Kate Ancketill

Kate Ancketill -Future Insights & Innovation Speaker

For 25 years, Kate Ancketill ran London-based business futurist consultancy GDR Creative Intelligence, acting as innovation partner to more than 100 of the world’s largest brands — including P&G, Tesco, Sephora, Microsoft, Google, Samsung, Pepsi, LVMH and Coca-Cola.

Named Best AI & Future Technology Speaker at the 2025 Speaker Awards and one of BizTech Magazine’s Top 30 IT Influencers in 2024, she continues to bring those same signals directly to conference stages, corporate summits and executive boardrooms worldwide.

What sets Kate apart is where she looks. Most speakers stay inside one industry’s news cycle; Kate reads them all as a single picture — a bank learning from beauty, a retailer borrowing a loyalty trick from mobile gaming, a hotel’s customer flow reshaping an automotive showroom. It’s not a framework or a checklist — after 25 years of paying attention across every sector at once, she simply notices the connections other people miss.

Every keynote is built from the same lens — the signal, the technology making it real, and the macro forces that decide whether it lasts — and can be delivered as a 30–45 minute conference session, a webinar, a panel contribution, or a half-day interactive board briefing.

As the NRF’s Martine Reardon, CMO & EVP of Content and Retail Strategy, puts it: “Kate gets among the highest feedback for speakers at the NRF Big Show every year — that’s why we’ve invited her to give the trends keynote for ten years running.”

SPEAKING TOPICS

Why everyone should become a futurist –A practical toolkit for projecting three to five years ahead — built from experience, not theory.

Most future-of-X talks leave audiences dazzled and directionless. This keynote focuses on early change detection built over 25 years of global market observation.

Key takeaways

• Reading markets through sharpened instinct, not checklists
• A 3–5 year planning horizon for boards and CMOs
• Clearer view of Gen Z and Generation Alpha as future customers

The future of consumer-facing AI –Cutting through tech hype to build pragmatic, 3-to-5-year enterprise capability.

Explores how consumers are evolving in the AI era — balancing personalisation and agentic efficiency against authentic human creativity and brand trust.

Key takeaways

• Separating high-ROI AI deployment from expensive marketing gimmicks
• Global case studies of brands using AI to reduce friction
• Maintaining human warmth and brand trust in an automated world

Consumer trends — upcoming generations –How upcoming generations will live, work, travel, consume, and spend leisure time.

Drawing on global field research, Kate tours signals from Seoul, Dubai, Beijing, Tokyo, New York, London, and the Nordics — and what it means for your business.

Key takeaways

• Spotting key challenges affecting upcoming generations
• Case studies on who is solving Gen Z’s problems right now
• Building agile cultures that adapt to changing consumer needs