mo gawdat

• Scary Smart: The Future of AI and How We Shape It
  The argument that the values we teach our machines matter as much as the code we write, from one of the earliest voices to make it. Gawdat shows why the machines mirror us — and why that makes their future our responsibility.
• Living and Leading in the Age of Sentient Machines
  How to lead people and organizations through a moment of rapid, anxiety-inducing technological change. Gawdat speaks the language of the technologist and the humanist at once, addressing engineers and executives alike.
• Happiness as a Skill: Resilience at Work and in Life
  The framework from his bestseller Solve for Happy, drawn from both an engineering career and a personal journey through loss. Gawdat treats wellbeing as something that can be built deliberately, not left to chance.
• Navigating Stress and Change in a World of Exponential Technology
  Why the same exponential technology that creates anxiety can be steered toward human flourishing — but only with intention. Gawdat gives audiences a way to meet accelerating change with clarity rather than fear.

speaker Bio: 

Mo Gawdat is the former Chief Business Officer of Google [X] — Google's "moonshot factory" — and one of the world's most in-demand voices on artificial intelligence and human wellbeing. Over a career spanning nearly three decades at IBM, NCR, Microsoft, and Google, he helped launch close to half of Google's global operations before leading business strategy at Google [X], home to projects like self-driving cars and Project Loon. He is the author of the international bestsellers Solve for Happy, Scary Smart, That Little Voice in Your Head, and Unstressable, and the founder of the One Billion Happy movement.

An Egyptian engineer by training, Gawdat combines the logic of a technologist with hard-won human insight. His 2021 book Scary Smart — named one of the Times and Sunday Times' best business books of the year — was among the earliest works to warn of the risks of unregulated AI and to argue that the values we teach our machines matter as much as the code we write. With the arrival of the modern AI boom, many of its predictions have been borne out, cementing his standing as one of the most respected voices bridging technology, ethics, and the human condition. Today he serves as Chief AI Officer at Flight Story.

Summary (Core Conviction):

Gawdat's distinctive argument is that AI is not, at its core, a technology problem — it is a parenting problem. The machines learn from us, mirroring the values, behaviors, and intentions of the humans who build and train them. His message to leaders is therefore double-edged: the same exponential technology that creates anxiety can be steered toward human flourishing, but only if we approach it with intention rather than fear. Drawing on both his engineering career and his personal journey through loss, he speaks the language of the mind and the heart at once — making him a rare keynote voice who can address an entire organization, from the engineers to the executives, about the future they are building together.

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