For most of human history, work has been about one thing: extracting human attention and energy and converting it into services and products. Management was the discipline of directing those finite human capacities toward what the organization required. Pressure came from inside and outside, and when pressure exceeded capacity, the humans suffered. That wasn’t a bug. It was the model.
We’re now standing at the edge of two very different futures.
In one, teams of AI agents quietly absorb the noisy, busy, messy work that has dominated modern professional life. If you don’t yet believe this is real, sit down with a vibe coding platform for an afternoon — what used to require a team of designers, producers, engineers, and QA testers can now be done, roughly, in a single sitting. The same thing is happening across functions. Generate a strategy deck in Claude that would have needed a researcher, an analyst, a designer, and a reviewer. Watch entire finance workflows get handled by agentic busybodies that ingest messy human input, log it, process it, and report back. It makes you reconsider the tools you’ve been taking for granted. Do you still need a comprehensive CRM when your enthusiastic team of agents can receive whatever lands in their inbox in whatever format, file it, and surface it back to you when it matters? Do you still need the narrow bandwidth of thumbs on screens? Or do you just talk, and let the agents do the work, and use the time you save to be fully human with other humans?
That’s one future. The other is a future where humans face more cognitive pressure than ever — where the pace of change outruns our ability to adapt, where decisions multiply faster than our capacity to make them well, and where the loneliness, anxiety, and brain-fry already showing up in workplace data become the dominant experience of work rather than the exception.
I think we get a bit of both, honestly. And I think the people who help organizations navigate the gap between those two futures — who can hold the technological reality and the human reality at the same time — are the ones worth listening to right now.
This is my working list of the 14 people doing that best in 2026. I’ve read most of their books, followed their work for years, and had two of them — Ravin Jesuthasan and Susan Cantrell — as guests on the Resilience Podcast in 2024. The conversations changed how I think about workforce architecture, and I’d recommend tracking down both episodes if you haven’t.
A note on what this list is and isn’t: it’s global, with regional context for each speaker. It’s not an SEO directory of every name with a future-of-work label — there are dozens of those, and most of them are useless. These are 14 thinkers who, by my reading, are actually shaping the conversation right now, with current research, recent books, and the kind of intellectual range that earns a place on the most serious stages in the world.
The List
1. Ravin Jesuthasan (United States)
The work-without-jobs architect.
If there’s a single name that defines the modern future of work conversation, it’s Ravin Jesuthasan. As Global Leader of Transformation Services at Mercer, a faculty member at Caltech and Kellogg, and a Wall Street Journal bestselling author six times over, he is the rare figure who is taken seriously in the C-suite, in academia, and on the conference circuit at once.
His central thesis is deceptively simple: the job is obsolete. Built for the Second Industrial Revolution and a more stable world, the job-and-job-holder model is too rigid for an era of accelerating automation, organizational agility demands, and alternative work arrangements. His 2022 MIT Press book Work Without Jobs (named business book of the year in 2023) and his 2024 Financial Times Book of the Month The Skills-Powered Organization lay out a deconstruct-redeploy-reconstruct framework that is now standard vocabulary in workforce strategy.
When I had Ravin on the Resilience Podcast in 2024, what struck me most wasn’t the framework — it was how patiently he made the case that organizations clinging to the job model aren’t being conservative; they’re being naive about how fragile that model has become. He’s everywhere serious people gather to talk about work in 2026 — Davos, MIT Sloan’s Work25, the Workhuman Live mainstage, Mercer’s Skills Snapshot research with HR leaders across 72 countries. He sits on the World Economic Forum’s Steering Committee on Work and Employment. If you can only book one speaker on the structural future of work, it’s him.
Best for: boards and executive teams grappling with workforce transformation, skills-based organizations, and AI’s effect on talent architecture.
Recent book: The Skills-Powered Organization: The Journey to the Next Generation Enterprise (MIT Press, 2024)
2. Lynda Gratton (United Kingdom)
The doyenne of the field.
For three decades, Lynda Gratton has been the global thought leader on the future of work — long before the phrase became a category. Professor of Management Practice at London Business School, founder of HSM Advisory, Thinkers50 Hall of Fame inductee in 2024, and author of more than ten books that have sold over a million copies in 20 languages, Gratton is the rare academic who has translated rigorous research into language CEOs and policymakers actually use.
Her Redesigning Work (2022) became the definitive playbook for hybrid work after the pandemic. The 100-Year Life, co-authored with Andrew Scott, fundamentally reframed how policymakers and organizations think about longevity, careers, and the multi-stage life. In September 2025 she announced the follow-up, Living the 100-Year Life (Bloomsbury), which moves from the macro thesis into the practical question of how to navigate a working life that now spans decades.
Gratton has chaired World Economic Forum councils on leadership, work, wages, and job creation, served on advisory boards for Japan’s prime minister, and her Harvard Business Review article “Managers Cannot Do It All” won the Warren Bennis best article of the year in 2022. Audiences describe her as a “rock star teacher” — and at LBS she has the teaching awards to prove it.
Best for: organizations rethinking long-term workforce strategy, hybrid design, longevity, and the changing role of the manager.
Recent book: Redesigning Work: How to Transform Your Organisation and Make Hybrid Work for Everyone (Penguin, 2022). Living the 100-Year Life (Bloomsbury, 2025).
3. Heather E. McGowan (United States)
The future-of-work strategist Thomas Friedman calls “the oasis.”
Named one of Forbes’ Top 50 Female Futurists and ranked LinkedIn’s #1 global voice for education, Heather McGowan has built a distinctive niche: she is the future of work strategist who refuses to lead with technology. Her bet is that the human capabilities — adaptability, empathy, curiosity — are what scale in an age of AI, and that organizations that activate those capabilities will outperform those that automate around them.
Her two bestsellers, The Adaptation Advantage (2020) and The Empathy Advantage (2023, named a Top 10 Business Book of the year), trace the same arc: the fundamental shift from managing people to enabling success, from extrinsic compliance to intrinsic motivation. Her current keynote work cuts through the AI hype to focus on what she calls “the empowered workforce” — the post-pandemic, post-Great-Resignation reality that traditional command-and-control leadership no longer scales.
McGowan’s client list — Google, JPMorgan Chase, Mastercard, Kaiser Permanente, The World Bank — speaks for itself. She also holds a faculty role at Swinburne University’s Centre for the New Workforce in Melbourne, giving her a useful APAC reach.
Best for: leadership development, organizational culture, and the human side of AI transformation.
Recent book: The Empathy Advantage: Leading the Empowered Workforce (Wiley, 2023)
4. Ethan Mollick (United States)
The most quoted academic voice on AI at work.
If you’ve read anything sensible about generative AI in the past two years, there’s a strong chance Ethan Mollick wrote it. The Wharton professor’s One Useful Thing Substack, his bestselling book Co-Intelligence (a New York Times bestseller and book of the year for both The Economist and the Financial Times), and his ongoing research as Co-Director of Wharton’s Generative AI Labs have made him the practical, optimistic, evidence-based counterweight to AI’s louder voices.
Mollick’s argument is that AI is not just a tool but a new kind of co-worker — and that the cost of really getting to know it is “at least three sleepless nights.” His framework of treating AI as co-worker, co-teacher, and coach has become standard vocabulary in serious AI adoption conversations. He was named one of TIME’s Most Influential People in Artificial Intelligence and MBA Professor of the Year by Poets and Quants.
What sets him apart on the speaking circuit is that he is genuinely doing the experiments — running studies on AI’s effect on consultant productivity, on entrepreneurship, on education — and reporting back in real time. For organizations actually trying to figure out how to integrate AI into work, he is the closest thing to ground truth available.
Best for: organizations grappling with how to actually deploy AI at work — beyond the hype and beyond the doom.
Recent book: Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI (Portfolio, 2024)
5. Amy Webb (United States)
The quantitative futurist who just declared trend reports dead.
Amy Webb is the global authority who turned strategic foresight into a rigorous, data-driven discipline. As founder and CEO of the Future Today Strategy Group (formerly Future Today Institute) and Professor of Strategic Foresight at NYU Stern, she has built the field’s foundational methodologies — quantitative tools that companies, governments, and militaries now use to anticipate disruption.
Her annual Tech Trends Report has been downloaded more than a million times a year. But at SXSW 2026, Webb did something dramatic: she held a symbolic funeral for the annual trend report itself, arguing that in a world of exponential technological and political change, static PDFs are obsolete by the time they ship. Her new framework prioritizes convergences — the intersections of multiple forces that create shifts no single trend can produce alone. “Trends tell you what is changing,” she said. “Convergences tell you what is inevitable.”
For audiences thinking 5, 10, or 20 years out — about AI, biotechnology, climate, geoeconomics, human augmentation — Webb is the most rigorous voice working. She has been named one of Forbes’ Five Women Changing the World, a Thinkers50 Radar honoree, and her 2017 The Signals Are Talking won the Thinkers50 RADAR Award.
Best for: boards and leadership teams that need to plan beyond the next 18 months, and want a futurist who works in data and scenarios rather than vibes.
Recent work: 2026 Emerging Tech Trend Report (SXSW launch, March 2026)
6. Josh Bersin (United States)
The HR analyst who named the Superworker.
No one has done more to define how HR and talent leaders should think about 2025 and 2026 than Josh Bersin. The global industry analyst, founder of The Josh Bersin Company, and creator of the Galileo AI platform for HR has spent 30 years studying corporate learning, talent, and organizational design — and his current “Rise of the Superworker” research is the dominant framework in the HR conversation right now.
His thesis: 2025 is not the year AI replaces workers; it’s the year a new class of AI-empowered employees emerges, capable of 10x productivity, creativity, and impact. The Superworker research isn’t a futurist abstraction — Bersin’s framework, drawn from hundreds of CEO and CHRO interviews, identifies four concrete archetypes and five organizational imperatives. Companies that build around this will outpace those who simply use AI to cut costs.
Bersin’s keynotes — Workhuman Live, Gloat Live, HR Tech, UNLEASH — consistently top conference rankings. He is also one of the rare analysts whose research output keeps pace with the news cycle: weekly podcasts, his Galileo platform, the Josh Bersin Academy, and a constant stream of practitioner-grade reports.
Best for: HR leaders, CHROs, CEOs, and anyone making real decisions about how AI changes their workforce model in 2026.
Recent work: The Rise of the Superworker: HR and Leadership Predictions and Imperatives for 2025 (research report)
7. Susan Cantrell (United States)
The workforce ecosystems thinker.
If Ravin Jesuthasan is the public face of skills-based organizations, Susan Cantrell is the architect doing the deep methodological work behind the scenes. As Vice President of Products and Workforce Strategies at Deloitte Consulting, leader of Human Capital Eminence at Deloitte, and a key contributor to the MIT Sloan Management Review and MIT Press Workforce Ecosystems research program, she has been driving the longest-running rigorous research program on how the modern workforce — full-time, contingent, partner, and increasingly machine — actually fits together.
Her co-authored Harvard Business Press book Workforce of One and her ongoing collaboration with Elizabeth Altman, David Kiron, and others has built the dominant framework for thinking about extended workforces. Cantrell’s 2025 work pushes further: rethinking workforce planning as continuous, AI-orchestrated, and outcome-defined rather than headcount-defined.
I had Susan on the Resilience Podcast in 2024, and the part of our conversation that has stuck with me most is how seriously she takes the integration question — not the headline-grabbing “what will AI do to jobs,” but the subtler problem of how organizations actually orchestrate full-time employees, contingent workers, partners, and AI agents into something coherent. She is less of a stage performer than some on this list and more of a strategic thinker, which makes her ideal for leadership offsites, board sessions, and CHRO summits where the audience wants substance over showmanship.
Best for: executive teams designing operating models that integrate full-time employees, contingent workers, partners, and AI agents into a coherent ecosystem.
Recent work: Contributor to Workforce Ecosystems: Reaching Strategic Goals with People, Partners, and Technologies (MIT Press, 2023). Ongoing Deloitte Human Capital Trends research on workforce planning and AI orchestration.
8. Adam Grant (United States)
The world’s most influential organizational psychologist.
Adam Grant doesn’t fit neatly into the future of work box, but every serious future of work conference wants him on the bill — and for good reason. The Wharton organizational psychologist (top-rated for seven consecutive years) is the world’s #2 most influential management thinker, host of the TED Re:Thinking and WorkLife podcasts (80 million downloads combined), and a #1 New York Times bestselling author six times over. His TED talks have been viewed more than 35 million times.
What makes him essential to a future of work conversation is the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025: the skills rising in demand are analytical thinking, resilience, flexibility, creativity — exactly the territory Grant has been studying for decades. His grade for how organizations are doing on these skills? “C-minus.” His current message — that companies need to scrap “best practices” and build “better practices,” ditch the daily morning meeting, take the four-day week seriously, and learn to think like scientists rather than preachers — lands hard with executive audiences.
His latest book, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things (2023), reframes performance as growth rather than innate gift — directly relevant to the reskilling conversation that sits at the heart of every AI transformation program.
Best for: keynotes that need a marquee name and substantive content on motivation, learning, leadership, and the soft-skills shift.
Recent book: Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things (Viking, 2023)
9. Bernard Marr (United Kingdom)
Europe’s most-booked tech and AI futurist.
Bernard Marr has built one of the largest audiences in the futurist world — 4 million across newsletters and social, top-5 LinkedIn business influencer rankings, 20+ books, a regular Forbes column, keynotes in 30+ countries for Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, and Adobe. What he offers is a particularly clear-eyed bridge between technology trends and what they mean for everyday work.
His 2026 writing — on AI burnout, the AI traps companies will fall into, what MWC and CES reveal about the AI-driven workplace, the rise of AI agents — is a useful pulse on what is actually happening right now in enterprise AI adoption. His book Future Skills: The 20 Skills and Competencies Everyone Needs to Succeed in a Digital World is a staple in L&D programs across Europe.
Marr’s strength is breadth and clarity. He is excellent for audiences that want a credible, accessible, non-doom-laden tour of where AI and digital transformation are actually heading — and what skills will matter when they get there.
Best for: broad audiences, employee summits, and leadership programs that need a confident, accessible take on AI and the future workplace.
Recent books: Generative AI in Practice and Future Skills
10. Mike Walsh (Australia / United States)
The futurist for the AI-powered enterprise.
Born in Australia, now globally based, Mike Walsh has carved out a distinctive niche: not predicting AI, but explaining what AI changes inside every team and organization. As CEO of the consultancy Tomorrow, a regular Harvard Business Review columnist, and author of The Algorithmic Leader (translated into Chinese, Japanese, Korean, German, Polish, and Russian), he has delivered more than 1,000 keynotes — from boardrooms at Verizon and Raytheon to a stadium audience of 25,000.
His upcoming 2026 book with Nitin Mittal, Deloitte’s Global Head of AI, takes his thesis further: AI is no longer copilots and chatbots, but an autonomous digital workforce that will transform how companies scale, compete, and create value. His framework of the “Fifth Industrial Revolution” — and his concept of “Generation AI,” the cohort born between 2010 and 2025 who have never known a world without algorithmic personalization — gives audiences a clear map of the next decade.
Walsh is a particularly good fit for organizations whose leaders are sophisticated about technology but need help reimagining the operating model around it.
Best for: technology leadership audiences, enterprise transformation programs, and boards thinking about AI as a structural shift rather than a tooling upgrade.
Recent book: The Algorithmic Leader: How to Be Smart When Machines Are Smarter Than You (forthcoming co-authored book on AI agents, HBR Press, 2026)
11. Holly Ransom (Australia)
The leadership voice the world’s biggest brands keep choosing.
Holly Ransom has done what very few Australian speakers manage: gone genuinely global. CEO of Emergent Global, author of The Leading Edge, named one of Australia’s 100 Most Influential Women by the Australian Financial Review, and recipient of the US Embassy’s Eleanor Roosevelt Award for Leadership Excellence, she has delivered more than 500 sessions across six continents and 25+ countries — for Microsoft, Virgin, P&G, Mastercard, Coca-Cola, Volvo, EY, and more.
She is the speaker Barack Obama personally requested to interview him on stage in Australia in 2018. She has since interviewed Malala Yousafzai, Sir Richard Branson, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Brené Brown, Venus Williams, and Matthew McConaughey. This matters for a future of work list because Ransom is one of the rare voices distilling actionable leadership lessons from hundreds of the world’s top leaders, then synthesizing them into the Mattering Matrix and high-performance team frameworks she now teaches at scale.
A Fulbright Scholar and Harvard Kennedy School fellow, Ransom’s current keynote work focuses on “leading what’s next” — the leadership shifts required to engage younger generations, retain women, build trust at scale, and bridge the gap between knowing and doing.
Best for: leadership conferences, women’s events, large stage moments where you need genuine star power with substance, and APAC audiences specifically.
Recent book: The Leading Edge
12. Dom Price (Australia)
Atlassian’s original Work Futurist, now stepping into a new chapter.
For more than a decade, Dom Price was Atlassian’s Work Futurist — a job he half-jokingly says was “made up almost as a joke” when he joined the company at employee number 600 and helped scale it through to more than 16,000 globally. In that time, he became one of the most recognizable voices on team dynamics, distributed work, productivity, and the future of teamwork — a TED speaker, a regular voice in the Australian and global press, and a fixture at Atlassian’s flagship Team conference.
In early 2026, Price made a major move: he joined boutique advisory firm Be Luminous as a Partner, founded by former PwC partners. The pitch is squarely future-of-work: helping organizations unlock the full potential of their people during periods of significant transformation. His current keynote focus — on rejecting the productivity myth, building distributed teams that actually work, and helping leaders rediscover what it means to be human in the age of AI — is sharper for the new chapter.
Price is the rare speaker who combines deep operating experience (he scaled an actual hyper-growth company) with the storytelling skill of a Manchester native who has lived in 50+ countries. For Australian and APAC audiences, he is a top-tier pick. For global audiences, he brings a credibility that pure-stage speakers can’t match.
Best for: distributed teams, organizational transformation, agile leadership, and audiences that want practical experience-grounded keynotes rather than 30,000-foot futurism.
13. Brad Hook (New Zealand)
The values-led performance voice from the Asia-Pacific.
Author of Start With Values (Penguin, 2025), founder of the Values Institute, and creator of the FLAME Method — a holistic framework for workplace performance covering Fellowship, Legacy, Agility, Mindset, and Energy — Brad Hook brings something distinctive to the future of work conversation: a focus on what makes humans perform sustainably in a world increasingly run by machines.
The Values Institute dataset — tens of thousands of respondents across more than 100 countries — is the largest of its kind on what people actually value at work, and the basis of the Global Values Report 2026: The Values-Living Gap. Confirmed direct corporate clients include PwC, Shell, Bridgestone, Electronic Arts, Fonterra, and Fletcher Building. His forthcoming 2026 book, The FLAME Method (Penguin), formalizes the framework that has been quietly informing leadership retreats and corporate programs for years.
Based in Mount Maunganui, New Zealand, Hook represents an emerging strand of future of work thinking that pushes back against pure productivity framing — arguing that performance in the age of intelligence depends on getting the human operating system right first. He is increasingly one of the names APAC organizations book when they want substance on resilience, values, and human performance without the wellness-industry vagueness.
Best for: leadership retreats, APAC corporate audiences, and organizations that want a future-of-work voice grounded in values, performance, and human flourishing rather than technology alone.
Recent book: Start With Values (Penguin, 2025). The FLAME Method (Penguin, forthcoming 2026).
14. Cassie Kozyrkov (United States)
The decision intelligence pioneer.
Cassie Kozyrkov, former Chief Decision Scientist at Google for nearly a decade and founder of decision intelligence as a discipline, is the speaker organizations book when they want to move past “AI as magic” and into the harder question of how humans and machines actually make decisions together. She has trained over 20,000 Googlers in her decision-making frameworks and now runs Kozyr, advising governments and Fortune 500 leaders on AI strategy. Her Decision Intelligence Substack is where she develops the ideas in real time.
What makes her distinctive on the future of work circuit is her insistence that AI doesn’t change whether humans need to make decisions — it changes which decisions humans make and how well-equipped they need to be. In a world where AI agents will execute on outputs, the bottleneck shifts to the quality of human framing, judgment, and goal-setting. That reframing has become essential for any organization actually deploying AI at scale.
Best for: technical and analytical audiences, AI governance discussions, and leadership programs grappling with how to make better decisions in collaboration with machines.
Three more worth following
Three names that didn’t quite make the top 14 but are absolutely worth watching:
Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic (UK / US) — Newly appointed Chief Science Officer at Russell Reynolds Associates (November 2025), formerly Chief Innovation Officer at ManpowerGroup, professor at UCL and Columbia, and one of the most rigorous voices on talent assessment, leadership, and personality science as it applies to AI hiring.
Stephane Kasriel (US) — Former CEO of Upwork and former head of Fintech at Meta, one of the most experienced operators on platform work and the future of the freelance economy.
Jacob Morgan (US) — Author, podcast host, and LinkedIn Top Voice with a particular focus on the employee experience side of the future-of-work conversation.
How to choose the right speaker for your event
If you’re booking, the first question isn’t who is the most famous — it’s what conversation you actually want your audience to have. A few quick filters:
- If the conversation is about structural workforce change — skills, jobs, ecosystems — Jesuthasan, Cantrell, or Bersin.
- If it’s about AI and work specifically — Mollick, Walsh, Marr, or Kozyrkov.
- If it’s about leadership and the human side — McGowan, Grant, Gratton, or Hook.
- If it’s about long-range futures and strategy — Webb or Walsh.
- If it’s about APAC audiences specifically — Ransom, Price, Hook, or McGowan (via her Swinburne affiliation).
The strongest events combine two or three of these voices — a structural thinker, a technology voice, and a human-side speaker — so the audience leaves with both the “what’s coming” and the “what to do about it.”
What this list points toward
Read these 14 people together and a pattern emerges that none of them quite name on their own.
The structural thinkers — Jesuthasan, Cantrell, Bersin, Gratton — are telling us the operating model of work is being rebuilt from the ground up. The AI voices — Mollick, Walsh, Marr, Kozyrkov, Webb — are telling us the speed and scale of that rebuild is unlike anything we’ve seen. The human-side thinkers — McGowan, Grant, Ransom, Price, Hook — are telling us that none of this lands well unless we get the human part right.
The future of work isn’t really a technology question or a workforce-architecture question or a leadership question. It’s all three, at once, on a clock.
What I keep coming back to is the framing I started with: in the old model, work extracted human capacity until the humans broke. The promise of agentic AI is that machines can finally do the extracting from each other — handle the busy, messy, attention-shredding work that has been quietly draining people for decades — and free humans to do what we’re actually built for. Thinking. Connecting. Creating. Caring. Being fully human with other humans.
That’s the optimistic future. The pessimistic one is a world where the cognitive load on humans goes up rather than down, where we spend our days managing agents instead of being relieved by them, and where the burnout numbers we’re already worried about look quaint by comparison.
Which one we get isn’t going to be decided by the technology. It’s going to be decided by leaders, by how organizations are designed, and by the conversations we have about what we actually want work to be. Which is why these 14 people matter — and why we should be listening to all of them, not just the ones whose framing flatters our preferred future.