Brian Solis

Brian Solis: Biography at a Glance

Brian Solis is one of the world’s leading digital anthropologists and futurists who has been called “one of the 21st-century business world’s leading thinkers.”
One of the industry’s first digital anthropologists, Brian helps audiences empathize with different generations (Gen-Y, Z, Alpha) and understand how technology creates a cross-generational superset of people with similar behaviors, interests, and aspirations.
Currently, Brian serves as the Head of Global Innovation at ServiceNow, he sets the strategic direction and programming for ServiceNow's Innovation and Executive Briefing Centers in Silicon Valley, New York, London, Paris, Sydney, and Singapore.
With a loyal online audience of over 800,000 people, his work makes him a sought-after thought leader to leading brands, celebrities such as Oprah, Shaq, and Ashton Kutcher, and over 1,000 startups around the world.
Brian is also an award-winning author of eight best-selling books including, Lifescale: How to Live a More Creative, Productive, and Happy Life and X: The Experience When Business Meets Design, and is known for pioneering frameworks such as Digital Darwinism and the Novel Economy.
Brian helps audiences understand the evolving, complex landscape of digital trends and how they impact our work, markets, and business over time.
Brian humanizes each wave of emergent disruption, helping shift people’s mindsets from being overwhelmed, confused, or intimidated to moving forward with curiosity, excitement, and imagination.

Media

Biography

Futurist: As a long-time Silicon Valley leader, Brian stays connected to technology leaders and trends to help executives anticipate and navigate the future. Brian’s research focuses on analyzing emerging and disruptive technologies to provide strategic foresight for organizations seeking to stay ahead in an era of rapid change.

Brian’s research and frameworks, such as “Digital Darwinism” and the “Novel Economy”, have guided Fortune 500 companies, top brands, and global enterprises in rethinking their approach to customer and employee experience, innovation, and leadership.

Digital Anthropologist: Brian is one of the industry’s first digital anthropologists who helped define the practice and humanized the trends. He observes how technology changes people’s behavior as leaders, employees, or customers and understand their aspirations, their values, how they make decisions, and how they want to work.

Through this research, Brian helps audiences empathize with different generations (Gen-Y, Z, Alpha) and understand how technology creates a cross-generational superset of customer and employees with similar behaviors, interests, and aspirations. Brian coined these important groups as Generation-Connected and Generation-Novel.

ServiceNow: Currently, Brian serves as the Head of Global Innovation at ServiceNow. In his role, Brian helps drive vision and strategy for the company's Office of Innovation. He also leads ServiceNow Futures, a specialized think tank that studies emerging technology and business trends. His team publishes insights that explore these trends and their future impact and the challenges and opportunities they create. Brian and his team then work closely with executives as trusted advisors to guide them in developing meaningful business and digital transformation strategies.

United Nations: Brian serves as a special adviser to the UN global innovation team. He develops workshops and keynotes that explore emergent trends and future scenarios, scenario strategies, skills development, and culture and leadership.

Salesforce: As the leader of Global Innovation at Salesforce, Brian gained a reputation as the “CxO Whisperer” because of his ability to translate shifting technology and market trends into actionable strategies. He also has a deep understanding of the challenges and opportunities facing companies and helps leaders think differently about current priorities and investments to future proof their organizations. Brian also partnered with leading brands to develop innovation pilots in service, L&D, and commerce, including applications that featured digital humans, 3D/immersive shopping and e-commerce powered by augmented reality.

Topics

The Leadership Mindshift: The Six-Stage Mindset Shift to That Helps Every Leader Shape the Future, Right Now

Most transformations don’t succeed because they’re trying to build tomorrow with yesterday’s assumptions, metrics, and mindsets. When the world changes faster than the organization can adapt, even the best strategies stall in the same place: “We’ve always done it this way."

In this energizing keynote, Brian Solis introduces the six-stage Mindshift cycle: 1) Receive, 2) Perceive, 3) Weave, 4) Conceive, 5) Believe, and 6) Achieve. The Mindshift framework empowers leaders can use to reframe disruption into possibility, convert uncertainty into strategy, and move from reactive change to intentional reinvention.

Audiences learn how to spot signals early, connect dots others miss, and create the belief and momentum required to lead people through uncertainty, while helping them see the role they play in transformation. It’s equal parts inspiration and a usable blueprint...helping leaders define a future worth building and then rally their teams to make it real.

When Intelligence is Abundant and Human Agency is Scarce: How True Leaders Scale Vision, Creativity, and Courage with AI

You compete with AI. AI isn’t here to replace you. It’s here to help you augment…to more effectively compete with AI. The winners in 2026 won’t just be the people who “use AI.” They’ll be the people who know how to think and collaborate with it…to do what what’s possible without AI and what AI couldn’t do without you. That’s the AI mindshift. It helps people unlock “WWAID” to use AI to work beyond efficiency and productivity.

This keynote is designed to reduce fear, build fluency, and empower teams and employees with AI…to embrace AI with confidence and enthusiasm. Brian Solis shows audiences how to move from basic prompting to context prompting and augmented prompting. He introduces the “AI mindshift” that starts by asking, What Would AI Do? (\WWAID)

The result is better decisions, better creativity, better outcomes…work that’s genuinely impossible without AI, and certainly impossible without those who attend this session.

The Innovation Game: How Leaders Can Build a Culture of Innovation to Turn Uncertainty into Opportunity

Digital and Darwinism is reshaping markets and behaviors, and it's only accelerating. Most companies don’t lack ideas, they lack vision, leadership, and culture that can create belief, clarity, and courage. And in this model, AI, humanoids, quantum, and other important trends, can distract from what truly matters. This keynote is for executives navigating constant disruption, internal politics, and innovation theater.

Brian has published several award-winning research studies that explore successful corporate and culture innovation initiatives and has advised companies on their innovation strategies.

This session maps how leaders take a step back, assess real threats and unseen opportunities, to set a new vision, build cultures that bring that vision to life, and drive change that puts technology to work, for people...supported by bold vision, modern metrics, and an operating system that turns curiosity into execution.

Why Experience is the Brand: The New Playbook for CX Innovation in an Era of Digital Customers and AI Expectations

Brian wrote one of the world's "best customer experience" books of all time. In today’s AI + Attention Economy, customers have more power, more options, and more tools to evaluate options and brands instantly. Expectations are being reset by the best experiences in every category.

Customers now research, compare, and decide with AI copilots before they ever visit your site, store, or contact center. Attention spans are shorter, patience is thinner, movements faster, but intentional. Brian frames the modern customer as the “accidental narcissist”: not selfish, but self-directed...empowered by technology, and expecting every interaction to be personal, immediate, and validating.

In this keynote, he will introduce a modern formula for competing through experience: BX + CX + UX = X, where X is your “Signature” Advantage.

The AInfinite Company: How to Compete Against AI-Native Businesses (and Become One from the Inside)

Every year, executives visit Silicon Valley to visit leading tech companies and to meet leading entrepreneurs, especially now with a new breed of AI-Native startups. In this is a special session, Brian will bring Silicon Valley to you.

AI-Native are a new breed of startups that ship faster with tiny teams, deliver near-instant time-to-value, and generate outsized revenue per employee (RPE) while scaling without scaling headcount, and create moats that keep them competitive as they evolve.

He'll reveal his research around "AInfinite thinking" and what it means to think like an AI Native startup by exploring the mindsets of founders and investors.

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