Dave Edwards | SpeakerHub

Personal Details

Bio

Experienced entrepreneur, executive, investor and advisor, with a proven track record of innovating and company building. Specialist in the future of work, especially the impact of AI and automation on the human employee experience.

My current speaking engagements include my wife & business partner, Helen, with whom I co-founded Sonder Studio. We bring a dynamic duo to the stage to help people understand AI, how it works for and against us, how it makes us feel and what we can do about it. We provide a positive outlook in an area that scares many by empowering people through knowledge that leverages expertise in technology, neuroscience, behavioral economics and philosophy.

I've been a performer all my life and a speaker for more than 20 years. I stitch together the future of technology and humanity with personal stories of working with some of the greats including Steve Jobs at Apple and Mary Meeker at Morgan Stanley. I've been an exec at the top of industry and an entrepreneur at the ground-level which gives me an ability to connect with a broad group of people.

To the stage, I bring a broad and comprehensive experience across finance, product marketing and strategy including as a venture capital investor and director, public company executive, startup founder & CEO and Wall Street analyst.

I'm a trend-spotter, analyst and storyteller. I have spent my career distilling and advancing big technology trends like the internet, cleantech and artificial intelligence. My brain is split in two with half dedicated to creatively designing consumer experiences while the other half has an uncanny ability to find the right metric to measure and build upon. This unique combination allows me to find opportunities ahead of the herd, create products that delight millions and raise billions for emerging companies.

My past experience includes co-founding Intelligentsia.ai (acquired by Quartz/Atlantic Media) as well as serving as head of software application marketing at Apple, head of consumer strategy at SunPower and a lead technology research analyst at Morgan Stanley.

My speaking experience includes wide range of conferences, including: the House of Beautiful Business, Greentech Summit, MacWorld, MarTech, Montreaux, Morgan Stanley Investment Conference, National Association of Broadcasters, National Headstart Association and South by Southwest. I've also been interviewed by a range of print and TV media, including: Bloomberg, CBC, CNBC, Fast Company, the Financial Times, Fox Business, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal.

Current position (1)

Co-Founder

Sonder Studio

Degrees (1)

History

Yale University

1989 to 1993

Presentations

Presentations (7)

The business case for people and process as part of AI/ML

Only a small fraction of companies get value from their AI/ML investment even after years of prototyping, infrastructure investment and strategy. Why? Because it’s all about how people learn and make decisions with machines and data. It should be easier but strong data-driven cultures don’t emerge, they are designed. We discuss why AI must be designed around how people learn and make decisions for it to deliver on its promise, and what to do about it.

Organizations are decision factories

“Organizations are decision factories,” says Nobel Laureate, Danny Kahneman. But with organizations increasingly being staffed not only by people and teams but also by data and machine learning models, how do human employees work best with machine employees? We explore the nuances of human decision making when workflow includes intelligent machines.

Data makes decisions harder, so here’s what to do about it

Shouldn’t data make decisions easier? You’d think so but that’s not how it works. We explain why our causal reasoning systems and intuitions are less useful the more data we have and why experience and data can be in conflict. We compare how humans reason and how machines reason and show you what makes for the best of both worlds. We touch on the future of causal machine learning and where the limits of machine reasoning are today.

How do we know that machines are learning what we want them to learn?

How do we know that machines are learning what we want them to learn? This is a central problem in machine learning and is known as the problem of alignment. Aligning machines to human intent is no trivial thing. While most people don’t worry about a superintelligence running amok, most of us do worry about the impact of intelligent machines on our experience of the world—are we eroding our own decision making capabilities and choices as we outsource more of our thinking and knowledge to machines?

AI, Personalization and the Design of Human Futures

Personalization in assistance, commerce, health, education and many other realms of life promises a new era of personal efficiency and, if done well, digital intimacy. But over personalization can be creepy and make people distrust AI or the brand behind it. AI forces us to think differently about the data we volunteer and the inferences being made about us and makes us want to know our data “voodoo doll.” It makes us want to ask what inferences are made about us based on our data and the data of others. We can feel trapped by the Paradox of Personalization and wonder if companies are engaged in human-centered design or in human futures design. In this talk, we dive into the emerging issues of personalization and the impact on privacy, preferences and personal agency.

AI and your Inner Self

In this session, we disrupt the traditional view the audience has of privacy. We describe how a new type of intelligence is interacting with us, forcing us to think differently about privacy. We detail how, instead of the inputs — what information we volunteer — we have to think of the outputs — what inferences are made about us. We explain how AI is alien in its knowledge about us, and how passive and unavoidable data collection can be used to track and infer our inner states, giving away our doubts and hesitations. We explore where these are used to budget us to alternate ends. We thread many privacy-related themes together to end with audience insights into AI’s role in denying us the right to explore, change, make mistakes and grow.

AI and our Biased Society

In this session, we explain how data bias impacts AI. We explain how data reflects human bias and how this presents in the data, as well as how AI algorithms amplify bias. We explain fairness and how fairness metrics can conflict. We explain why it’s vital to have diversity in AI, and give multiple, concrete examples of where bias in AI has caused harm. Finally, we close with the promise of AI done well — reducing human bias and increasing inclusivity.

Workshops (1)

Data-Driven Decision-Making

Full day

This workshop starts with understanding how humans think; how humans gain a sense of knowledge and make decisions. We then explore the role of intuition and experience versus analysis and predictive modeling. We diagnose the barriers to better use of data and the human factors at play. We look to the latest in behavioral science to understand where people are indispensable and what's required to unlock human potential in the age of data. We dive deep on how technology—big data, analytics, AI/machine learning—changes where, how and when to look to data for better decision-making.

Past talks (3)

Learning in the Age of AI

Unknown Summit

Lisbon, Portugal

November 7, 2019

Artificial Intelligence Masterclass

House of Beautiful Business

Lisbon

November 5, 2019

AI and Intimacy

House of Beautiful Business

Lisbon