Speaking & Teaching

I've run 300+ sessions across four continents - business schools, main stages, conference halls, the V&A. The common thread: people do things, not just hear things. They try it in the room, badly, while nothing is riding on it.

I came to this from teaching - at universities, companies and schools, years of rooms where people had to leave able to do something. That's still the brief I design to, whether it's a keynote or three days.

Some bookings are one talk. Others are the whole run - the same room four times in two days, product demos, the awkward questions, still being useful at the evening mingle. I've found I quite like the second kind.

At Wavetable we build Rondo, a platform teams practise on - which means the room usually ends up doing the work rather than watching me do it.

If you want to work together - get in touch with what you're thinking.

Selected clients

• Corporate: Deloitte Global, EY, Pernod Ricard, Publicis Groupe, NBC Comcast, IBM, Mastercard, Ubisoft, mci group
• Education: Columbia Business School, IE Business School, Universidad Francisco Marroquin, The New School, University of Westminster
• Events & Creative: SXSW, CES, Soho House, IBTM World, CMX Summit, Betaworks, The British Council, V&A Museum, Creative Mornings

Recently

• ByteDance - London, 2026
• mci group Business Academy - Paris, 2026 - "AI Acceleration: The Three Bets You're Already Making"
• IBTM World - Barcelona, 2024 and 2025 - "AI for Event Professionals"
• Pernod Ricard - Mexico City, 2024

Full speaking history →

What I do

• Keynotes - 20-60 minutes. I don't do the TED-style performance monologue. My keynotes have interaction built in - moments where the room does something, not just listens. Works better, and people remember more of it.
• Workshops - Half a day, or a full one, or two. I've designed and run hundreds, and it's probably the format I'd pick if you made me choose one. Hands-on, structured, vibrant, with frameworks people use afterwards. Not death-by-Post-it.
• Programmes - Several sessions over weeks, same group, each one building on the last. For when it was never going to fit into a single day.
• Expert residencies - Extended engagements where I'm your AI expert across multiple sessions, an event, or a product launch. Think: credible independent voice who can teach, engage, and run a room - not a one-and-done keynote, but sustained presence. The gig that doesn't fit neatly into "speaker" or "facilitator" - at CES I did it as an expert guide on the show floor. Two or three a year.
• Advisory - Ongoing, usually monthly. For organisations designing something they'll run for years - an academy, an internal programme, a whole capability - who'd rather have someone who has designed a lot of them on the call than a deck at the end.

Also:

• Panel moderation - It's underrated. A good moderator does the prep, keeps the energy, makes the panelists look smarter than they expected, and gets the audience involved. I've hosted panels on AI, creator economy, learning innovation, and media futures - and I enjoy it more than I probably should.
• Facilitation - Offsites, strategy sessions, team days. When a group needs to figure something out together and needs someone to design the structure and keep it on track.

What I work on

Four bodies of work. Any of them runs as a keynote, a half-day, or the spine of a residency - the length changes, the material doesn't.

1) Nobody's Using It

Closing the gap between AI rollout and adoption

You bought the licences. You ran the training. Six months on, the same four people are doing all the interesting work and nobody wants to open the usage dashboard.

This isn't a tools problem. People don't adopt a tool because someone showed it to them. They adopt it after they've used it on their own work, badly, somewhere that was fine.

What the gap actually is, why training doesn't close it, and what does.

2) The Three Bets You're Already Making

AI strategy while the ground is still moving

Every business is already making three bets on AI. Most haven't said them out loud, which means nobody has checked whether they're the right ones.

This session names them: what you're betting on the tools, on your people, and on what you actually sell. What's genuinely shifting in how work gets done - and what isn't. Taste, judgment, the calls that don't get automated.

Not a trends deck. Three bets, examined, with your own business on the table.

Industry cuts: Agencies and professional services · Events and experiences · Product and leadership teams

Delivered as "AI Acceleration: The Three Bets You're Already Making" at mci group Business Academy, Paris 2026, and as "AI for Event Professionals" at IBTM World, Barcelona 2024 and 2025.

3) Groove Theory: The Five Elements of Creative Work

Finding your rhythm when AI handles the rest

Some work connects instantly. Other work - equally smart, equally polished - just doesn't. The difference is groove.

I write a newsletter called Groove Theory, reverse-engineering what makes certain work unmistakable: the Safdie Brothers' tension design, Dishoom's theatrical hospitality, Trent Reznor letting his songs go, Citymapper's interface choreography. Five elements keep showing up: Structure, Rhythm, Modality, Presence, Signal. Thirty editions in, they've held up.

AI can generate content. It can't find the groove. These are the skills that matter more now, not less.

4) Everything is Experience Design Now

Why the future of communication looks like production

A decade ago, production-quality experiences meant studio time, crew, and serious budget. Now a small team can produce work that used to require a department.

This shift is reaching everything - product education, internal communications, customer experiences, corporate events. The tools to create narrative-driven, production-quality experiences are accessible. But the bigger question isn't about tools - it's about what communication even is when information is everywhere and attention is scarce.

The answer looks less like broadcasting and more like enrollment - work done with people, not to them.

Every session runs on Rondo

Pilots get simulators. The rest of us get PowerPoints. So I bring a simulator.

Rondo is the practice platform we build at Wavetable. Whatever the format, the room can be doing something on their own devices twenty minutes in - working a scenario, making a call, seeing what everyone else decided - instead of waiting for the Q&A.

Not a word cloud, not turn-to-your-neighbour. People make decisions that have consequences, then find out what happened.

You'll try it yourself before you leave, and take away what you made - the scenario you worked, the call you argued, something you can run again with your own team.

It means a keynote can have a middle rather than a build-up, and a workshop doesn't need forty Post-its to prove people participated.

In Action

What people say

"Extraordinary - one of the best teachers I've had in any environment"

"Loved the keynote content, but even more, the warmth, the sense of humor, how authentic you are. More speakers should be that genuine and warm"

"Dynamic, hands-on, funny, great energy, and full of information"

"Howard's facilitation exemplified an impressive blend of creativity, analytics, and empathy"

"THANK YOU HOWARD! I have the deepest respect for you and really am honored that I got to take your class. You are an amazing educator and an awesome cheerleader."

"Howard is a great facilitator. He has a friendly and relatable teaching style as well as nicely designed decks that retain my focus and help me to absorb what I am meant to be learning."

Speaker Bio & Photos

Howard Gray is a teacher, writer, and experience designer. He runs Wavetable, a studio that builds playable business cases - simulations where teams practise the hard conversations before they have them for real. He also writes Groove Theory, a newsletter about how creative work finds its rhythm.

Much of his current work is about the gap between rolling AI out and people actually using it. He's delivered 300+ sessions across four continents, taught at Columbia and IE Business School, and has sat on the SXSW advisory committee since 2019.

Based between London and New York, Howard is still searching for the perfect breakfast.

Headshots

FAQs

Let's talk

Tell me about the event, the room, and what you need people to leave with. That's usually enough to know whether it's a fit.

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