Speaking & Podcasts
Piers Fawkes
Founder, PSFK
LinkedInSince 2004, Piers has been advising the world's leading brands, retailers and technology companies about emerging trends and opportunity spaces. Drawing on more than 20 years of tracking consumer and business change through PSFK, alongside hands-on experience building AI products through Fodda, Piers explores what these shifts mean for organizations and the people they serve.
In-person keynotes & executive podcasts. Tailored to your category.
Previous stages
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Future of AI & Creativity 2027
Six emerging shifts changing what we create, who we serve, and how businesses capture value.
In this PSFK briefing, Piers Fawkes, founder of PSFK and Fodda, explores six emerging trends reshaping creativity, technology and business in 2027. From the growing value of human expertise to agentic services and new commercial models, the report examines what is worth making, who we are making it for, and how that value gets exchanged.
Understanding Business in the Age of AI
Each keynote can be adapted for industries including retail, beauty, fashion, consumer goods, sports, technology, and professional services. Available for conference keynotes, executive briefings, leadership meetings, and industry events.
AI is changing how we shop, how we work, how we share knowledge, and how businesses create value.
Drawing on more than 20 years of tracking consumer and business change through PSFK, alongside hands-on experience building AI products through Fodda, Piers Fawkes explores what these shifts mean for organizations and the people they serve.
Each presentation combines emerging trends, real-world examples, and practical implications for business leaders.
When the Customer Is a Bot
The Future of Shopping and Agentic Commerce
What happens when your next customer isn't human? AI agents are beginning to research, compare, recommend, and purchase products on behalf of consumers. This talk explores how agentic commerce is changing product discovery, brand influence, retail experiences, and the economics of shopping, and what businesses should be doing to prepare.
Why We Need Digital Twins
The Future of Identity, Expertise and AI Representation
As AI agents increasingly act on our behalf, how do they understand who we are, what we know, and what matters to us? This talk explores the emerging role of digital twins for people, experts, brands, and organizations. From capturing institutional knowledge to creating intelligent representations that can interact with other AI systems, Piers examines the opportunities and challenges around identity, trust, control, and the future of expertise.
I Built It So You Don't Have To
Lessons from Building Real AI Products
What actually happens when you move beyond AI experimentation and start building products? Drawing on firsthand experience developing AI knowledge platforms, consumer services, and automated workflows, Piers shares what worked, what didn't, and what he learned along the way. A practical look at the decisions, unexpected challenges, and opportunities that emerge when AI moves from concept to deployment.
Twenty Years of Trends, Read by a Machine
How AI Is Changing the Way We Understand the Future
For more than two decades, PSFK has tracked emerging consumer behaviors, technologies, and business ideas. Now AI offers new ways to connect and interrogate accumulated knowledge. This talk explores how organizations can use AI to recognize patterns, revisit assumptions, distinguish lasting shifts from short-lived hype, and develop a more informed perspective on what comes next.
Recent Podcasts & Guest Appearances
In-depth discussions bridging keynote concepts and technical reality: agentic commerce, AI workflows, knowledge systems, and trends forecasting.
The Chatbot Is the New Browser
The Media Machine with Johanna Salazar and Julie Kellman Reading
Piers talks about the shift from searching for information to conversing with it, and why the chatbot is becoming the new browser. He covers why reports and PDFs are losing relevance, how he taught himself AI by building products, and why thinking in workflows is where the real value sits.
AI Trends, Knowledge Graphs, and Startup Data
Deconstructing Data with Jessie Lizak and David Finkelstein (BDEX)
Piers joins the BDEX team to talk about where trends, data and knowledge systems meet in the age of AI. The conversation covers AI trends in startups, knowledge graphs in AI systems, using data for trends research, and his tech stack.
Signature Category Keynotes
Detailed strategic frameworks backed by empirical case scans across retail tiers and conversational conversion funnels.
Customer engagement strategies for brands across retail tiers and touchpoints
How does a brand approach a stratified market where each tier offers a different mix of touchpoints? Value retail might reach large numbers of customers in store, but a consistent brand experience is hard to deliver. Premium and luxury can create engaging experiences for fans of a brand, but how do you broaden the reach?
With so many options, how does a marketing and sales team coordinate the go-to-market approach across tiers — and how does it move into a tier it hasn't sold in before?
In this presentation, PSFK founder Piers Fawkes maps how brands deploy customer engagement across retail tiers — value, mass, premium, and luxury — and across physical, online, mobile, and AI touchpoints, explaining the strategies available and how each plays out by channel. Drawing on a global scan of case studies that can be tailored to the audience's category.
What the audience leaves with
A way to match engagement strategy to retail tier and channel, and a clear view of why one playbook stretched across all of them quietly fails.
A global scan of current case studies — store-as-event, IP destinations, retail-as-hospitality, AI-led discovery — to borrow from and adapt.
A practical approach to coordinating go-to-market across tiers, broadening reach from a single tier, and entering a tier the brand hasn't sold in before.
Best for: Retail, brand marketing, merchandising, CPG, innovation teams; retail and marketing conferences; corporate brand/retail offsites.
What's missing in the AI discovery & conversion journey
AI is rewriting how customers discover products — they ask an assistant, and an answer arrives in a sentence. Brands are racing to be that answer. But what happens after the recommendation? Does a customer who trusts what the AI told them actually act on it — and if not, what stops them?
Drawing on a global scan of how AI is reshaping discovery, plus his own experience building the consumer AI product Service Buddy, PSFK founder Piers Fawkes makes an uncomfortable case: the industry is busy solving the recommendation and overlooking the conversion. The hard problem was never getting AI to give a good answer — it's everything that has to happen between a believed answer and a completed action, and that's exactly where most brands are investing the least.
What the audience leaves with
A clear map of where AI is taking discovery — assistants, conversational search, commerce embedded in content — and what it means for a brand to no longer own the moment of finding.
The real reason AI-driven recommendations stall before purchase, drawn from building and testing a consumer AI product rather than observing from the outside.
Where to actually invest: the action layer between a believed recommendation and a completed purchase that most brands are leaving empty.
Best for: Marketing, e-commerce, digital, product, and innovation teams; AI/commerce conferences; corporate strategy offsites grappling with AI.
Check speaking availability
Both talks are in-person keynotes and can be tailored to your sector. Case studies are selected for the audience in the room.