Abigail Posner

Abigail Posner is a keynote speaker on AI, creativity, and human potential. A former Director at Google Creative Works and Harvard-trained cultural anthropologist, she helps leaders and organizations develop the expansive thinking and creative edge needed to lead through AI-driven change. Her keynotes blend anthropology, neuroscience, and real-world business insight to give audiences a practical framework for harnessing what no AI can replicate: distinctly human ingenuity.

Abigail Posner spent 13 years at Google helping the world’s top brands invent the future — now she’s helping leaders do the same thing for themselves.

From Anthropology to the Boardroom

As Director of U.S. Creative Works at Google, Posner led a multidisciplinary team developing data-driven, AI-powered advertising and branded content strategies for YouTube’s top global advertisers. She pioneered Humanizing Digital, an anthropology-based thought leadership series exploring how people emotionally relate to technology, and spearheaded a cultural transformation initiative reaching more than 4,000 Google sales professionals worldwide. Before Google, she served as Executive Vice President of Brand Strategy at Publicis New York and Strategy Team Director at DDB New York.

Unlocking the Human Code in an AI Era

Posner’s keynotes give leaders a concrete framework for competing in the age of AI — not by doing more, but by thinking bigger. She draws on cultural anthropology, neuroscience, and real-world business examples to show how creativity, expansive thinking, and distinctly human ingenuity are the ultimate competitive edge that no algorithm can replicate. Her work has been recognized with the United Nations Media Impact Award and featured in The New York Times, Forbes, and Fast Company.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard University in social anthropology, Abigail Posner delivers keynotes on AI and human creativity, leadership and innovation, and organizational transformation.

Your Expansiveness Edge: Harnessing the Untapped Combinations Within You

What’s my edge now? That’s what leaders are asking in a world where AI completely shifted how they add value and lead through change.

The leaders defining what’s next have figured out how to connect all the different sides of who they are, strategically and deliberately, to generate ideas and drive impact no one else can replicate. This isn’t bringing your whole self to work. It’s a different game entirely.

In this high-energy, fast-moving talk, Abigail Posner, former Director of U.S. Creative Works at Google and unstoppable creative force, inspires leaders with a framework to stop compartmentalizing their strengths and start activating the full range of their potential.

Through vivid storytelling, real-world examples, and audience engagement, Abigail shows how the future belongs to people who combine disciplines, passions, lived experiences, contradictions, curiosities, and embodied presence into something no algorithm can predict and no competitor can replicate.

This presentation is a charge forward. Audiences walk away ready to lead and work with more potency. Because when you expand, the room expands. And when the room expands, what’s possible changes.

Tangible Takeaways:

• Walk away understanding why the most transformative organizations aren’t merely diverse, they are expansive, and why expansiveness fuels innovation in ways strategy alone cannot.
• Learn how to apply the Expansiveness Framework, a clear, actionable architecture for unlocking human potential across teams and systems.
• Discover how relentless curiosity about yourself and others sparks deeper questions, richer connections, and ideas no one else would dare to pursue.
• Identify and activate the unexpected intersections within you, your background, disciplines, passions, and the embodied energy you bring, to generate ideas no one else in the room could have produced.
• Leave inspired with a curated set of hands-on exercises designed to ignite your personal Expansiveness Edge immediately, not someday, not theoretically, but now.

Wired to Create: Tap Your Innate Creativity to Drive Bolder Ideas and Bigger Breakthroughs

Too many people don’t think they’re capable of generating the breakthrough ideas their organization desperately needs. They’re wrong. And this presentation inspires them how to contribute in ways they never imagined.

Creativity isn’t reserved for the “naturally gifted” — it’s wired into all of us. The problem isn’t that people lack creative capacity. It’s that they’ve never been shown how to find it, trust it, and activate it. In an era of AI, that capacity matters more than ever, freeing us to refocus on what humans do best: bold ideation, collaborative insight, and imaginative thinking at its most powerful.

In this electrifying, mind-expanding talk, Abigail Posner, a force of nature on stage, shows every person in the room how to unlock their innate creative potential. She hands them a rich toolkit spanning anthropology, neuroscience, real-world business examples, and AI-powered analysis to generate bold ideas and compete in times of seismic change.

Audiences leave equipped with concrete tools to activate their creativity immediately.

Tangible Takeaways:

• Discover why the most valuable currency isn’t technical skill, it’s distinctly human creativity. Curiosity, imagination, and collaborative sense-making are now the defining competitive advantage.
• Be inspired to nurture, trust, and activate your innate creative potential to generate bold ideas that move the needle.
• Understand a cross-disciplinary set of lenses drawn from anthropology, neuroscience, technology, and creative development to unlock new dimensions of thinking.
• Get a full-spectrum toolkit for strategically deploying each to unearth the freshest, most generative ideas for any challenge, using a full-spectrum toolkit for uncovering ideas: from ethnographic observation and behavioral research to quantitative data and AI-powered analysis.

Ingenuity Unleashed: Using AI to Make Human Imagination More Powerful Than Ever

Everyone is using AI to do the same things faster. Almost no one is using it to think bigger. The creative potential of AI is vastly underestimated and almost entirely untapped.

Your boldest ideas and sharpest instincts have always been there. But ingenuity, the ability to apply those ideas to solve real problems, can only go so far when it’s buried under the mental load of everything else. AI changes that. It takes on the rote and the analytical, freeing your most original, emotionally intelligent thinking to finally unleash its full force and take what’s possible further than ever imagined.

In this inspiring, provocative talk, Abigail Posner reframes AI as the latest in a long human tradition of using tools to expand what we’re capable of and gives people a concrete way to use it differently. Audiences leave knowing not just why AI is a creative force multiplier, but exactly how to deploy it that way, with their thinking cracked open and a practical framework to put it to work immediately.

Tangible Takeaways:

• Understand how ingenuity – creativity plus the ability to make big ideas actually land – is innate in all of us. It becomes your most powerful force in an AI world.
• Learn provocative new thinking on how AI amplifies human creativity in ways that are still emerging, full of possibility, and overturning what we thought we knew.
• Embrace a new lens, drawn from years of anthropological research on how humans have always partnered with technology to expand their capabilities and what that means for right now.
• Discover a practical framework for activating your boldest thinking so AI doesn’t just support what you do, it takes it further than was ever possible before.

What does Abigail Posner speak about? Abigail Posner speaks on AI and human creativity, innovation leadership, and organizational transformation. Her keynotes show leaders how to use their unique combination of experience, perspective, and creative instinct — what she calls the Human Code — as a competitive edge in an AI-driven world.

What is Abigail Posner’s background? Posner spent 13 years at Google, most recently as Director of U.S. Creative Works, where she led AI-powered content strategy for YouTube’s top global advertisers. Before Google, she held senior strategy roles at Publicis New York and DDB New York. She holds a degree in social anthropology from Harvard University.

Who books Abigail Posner to speak? Meeting planners book Abigail Posner for corporate leadership conferences, innovation summits, marketing and advertising events, and technology-focused executive gatherings where audiences need a fresh, human-centered perspective on AI.