. Before Skype. Before anyone imagined a telephone call could travel through a computer.
In February 1995, VocalTec released Internet Phone — the first commercial application that let a consumer make a voice call over the internet. Six minutes after it went live, Thomas called VocalTec’s CEO in Herzliya, Israel, and became one of its earliest beta testers.
The reason was personal, not academic. He was calling his future wife Camilla in Norway, and international calls cost fifteen dollars a minute. He needed a way to talk to her that would not cost everything he had.
When he moved to Norway, Ericsson and Telenor both drew on his early VoIP background.
As CEO of Free World Dialup, he ran one of the first peer-to-peer internet telephony ventures — a platform that proved voice could move across the open internet without gatekeepers. CNN named him Maverick of the Day.
While working at Ericsson in Norway, Thomas proposed bringing an international VoIP conference to Europe for the first time, and drove it personally: he approached Ericsson’s worldwide CEO directly and secured him as keynote speaker. The first Voice on the Net Europe conference drew more than 500 attendees from around the world.
2017: The IBM Watson AI Lab for Cancer
In 2017, Thomas founded the IBM Watson AI Lab for Cancer at the Oslo Cancer Cluster — one of the first AI cancer laboratories built inside a European cancer campus.
He asked the CEO of IBM Norway to fund it first, and was told no. He then took the case to the CEO of IBM Nordic, who said yes.
The lab became a point of reference for the European healthcare community. A delegation of forty physicians from the Netherlands spent a day inside the lab with Thomas, learning what AI could mean for their work.
It happened because one person asked for something that seemed unreasonable, was told no, found another way, and built it anyway.
2025: AI agents as the engineering team
Thomas’s most recent venture was built without a traditional engineering team. AI agents handle the development, testing and deployment; Thomas sets direction, makes the decisions, and holds accountability.
This is the lived experience behind his current keynote work — including The AI Experiment Is Over and the Results Have Not Arrived, Why AI Drains the Moat From the Inside: The Warning Signs Leaders Miss, and How to Make AI Stick and Change How Work Gets Done.
Credentials
He has delivered more than 450 keynotes across 30+ countries for organizations including the European Commission, the World Health Organization, the World Governments Summit in Dubai, IBM, EY and UNICEF. He has also delivered fireside-chat sessions for organizations including Medtronic.
He redesigned how Norway’s Tax Administration approaches innovation, held senior positions at Telenor and Ericsson, and was Nordic Chief Technology and Innovation Officer at Cognizant, where he closed over USD 500 million in enterprise transformation deals.
He was named Social Entrepreneur of the Year by IESE Business School (University of Navarra) for WiHood, March 2009.
Selected as a judge for The Speaker Awards and Summit (thespeakerawards.com), London, 2027.
He publishes Clarity at the Top, a newsletter and podcast for senior executives navigating the shift AI is creating inside organizations, and inside themselves.
How leadership is changing
Throughout his career, Thomas has worked with organizations building AI strategies, shaping their next business models, and navigating the human side of what follows.
What has changed most is not the technology. It is what leadership now has to carry.
The decisions are faster. The stakes are less forgiving. The people around you are looking for clarity you may not yet have. And the loneliness of leading through a shift this large rarely gets spoken about honestly.
That is the work he does now.
How we can work together
Thomas works with a small number of senior leaders each quarter, on the questions they cannot ask out loud to anyone else.
The work is direct. It starts with a conversation about what is actually happening inside the organization, and inside you as a leader. Sometimes the answer is a new strategy. Sometimes it is a decision you have been delaying. Sometimes it is simply a voice outside the organization that lets you see your own situation clearly. Learn more about how this works.
The next step
If this is the kind of work you are looking for, have a quiet thirty-minute conversation.
Email Thomas@Anglero.com.
Why this work matters
Not because it is easy.
Because it matters, and because some of it cannot be done alone.
Thomas Anglero on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/anglero
MerkabaPhi AS, Oslo, Norway