Mark Kilens

TACK

TACK ⛵️ is a media and go-to-market firm helping startups and scaleups match how they go-to-market to how people buy. Modernizing how businesses go-to-market to create, capture, and convert demand into revenue. 

Companies like Commsor, ZoomInfo, Swoogo, Coursera, Aiven, CloudBees, Audette, Terminus, and more partner with TACK to evolve how they go-to-market using a People-first GTM approach. 

Its mission is to match how companies go-to-market to how people buy by making every experience and interaction with a business more human.

TACK Network is a GTM media network of content and resources all about B2B go-to-market. We produce original shows and authentic stories giving some of the brightest people in B2B go-to-market the support they need to share stories and ideas.

TACK Insider is for marketers and entrepreneurs looking to learn how to go-to-market to match how people buy today. Members learn how to use seven different growth strategies that are all part of the People-first GTM Model.  The membership and community comes with hundreds of resources, weekly masterclasses, and personalized coaching.

TACK GTM is Uber for GTM Leaders. An on demand go-to-market services firm specializing in People-first GTM strategies and services that grow pipeline and revenue. We partner with CEOs, Founders, and Marketing Leaders to design and deploy People-first GTM strategies.

Chart your go-to-market with TACK.

CEO and Co-Founder

Stage 2 Capital

The Stage 2 Capital Catalyst supports early stage B2B software companies in scaling their businesses by combining Venture Capital and Go-To-Market, empowering founders with hands-on coaching from an unrivaled network of go-to-market leaders.

Limited Partner and Advisor

Airmeet

Airmeet helps marketers book more meetings and create pipeline faster using premium webinars and online events. 

Airmeet's Event Experience Cloud is an all-in-one premium webinar and event platform helping B2B businesses generate more pipeline and revenue.

I lead Airmeet’s global marketing team and are working to advance the event-led growth movement.

Chief Marketing Officer

Drift

Content and community are key ingredients to accelerating a business's revenue, delivering more customer value, and building an enduring brand.

My team's partner with Drift's marketing, sales, and customers success teams to develop the right content, programs, and experiences to accelerate revenue, deliver more value to our customers, and grow Drift’s brand.

Get your 100% free Drift Insider account. https://www.drift.com/insider/

Check out a couple of Drift's newest digital books. https://www.drift.com/books/

The Conversational Marketing Blueprint: https://www.drift.com/books/conversational-marketing-blueprint/

The Guide to Conversational ABM: https://www.drift.com/books/conversational-abm/

Learn something new on Drift's blog: https://www.drift.com/blog/

Vice President of Content and Community

HubSpot

I was the VP of Marketing and founder of HubSpot Academy.

HubSpot Academy is a global learning community and platform with millions of people in more than 200 countries.

It’s a tremendous growth driver of demand and interest - signing up and certifying tens of thousands of new HubSot users and community members every month.

We focused on converting free users into software revenue and helped retain and grow that revenue by building onboarding, expansion, and community programs.

I had the honor and privilege to lead a team of extremely passionate, motivated, and intelligent people. 

HubSpot Academy's purpose is to educate and inspire people so that we, together, transform the way the world does business.

We created content and education to teach people the inbound methodology and how to use the HubSpot platform to grow their business.

Vice President of HubSpot Academy

HubSpot Academy was launched in May 2012 after running it as an experiment for 18 months. 

I was responsible for creating the Inbound Methodology with Brain Halligan and Dharmesh Shah. 

I updated the original methodology in early 2018 to HubSpot's new Inbound flywheel model. 

We created content and education to teach people the inbound methodology and how to use the HubSpot platform to grow their business.

HubSpot Academy's purpose is to educate and inspire people so that we, together, transform the way the world does business.

Director of HubSpot Academy

I was a Senior Inbound Marketing Consultant at HubSpot. I worked with B2B and B2C businesses helping them create, execute, and measure their inbound marketing goals and strategies.

Senior Inbound Marketing Consultant

I joined HubSpot as an Inbound Marketing Consultant. I trained businesses how to use HubSpot to get found, convert leads, close leads into customers, and analyze their results.

Inbound Marketing Consultant

SalesQuest

I was responsible for email marketing campaigns, building prospect and customer databases, social media, inbound marketing, lead generation, the website, and helped create new products and services.

Director of Marketing

I managed a team of market research analysts that created and maintained a library of more than 850 Fortune 1000 and Global 500 company profiles. 

I was responsible for all inbound marketing activities, SEO, social media, and marketing campaigns.

Manager, Marketing and Operations

I performed research on Fortune 1000 companies which included investigating their technology implementations, org charts, budgets, financials, and operating models.

Research Analyst

CEO and Co-founder of TACK ⛵️ & ClubPF ⚓️ | People-first GTM Champion

Mark Kilens is the CEO and Co-founder of TACK, a media and go-to-market firm helping startups and scaleups match how they go-to-market to how people buy. TACK modernizes how businesses go-to-market to create, capture, and convert demand into revenue.

TACK helps B2B organizations transform how they grow using its proprietary People-first GTM model and approach. TACK'S mission is to make every experience and interaction with a business more human. Companies like Commsor, Swoogo, ZoomInfo, Casted, and UserGems partner with TACK to unite their go-to-market teams to grow more efficiently and effectively.

He previously was CMO of Airmeet, a leading virtual and hybrid event platform. He oversaw Airmeet’s global marketing team responsible for brand, demand, lifecycle, and product marketing.

Before that he was the VP of Content and Community at Drift where he led the brand, content, creative, and events teams. He oversaw Drift’s community, Drift Insider, which has 65,000+ members, and Drift’s FLASH, RevGrowth, and HYPERGROWTH events.

Prior to joining Drift, he served as VP of Marketing and founder of HubSpot Academy. As a former customer, Mark joined HubSpot in 2010 where he spent two years working with thousands of HubSpot customers to scale their inbound strategy. 

From there, he went on to build HubSpot Academy from the ground up, and in doing so, educated and certified millions of people and helped grow HubSpot to more than $600 million in revenue.

When he’s not building TACK, Mark enjoys plenty of steak and lobster, a round of golf or two, and loves being on snow or in the ocean.

Go fast, take chances!

Leading Airmeet’s global marketing team and working to advance the event-led growth movement across B2B.

Airmeet is the most customizable and immersive virtual and hybrid event platform for growing businesses. 

Here's how I almost failed scaling HubSpot Academy.

At the time, HubSpot was becoming a global company serving several different languages outside of just English. 

It was tricky. Do we create native content in each language? Do we translate some of the content but not all? Do we use automated translation solutions?

I can tell you this. The automated translation solutions we tried and used at the time were not very good. 

Globalization and localization. It’s hard. 

There were thousands of hours of video, transcripts, and website content. It was an immense undertaking. 

Here’s how we solved this complex problem. We implemented a tiered system for the localization and translation of all content assets. For some content we localized and translated the piece. For other assets we just translated the content. 

That tiered approach saved us a ton of time and money over the long run. 

Since then I’ve advised many companies on how to think about content localization and translation. In the last few years a lot has changed thanks to generative AI. 

Recently I came across a new solution to help solve this problem. Something I wish I had back in 2015. Weglot.

What’s Weglot? 

It’s a solution that simplifies website and content translation. Some of the things I faced when doing this ten years ago were manual translation, page duplication, complex SEO setup, and technical integrations. Painful and time consuming. 

The number one thing you should be doing today is speaking the language of ALL your customers. Did you know that more than 70% of people prefer to buy in their native language

It’s now easy to expand your international presence in just a few clicks. You can do it quickly thanks to automated translation that’s accurate and crisp. 

Increase your SEO visibility in every market that matters. More markets = more reach = more potential customers. 

And thanks to solutions like Weglot, it's easy to integrate with WordPress, Shopify, Webflow, Wix, and more. In just a few minutes. No need to move to a different CMS. 

I recently decided to partner with Weglot to help businesses of any size create a more global footprint and make sure their content is speaking the language of their customers. 

It’s more important than ever to make sure your content is in the right language both for people and the bots. 

#WeglotPartner

p.s. still rocking my favorite HubSpot Academy custom Patagonia.

VP of Marketing at EasyLlama | People-first GTM Evangelist

Don’t fall into the status quo.

Here’s my marketing playbook for 2026.

1) Major investments in brand. Which is combo of content, events, community, and customer programs. 

I was so fortunate to bring on a rock star for all those things Katrine Reddin 🦕. She of course will have support and we’re going to be playing offense next year.

Expect to see the 🦙 everywhere. With some major surprises. 

2) Intent and network signals.

We’re an inbound heavy operation which means we can use signals to prioritize leads, follow up with other leads, and nurture a lot better.

Plus we can use network signals like if someone in our network knows someone that could unlock an introduction for us or give us some intel. 

I’m betting big on network signals next year. Both from our customers and our broader network.

3) Holistic revenue attribution.

We’re going to be tracking three types of revenue attribution.

Software attribution, first and last touch.

Self reported attribution in our demo forms.

Discovery call question attribution asked by each AE.

We have two of the three already in play and the data is fascinating. 

I’m also going to add incremental testing to the mix. Do something and then remove it or isolate the removal of the activity like not doing a billboard in one city but having one in another city, and using lead and pipeline data to determine impact. 

This data will help us understand number one and two a hiwnlot better next year. 

4) Monthly marketable moments. 

We already ship a lot of new products and tools in the reg. But next year we’re going to package them better and create one big wave each month. Beat the drum!

5) New offers.

We are cooking up come very compelling free new offers to launch in the first half of next year. I can’t give you any sneak peeks yet, but you should be thinking and investing in offers that will help you turn brand attention into business revenue.

Offers that are differentiated and compelling are key to your demand strategy today.

Don’t forget that your offers should treated as products built by the marketing team. Positioning, promotion, and distribution all matter.

I got a coupe of other ideas brewing. Going to wait to share them until I have more conviction behind each idea. 

If you think these topics are interesting, then you should join my marketing leadership mastermind group. We meet every week for an hour. 

Today we’re chatting about the homepage redesign process and the dashboards a marketing leader should be using to run their business. 

Drop ‘mastermind’ in the comments for more info.

Data is the lifeblood of a business today. Yet most businesses are missing two things. 

Clean data and actionable data. 

This problem costs businesses thousands, if not millions, of dollars in revenue.

What every leader should have are insights into revenue generation, customer health, competitors, and a whole lot more. 

Trust me, I have felt this pain at all of the businesses I’ve worked at. We're actually working on solving this problem at EasyLlama right now. Through a combination of hiring the right people, tech, and process changes. 

One solution that I’ve been trying out is Rows.com  

I’ve been able to upload CSVs and PDFs, connect GA4, and our paid media accounts.  Then I simply ask it questions in plain English.  Way easier than me trying to fumble around with Google Sheets or Excel. 

It organizes and understands the data without me needing to understand SQL or anything else. 

Things like, ‘tell me how many opportunities find us through paid search and also mention Google as how they heard about us.”

Simple prompts that can give me quick and impactful insights into how different channels, campaigns, offers, or messaging are driving results. 

It extracts, connects, analyzes, and keeps all the data fresh. 

Which means I get automated reporting and get insights and actionable recommendations on the regular. Exactly what a busy marketing leader needs. 


My point of view is every company should have at least one business analyst. But that’s not always possible due to the cost involved or other factors. So why not give that power to your founders, and other executives, heck your individual contributors too!?

It’s now possible for you to create your own business analyst copilot/agent helping you analyze and sift through data to find the golden nuggets. I’ve built my own business analyst at a fraction of the cost.

Rows is helping me flex my critical thinking skills and become an even more data empowered marketing leader. 

Helping me see around the next few corners and better plan and predict for the coming quarters. 

You can try it for free yourself. Rows dot com

Product launches are always exhilarating ... and stressful ... but so rewarding.  

Today, I'm proud to announce the third product pillar in EasyLlama's Compliance and Learning Platform. 

Security Awareness Training 🥳

Lots of small and medium businesses should be protecting their business and brand from cyber threats. 

Most don't becuase of two reasons, time and the cost.

We eliminate both reasons and give you a solution that's less than $2/month per employee. For a 150 person business, you can provide an important layer of protection from bad actors and cyber criminals for only $250/month.

It includes a powerful Phishing Simulator powered by AI.  

Giving you the ability to use pre-built phishing campaigns that can run automatically year-round.

You also get detailed ongoing reports so you can have a complete view of your organizational risk and how to better prepare employees to not be fooled.

It's time to: finally...

Prepare. Replace passive, one-off cybersecurity courses with interactive, scenario-based training that builds employee confidence and real-world readiness.

Produce. Demonstrate measurable results with dynamic risk reports and benchmarks that connect safer behaviors to stronger business outcomes.

Protect. Reinforce safe habits through continuous phishing simulations, instant feedback, and ongoing awareness campaigns that reduce risk all year long.

We now offer SMBs ONE platform to manage all of their compliance, security training, employee onboarding, and team training needs. 

All-in-one for the win. Finally one tool that employees need to use and one solution you need to manage and pay for. Nirvana, right?

A massive thank you to the team members behind this big launch. ❤️

From the folks on the product and engineering side, Lawrence Valenti, Michaël Devyver, and Merry Chin. To the people on the GTM teams, Alicia Falcon, PMMC®, Tan Tran, Katrine Reddin 🦕, Carmen Choi, Hana N., and Laura B..

A great product launch take an immense amount of coordination, planning, and execution. We use Asana, Google Doc/Sheets, and Slack to make it all happen. Of course Figma, Canva, and our CMS have something to say too.

Here's how to create the best possible webinar. 

I call it the webinar triple threat play. 

Yes, I did steal that from Bobby Flay's Triple Threat show. 🥓

Here's how to cook it up. 

By the way, I shared this playbook in my weekly marketing leadership mastermind group yesterday. Let me know if you are interested in joining. 

Start first by creating a webinar outline and agenda that has THREE distinct segments. 

1) A 20 or so minute conversation with a thought leader or subject matter expert focused around the webinar's topic. 

2) A ten minute product demo that ties what the thought leader spoke about with the use case of the product. Make sure at the end of this segment you ask the audience, using a poll in the webinar, if they would like to get a full demo of the product they just saw. I usually see about 5% to 20% of the attendees asking for a demo. 

3) A customer speaks for about ten minutes and shares their perspective on how they are using the product and the benefits value it's creating for them and their business. 

Make sure you have a DYNAMIC host. Their job is to host the entire webinar and to facilitate each segment. Getting the audience fired up, engaged, and keeping the webinar on track and managing the overall webinar experience. 

Use something like Wistia's webinar platform to make the webinar feel like a well produced show so what people are seeing is changing every couple of minutes. The key is making it not boring. 

Once the webinar is done, you now have three amazing pieces of content to repackage and reuse. 

One that's thought leadership centric, one that's very product focused, and one that is your customer proof and voice of customer segment. Wisita makes it super easy to create clips from each segment and for you to turn those clips into a format that's right for the right channel. 

So there you have it. My tasty Webinar Triple Threat Play™ 

We're run this playbook many times at EasyLlama and it never fails. 

Drop a note if you want me to share an example of one of our latest webinars using this format, or if you want to join the mastermind group. 

Happy Webinaring!

Don’t start your strategy by thinking of a tool first.

It never works. 

Always think about your STRATEGY first. 

For me it's, 'What is the best way to win the game I’m playing?'

For people in marketing and sales the answer is not AI. 

The answer is how can I best match how I’m marketing and selling to how they like to buy what I’m offering. 

For some businesses, it’s more a PLG motion. For others it’s PLG + Sales-assisted. And others use an enterprise-grade consultative GTM motion. 

But no matter what you’re trying to sell, using buying signals is a smart part of your strategy. 

Buyer signals are key to helping you understand what a buyer is doing so that you can match your approach to them. 

You can start really simple by first identifying what are your low, medium, and high intent buying signals. 

Low intent would be downloading a piece of content, going to an event that you hosted, or reading your newsletter. 

Medium intent would be checking out your pricing page, going to a webinar that includes a product demo, or researching competitors. 

High intent would be signing up for a fee trial or account, requesting a demo, or raising their hand for more info during a webinar. 

Signals can be at the contact or account level and include activity data from any first-, second-, or third-party data source.

Once you know your signals and where to find them. Don’t forget that part. :) You can then determine how to act on each signal. 

The easiest way to think about this is what signals are marketing-led, sales-led or a hybrid approach.  

Alright so we now let’s talk about tools. One of my favorite tools I’ve used to run a signal-based GTM strategy is Common Room.  They make it easy with their RoomieAI suite to find, organize, and act on all the buying signals. 

The key, IMO, is to try and keep the signal architecture in one centralized place. Much easier to manage and maintain. Helps streamline the prospecting motion of creating deals and using signals to close deals.

One of the most important things for your signal-based strategy to work is making sure the salespeople know where to see and how to use the signals. Sure, automation can help, but when a salesperson is given a power that they didn’t have before and knows how to use the power responsibility, great things can happen. Take a look at the image to see what a salesperson could get.

Things like faster lead follow up, meeting the buyer where they are, sending the right message at the right time, and reaching out to the right stakeholders to increase the likelihood a deal closes. 

The big takeaway is to please make sure you design your GTM to match how people buy today.

My new community and resource hub is open for business. 

It's called The GTM Library.

A hangout for founders, fractional folks, and marketers who wants to sharpen their go-to-market skills and execution.  

I'm an entrepreneur at heart which means I'm obsessed with all things go-to-market.  I've built a pretty big private collection of my favorite go-to-market resources, including a 100+ masterclasses from people in my network.

When you sign up you'll get access to the community and my regular masterclasses. I'm hosting a new one in a couple of weeks about my latest positioning and messaging framework that I've built. 

For a small one-time payment you can get your library card and access to my private collection of resources and masterclasses, including a private call with me. 

Hope you find it valuable. 

https://lnkd.in/eK27VGsG 

p.s. that's me with one of my favorite books about entrepreneurship and leading a business.

Kevin J. Neary

Orcawise

As Co-founder and CEO at Orcawise I lead the following:

- our R&D team building custom LLM's to help enterprises be compliant with EU AI Act. 
- our client consulting team implementing Responsible AI services, tools and training. 
- new initiatives and contributions to the (RAI) Responsible AI ecosystem we foster.  
- speak at events on RAI topics like ethics, sustainability, the future of business & humanity.

Chief Executive

Consultancy on AI ethics, compliance, governance for organizations in health, education, finance and emerging tech.

Fractional Responsible AI Consultant

CeADAR Ireland

Industry Steering Board

IP Commercialization Committee

MassChallenge Switzerland

Mentor Expert Judge. 

Kevin Neary Events

AI Keynote Speaker 

The AI Roadmap

Digital selling ecosystem for entrepreneurs

Event Manager, Host

NovaUCD

Founder and CEO at UCD Campus Company 

Google for Startups EU

Google Scaling Program 

ORCA Media Group

During this time I contributed to the launch, scale and exit for multiple ventures. 

Staffing Firm Founder: Launched and led a staffing firm for seven years, focusing on innovative recruitment strategies and achieving 100%+ year-on-year growth for five years through to the end of the dot com era.

R&D Consulting - Orca Media: Spearheaded an R&D consulting business aiding entrepreneurs in commercializing academic research. Established key partnerships and facilitated 25 successful projects.

Orca BI: Co-founded and launched Orca BI, introducing Microsoft PowerPivot business intelligence solutions to SMBs in Europe, resulting in 1.2% market penetration in DAX niche within the first year.

Connectors Marketplace: Developed an online marketplace connecting micro-recruiters with hiring managers at US multinationals in Europe, enhancing recruitment efficiency by 30%.

Entrepreneurial Support: Advised and supported US-based disruptive ventures in "audience-participation filmmaking" and AI-driven "venture valuation modelling" and "investment strategies", contributing to 2 successful MVP launches before both ventures ultimately failed to cross-the-chasm due to time-to-market and product-market fit issues. 

Signal-Based Selling Engine: Innovated a signal-based selling engine for identifying buying signals and automating social selling messages, leading to a 36% increase in sales prospects for client that following social selling strategies..

Through these ventures, I've navigated the highs and lows of entrepreneurial endeavors in multiple sectors, resulting in some lucrative lifestyle businesses, pioneering disruptive models resulted in some disappointments as well as seamless exits achieved by integrating IP with more established companies.

Business Owner / Investor

Founder & CEO at Orcawise 🚀 AI Advisor 🌍 Investor 🎤 The AI Roadmap Series

Working with AI since 2003, and today totally focused on Responsible AI (RAI). Kevin Neary is a recognized leader and advisor in Responsible AI -  AI governance, compliance, and ethical AI practices. His expertise is technology compliance with the EU AI Act & US guidelines, with a particular focus on AI Risk management, Bias and Fairness compliance in information systems.

As the CEO of Orcawise, Kevin and team is the trusted partner to enterprises implementing RAI practices.

Beyond his role at Orcawise, Kevin is actively involved in advancing AI through positions as a board advisor at leading institutions, including Georgia College and State University's, AI Lab and CeADAR, Ireland's National Centre for Applied AI. CeADAR is one of Europe's top EDIHs (European Digital Innovation Hubs), dedicated to promoting AI adoption among SMEs and public sector organizations (PSOs). Kevin's contributions at CeADAR help make the benefits of AI accessible and actionable by businesses that want to transform and innovate responsibly and sustainably.

A sought-after speaker with The AI Roadmap event series in New York, Kevin educates business leaders on AI Literacy & Ethics. He serves as a mentor/expert/ judge at the global platform MassChallenge, Switzerland, and as a mentor at the AI Ecosystem Accelerator, NovaUCD, University College Dublin, supporting AI startups and the next generation of AI innovators.

🔔 Contribution to our AI community:

▶️ RAI Tools for Compliance 

Orcawise EU AI Act Chatbot - is a customizable LLM designed to help automate compliance with the EU AI Act 🔴 DM me for a demo. 
 
▶️ RAI Services

With two decades of experience, I lead a seasoned team offering consultancy and development services 🔴 DM me about RAI consultancy.

▶️ RAI Training Programs

Responsible AI Training (RAIT) - is a custom bootcamp for companies automating compliance with EU Ai Act 🔴 DM me to enquire about AI training for your team.

🔔 Commitment to the AI Community:

▶️ Steering Board Member at CeADAR, Europe’s top Digital Innovation Hub, facilitating AI adoption for SMEs and PSOs.

▶️ Advisory Board Member at Georgia College & State University, AI Lab

▶️ Organizer of “The AI Roadmap” Event Series to demystify AI technologies and their applications.

🔔 Keynote & Mentoring

Active mentor and keynote speaker, contributing globally from the US to EMEA.

🔴 Background

Previously, I was a business & system consultant (founder and staff member) with a track record of securing over $100 million in "new business". 

Follow me for updates and insights into Responsible AI!

Chief Executive leading AI Transformations with Advisory & Services for Entrepreneurs and  Marketers

We all feel the pain of handling AI standards and legislation. It's both challenging and sometimes unpredictable as we strive for compliance and safety. 🇺🇸 🇪🇺 🇬🇧 The latest planned changes to the EU AI Act🧑‍⚖️ set for formal proposal around November 19, 2025, aim to ease compliance burdens primarily for companies already deploying generative and high-risk AI systems.

Key tangible points include:

🇪🇺 A proposed one-year grace period for companies to retroactively comply with transparency obligations such as watermarking AI-generated content. This offers breathing room for firms to adjust without immediate penalty.

🇪🇺 Expanded exemptions are expected for small and mid-cap companies, lightening their registration and reporting requirements, recognizing that compliance costs weigh heavily on these groups.

🇪🇺 Enforcement of penalties, especially for transparency violations, may be postponed until August 2027 to give organizations adequate time for alignment.

🇪🇺 Centralization of enforcement powers under the European Commission’s AI Office is proposed to streamline oversight and reduce fragmentation across member states.

🇪🇺 The EU is clarifying the AI Act’s relation to other frameworks like the Digital Services Act to reduce regulatory overlaps and confusion.
Likelihood and context:

These changes come in response to sustained pressure from large tech companies and lobby groups citing excessive complexity and innovation risk.

However, all proposed amendments will undergo scrutiny and voting by EU member states and the European Parliament, so modifications remain possible before final adoption.

The regulatory direction remains firm on banning harmful AI practices and enforcing strict rules on high-risk AI, making these tweaks more about phased, practical implementation than rollbacks.

👉 The message remains: proactive alignment with transparency, accountability, and risk mitigation is critical to avoid penalties and harness AI responsibly as a competitive asset.

This is a pragmatic adjustment to balance innovation and regulation rather than a loosening of critical AI trust standards.

SOURCE: WSJ WALL STREET JOURNAL
----
Follow me for updates on ©️ RAIMS™ Responsible AI Management System turning ISO 42001, EU AI Act & NIST guidance into practice with Standards, Credentials & Implementation tools.

Kevin Neary

CEO at Orcawise | Pioneering RAIMS™ Responsible AI Management System turning ISO 42001, EU AI Act & NIST guidance into practice with Standards, Credentials & Implementation | Author & AI Keynote Speaker

🚨 BREAKING: EU Announces Significant Delays for AI Act Enforcement 🚨
The European Commission has just proposed critical amendments to the AI Act that could reshape compliance timelines for AI systems across Europe. Instead of going live next August, high-risk AI obligations will only begin once Brussels confirms that the necessary harmonised standards and support tools are in place, a process whose timing remains uncertain. 

What does this mean for businesses? 🇺🇸 🇪🇺 🇬🇧 

🇪🇺 The application of high-risk obligations for areas like employment, credit scoring and law enforcement might be postponed until sometime before December 2027.

🇪🇺 For product-based high-risk systems, the timeline extends to August 2028.
These "longstop" dates serve as safety nets if standards and specifications aren’t ready in time.

🇪🇺 While these changes aim to create legal certainty and reduce compliance complexity, they also introduce a period of uncertainty. Companies need to stay alert to upcoming developments and prepare for phased implementation once standards are finalized.

🇪🇺 This move reflects a broader effort to balance innovation, safety, and clarity in EU’s digital rules. But one thing's clear: compliance timelines are now more flexible, but also more unpredictable.

Stay tuned as the EU continues refining its approach to responsible AI regulation.

Source: Digital Strategy Europa

#RAIMS #ResponsibleAi

This paper from World Economic Forum via Peter Slattery, PhD address some key components of Responsible AI in the context of operationalizing real-world AI agents.

"The paper makes three key contributions. Firstly, it covers the technical foundations of AI agents, including their architectures, protocols and security considerations. 

Secondly, it offers a functional classification that differentiates agents by their role, autonomy, authority, predictability and operational context. 

Thirdly, it suggests a progressive governance approach that directly connects evaluation and safeguards to an agent’s task scope and deployment environment. 

Together, these elements guide adopters with a conceptual blueprint for moving from experimentation to deployment. 

The report highlights the importance of aligning adoption with evaluation and governance practices to ensure that AI agents are successfully deployed while trust, safety and accountability are maintained"

World Economic Forum Capgemini

AI Agents in Action

The AGI narrative today typically unfolds at three levels:

1. AGI is probable - some experts believe that by the time we reach GPT-9, we could achieve Artificial General Intelligence.

2. AGI is possible - if we redesign AI architectures to enable machines to learn like young humans, with rich sensory experiences, AGI could emerge.

3. AGI is improbable - given that machines fundamentally differ from humans, some argue that no matter how powerful they become, AGI can never be reached. 

Which story are you telling and why?

For many, artificial general intelligence, or AGI, is more than just a technology. In tech hubs like Silicon Valley, it’s talked about in mystical terms. 

Ilya Sutskever, cofounder and former chief scientist at OpenAI, is said to have led chants of “Feel the AGI!” at team meetings. And he feels it more than most: In 2024, he left OpenAI, whose stated mission is to ensure that AGI benefits all of humanity, to cofound Safe Superintelligence, a startup dedicated to figuring out how to avoid a so-called rogue AGI (or control it when it comes). Superintelligence is the hot new flavor—AGI but better!—introduced as talk of AGI becomes commonplace.

Sutskever also exemplifies the mixed-up motivations at play among many self-anointed AGI evangelists. He has spent his career building the foundations for a future technology that he now finds terrifying. “It’s going to be monumental, earth-shattering—there will be a before and an after,” he told me a few months before he quit OpenAI. When I asked him why he had redirected his efforts into reining that technology in, he said: “I’m doing it for my own self-interest. It’s obviously important that any superintelligence anyone builds does not go rogue. Obviously.”

He’s far from alone in his grandiose, even apocalyptic, thinking. 

People are used to hearing that this or that is the next big thing, says Shannon Vallor, who studies the ethics of technology at the University of Edinburgh. “It used to be the computer age and then it was the internet age and now it’s the AI age,” she says. “It’s normal to have something presented to you and be told that this thing is the future. What’s different, of course, is that in contrast to computers and the internet, AGI doesn’t exist.”

And that’s why feeling the AGI is not the same as boosting the next big thing. There’s something weirder going on. Here’s what we think: AGI is a lot like a conspiracy theory, and it may be the most consequential one of our time.

Read the story: https://trib.al/cd98kug

Sinead Bovell This is correct - companies reshaping their teams for AI aren’t just cutting jobs, they’re preparing for a big change. The top companies now realize they must build their AI like a start-up, from the ground up. Not only is Ai a massive behavioual and cultural shift that requires a new foundation, but leaders can see the opportunity for responsible AI, making sure new processes are fair, trustworthy and protect folks interests right from the start, not an after-thought bolt-on. This is where the competitive edge lies. These top companies are just opening the door for a new era of hiring. We'll be over in Europe speaking on RAIMS™ at the BDVA - Big Data Value Association etam session in Copenhagen, November 13th #RAIMS #Trust

WAYE Founder, Futurist and Strategic Foresight Advisor, MBA

Companies aren’t laying off corporate workers to replace them with AI. AI isn’t capable of automating full workflows, especially not thousands, no matter how many “leaked memos” claim otherwise.

What’s happening is more strategic than that. Companies are restructuring in preparation for the disruption AI will bring. They’re internalizing their own disruption and shifting into “startup mode” versus outsourcing disruption to a competitor or a new entrant. It’s an anticipatory restructuring. 

Understanding this nuance matters because it’s a clear signal of what lies ahead.

The opportunity for small and mid-sized economies competitiveness is to pool their resources to develop frontier models or niche sector specific models. The opportunity is even greater for these economies  to pool resources to lay a responsible AI foundation on which to evolve all AI development, at a national(s) level, that is truly differentiated (with embedded governance) from what the large economies are currently doing with frontier models.

"The United States now controls approximately 75% of global AI compute capacity, China 15%, and the EU 5%. This concentration of compute, alongside concentrations of AI development talent, data, and AI model ownership suggests that mid-sized economies likely face insurmountable barriers to independent frontier AI development. 

At the same time, economic, cultural, and security infrastructures are coming to rely ever more on frontier models. States that are unable to develop their own frontier models or access the computing hardware required to train them will have to choose between dependency and weakness: 

• Dependency: if states adopt U.S. or Chinese AI systems, these frontier AI states can then exploit their privileged position in ways that harm dependent states, for example through data theft, service restrictions, selectively withholding frontier capabilities, embedding values in foundation models, and unfavorable terms of trade. 

• Weakness: if, on the other hand, states limit their adoption of frontier systems to avoid dependency, frontier AI states may achieve breakthrough capabilities—in economic productivity, in scientific discovery, in military operations—that create widening gaps in economic and military capabilities. Yet, mid-sized economies are also AI bridge powers, possessing substantial AI development capabilities and resources that, if combined, would allow them to challenge the status quo. 

By working together and strategically choosing their AI development approaches, AI bridge powers can develop competitive frontier models: 

• First, pooled computing infrastructure can support frontier-scale development. [...]

• Second, a significant portion of top AI talent has ties to AI bridge power countries [...]

• Third, while most of the data used to train frontier models is already public, bridge powers could pool domain-specific data and resources for data cleaning and expert labeling efforts. 

• Fourth, bridge powers should make strategic, frontier development bets[...]

• Fifth, building reliable AI represents an unmet market need where bridge powers have structural advantages[...]

A multinational partnership could enable members to preserve sovereignty, have more weight in shaping global AI governance, and lead through ethical stewardship[...]

Adrien ABECASSIS, Jonathan Barry, Imane (Ima) Bello, Yoshua Bengio, Antonin Bergeaud, Yann Bonnet, Philipp Hacker, Ben Harack, Sophia Hatz, Joachim Henkel, Holger Hoos, Kit Kitamura, Ranjit Lall, Yann Lechelle, Constance de Leusse, Charles Martinet, Nicolas Miailhe, Julia C Morse, Maximilian Negele, Kyung Ryul Park, Miro Pluckebaum, Murielle Popa-Fabre, Benjamin PRUD’HOMME-AMICHOT, Yohann Ralle, Mark Robinson, Charbel-Raphaël Segerie, José-Ignacio Torreblanca, Lucia Velasco, (Vijay) K VijayRaghavan

A Blueprint for Multinational Advanced AI Development

As cities like NY rethink nightlife and  tourism we'll experience first hand how #RAIMS Responsible AI systems are seamlessly embedded in the growth strategies of city experiences.

Faced with the demands of growth, cities are rethinking how they operate - and when.

In New York City alone, the night-time economy supports 300,000 jobs and
generates over $35 billion per year.

From late-night libraries to nocturnal tourism, sensor-driven lighting and #night czars, here are just some of the ways that #cities are leveraging those extra hours on the clock.

The World Economic Forum has published a briefing paper, Unlocking the Potential of 24-Hour Economies, which explores how governing, investing, and designing for round-the-clock urban life can create safer, more inclusive and more economically resilient cities. You can read it here: https://ow.ly/ePpe50XkNBZ

Consultants - your clients are now paying for outcomes, next clients will only pay for judgement and ultimately judgement tied to outcomes. Judgement with embedded Responsible AI will be the norm. #RAIMS

CEO at Plus AI - Stop making slides the old way! Try the best AI for PowerPoint and Google Slides

The billable hour is dying.

McKinsey just disclosed that 25% of their projects are now outcome-based: fees paid on results, not hours. 

They've cut 5,000 jobs while deploying 12,000 AI agents. Project teams that once needed 14 consultants now run with 2–3 humans plus AI.

The same shift is hitting law. 67% of corporate legal departments expect AI to impact the billable hour.

Bloomberg Law called it "Big Law's AI Nightmare": fewer billed hours, lower profits. 

Ropes & Gray (top 10 largest US law firm) just launched a pilot letting first-year associates spend time on AI training instead of billing.

Entry-level tasks like research, synthesis, first-draft slides, workshop summaries, and model updates don't require humans anymore. What used to take analysts a week now takes ~30 minutes with good AI workflows.

And when the workload shrinks, the price follows.

KPMG is investing $2B with Microsoft to integrate AI into audit. EY calls their new model "service-as-a-software." Firms are being pushed from billing hours to billing outcomes, IP, and productized services.

AI is replacing the parts of consulting that weren't adding value.

Clients will still pay for judgment, experience, and clarity. But they won't pay for manual work.

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