Making Your Ideas & Stories Connect Better With Humans In The Age of AI

Work changes fast. Leaders are told to steady the room, explain complexity, inspire confidence. Many were never taught how. Your clients should be paying for ideas that make rooms lean forward, campaigns that travel and stories that turn audiences into believers. But right now, many leaders are in panic mode as their teams just use AI to produce faster versions of the same thinking. More words. More decks. More options. More sameness.

In meetings and pitches especially, business storytelling has become a balancing act. Leaders need to demonstrate expertise without turning every story into a monument to themselves. Former agency leader and Newsjacking author Jon Burkhart has a different solution for this problem.

He believes Day 1 Empathy unlocks Day 1 Energy. His empathy is not soft. It’s a strategic diagnostic that only humans can use. It’s a way of identifying what truth remains unspoken because saying it would require uncomfortable change. Once this tension or fear or confusion is identified, it can be redirected. In this high-energy, interactive keynote, Jon guides you through the 5 C’s of Human Connection that must be present in your case studies, pitches and even chats in the pub.

Jon Burkhart is best known for being an award-winning international keynote speaker, strategist and author of Newsjacking. Through his consultancy TBC Global, he helps brands rethink the way they do business, so they stand out with a more impactful story. Over the last decade, Jon’s travelled to 26 countries, inspiring clients like Microsoft, Santander, Deloitte and Salesforce to be more audacious. Also, he’s one of very few to speak at SXSW 20 times, and now he serves on their advisory board.