Speaker Spotlight
Most AI Keynotes Tell a Room What Is Coming. His Book Is the Textbook Universities Use to Teach How It Actually Works.
Dr. Jon Krohn — Author of Deep Learning Illustrated · Host of SuperDataScience · CEO of Y Carrot · Oxford Doctorate in Neuroscience
The AI speaking market divides fairly cleanly into two groups. There are futurists who describe where the technology is heading, and there are practitioners who have built the things.
Jon Krohn is emphatically the second kind. His book Deep Learning Illustrated was an instant number-one bestseller in several Amazon categories, has been translated into seven languages, and is used as the textbook for introductory AI courses at universities worldwide.
He earned his doctorate in neuroscience at Oxford by building machine learning models for large-scale genetic, behavioural and brain-imaging data. His journal articles have been cited nearly 2,000 times.
The Rare Combination: Depth Plus Clarity
Technical credibility usually comes at a cost. The people who genuinely understand how these systems work often cannot explain them to a general audience, and the people who explain beautifully frequently cannot answer the follow-up question.
Jon’s entire professional reputation is built on doing both. His book sold on the strength of visual explanations of abstract concepts. His course, The Mathematical Foundations of Machine Learning, has been bought by more than 120,000 students. His YouTube channel won a Data Community Content Creator Award, and he has been recognised as a LinkedIn Top Voice.
That matters for one specific reason: the Q&A. Any AI keynote will generate hard questions from the technical people in the room, and a speaker who cannot handle them loses the audience that most needed convincing. Jon lectures at Columbia, Waterloo and NYU and hosts a twice-weekly technical podcast. The questions are not a risk for him.
Four Talks, All Tailorable
AI Explained is the foundational session covering what AI actually is, how it differs from machine learning and deep learning, how machines learn from data, and which common myths do not survive contact with the evidence. It is the right choice for a general audience that has heard a great deal about AI and understood little of it.
Generative AI goes under the hood of the systems behind conversational interfaces, and covers image, video, code, music and robotics modalities. Getting Commercial Value From AI is the business case session, separating tasks that can be replaced from tasks that can be augmented. Leveraging AI For Social Good is the optimistic closing-keynote option, on medicine, education, energy and agriculture.
All four can be tailored to a specific industry, which is worth taking him up on. A generic AI talk is the most commoditised hour in the speaking business right now.
One pairing worth considering. Our analysis of Gallup’s AI adoption data found that only 12 percent of workers say AI has transformed their work, and that the strongest predictor of adoption is whether the direct manager champions it. Jon answers what the technology is. A leadership speaker answers whether your organization will actually use it. Booked together, those two sessions cover the whole problem.
He is CEO of Y Carrot, supervises robotics research at the University of Auckland, holds a fellowship at Lightning AI, and hosted The Network Effect on Bloomberg TV. He is a Canadian based in Lower Manhattan.
Book Dr. Jon Krohn
Available for keynotes on AI, generative AI, commercial value from AI and AI for social good, tailored to your industry, in person or virtually.