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Talks that give your audience back their own minds.
Every conference has an AI speaker who explains what the tools can do. Kris Willis does something different: he shows audiences what the tools are doing to them, and hands them a practice for taking their judgment back. Drawing on depth psychology, Greek myth, and years inside executive education, his keynotes leave rooms with language they didn't have that morning for a problem they'd been feeling for years.
The Wasteland Within: Reclaiming Judgment in the Age of the Algorithm
The signature talk. In the old story, the Fisher King sits wounded in his castle while the land around him dries up, and no one at court will ask the question that heals him. Something similar is happening inside our organizations: decisions still get made, reports still get written, but the judgment underneath them is quietly going dry. This keynote names the condition, traces how AI accelerates it, and gives audiences the one question that restarts the water. Best for: leadership summits, executive offsites, association conferences. Audiences leave with: a diagnostic vocabulary for judgment erosion, three signals it is happening on their team, and a first practice for reversing it.
The Algorithm Has a Script for You: How to Decline the Part
The brand keynote, and the most personal of the four. Every recommendation engine, every autocomplete, every generated draft is a casting call: here is your role, pre-written. This talk moves from the Greek stage to the modern feed to show how self-authorship is surrendered one convenience at a time, and what it takes to stay the author of your own thinking while still using the tools. Best for: professional development conferences, university audiences, corporate all-hands during AI rollouts. Audiences leave with: the concept of Algorithmic Locked-In Consciousness, a personal audit of where their thinking is being pre-completed, and a daily practice for reclaiming it.
Cognitive Surrender: The Judgment Risk No One Is Governing
The executive talk, and the most commercially urgent. Organizations govern AI for bias, privacy, and security, but almost none govern for the slow transfer of institutional judgment to systems that optimize but cannot deliberate. This keynote makes the business case that judgment is an asset on no balance sheet and shows leaders how to build deliberation back into AI-saturated workflows before the capacity to deliberate is gone. Best for: C-suite gatherings, board retreats, risk and strategy conferences, L&D leadership events. Audiences leave with: a framework for auditing where surrender is already happening, and three governance moves that preserve human judgment without slowing adoption.