Linda Bernardi

Linda Bernardi is a serial technology entrepreneur, bestselling author, and innovation strategist who served as Chief Innovation Officer at IBM, where she helped introduce Watson to the world. She speaks on disruptive innovation, AI, IoT, blockchain, and building cultures that embrace transformational change across every industry sector.

IBM Chief Innovation Officer and Tech Pioneer
At IBM, Bernardi focused on enabling Fortune 100 companies to harness IoT, AI, and cognitive capabilities for digital transformation. She founded one of the world’s first IoT companies, ConnecTerra, pioneering the connection of RFID technology to enterprise systems before selling the company in 2006. She also served as EVP and Chief Product and Strategy Officer at Element AI, building AI products for enterprises, and as Head of Strategy at Consensys for blockchain and cryptocurrency adoption.

Bestselling Author and McKinsey Advisor
Currently a Senior Advisor for McKinsey & Company Worldwide, Bernardi is the author of two acclaimed books: ProVoke, on building cultures of disruption, and The Inversion Factor (MIT Press), which won the Axiom Bronze Award for Best Business Theory and explores the critical shift from product-first to needs-first business models. She is a Founding Emeritus board member of the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology and an Emeritus board member at The SETI Institute.

Bernardi holds an M.S. in Applied Mathematics and Statistics from UCLA and has delivered hundreds of keynotes globally across finance, healthcare, retail, and technology sectors.

Futureproof YOUR business: Leveraging AI, IoT, and Big Data in the Financial Sector

The financial industry is experiencing game-changing disruption from AI and IoT, as well as Big Data and predictive analytics. Linda Bernardi illustrates how traditional financial models are being pushed aside in today’s consumer-driven “Know Me” economy by technologies like blockchain and cryptocurrency. She discusses how digital disruption is literally overhauling the mobile consumer’s banking expectations. A serial high-tech entrepreneur and bestselling serial author on these topics, Bernardi brings financial audiences a powerful message of futureproofing that applies to financial institutions, asset management associations, reinsurance, and the mortgage industry.

As Chief Innovation Officer at IBM and Watson Co-Lead, Bernardi is ideally qualified in how to leverage disruptive innovation. Her enthusiasm will inspire your audience to feel comfortable with disruption, empowering them to futureproof their business as disruptive technologies continue to shape the financial industry.

How Technological Disruption Will Reshape Healthcare

The healthcare industry is traditionally resistant to technological change and disruptions. However, AI, blockchain, and the resulting technological shifts are turning healthcare on its head. From intelligent robotics, personalized medicine, and compliance monitoring to immersion technology, predictive monitoring, and IoT-enabled services, Linda Bernardi discusses inversion technologies like blockchain and AI and their impact on traditional models of research, patient data, clinical trials, and drug approval. While hospitals aim for higher revenues, patients require more transparency. Patient portals are one response, but are portals enough? Bernardi says the hospital landscape of the near future must align with today’s consumer-driven “Know Me” economy.

Invent Your Future: Futureproof Your Business by Embracing Disruptive Technologies

Linda Bernardi takes a deep-dive into the emergence of today’s consumer-driven “Know-Me” economy and the trends surrounding Artificial Intelligence (AI), The Internet of Things (IoT), blockchain, and crypto technologies. She raises her audience’s comfort level with digital disruption and sparks optimism in the idea of futureproofing your business. Her focus is to engage you in a positive way with these transformational technologies. As author of the Amazon bestseller, The Inversion Factor: How to Thrive in the IoT Economy, Bernardi shares with audiences how to abandon the ‘product-first’ model and capitalize on a ‘customer-need’ model, as Netflix and many others have done.

C-Agility

This is one of Linda Bernardi’s main focuses today as she works with clients. C-Agility, or COVID-Agility means agility and hyper-innovation during COVID-19 across all sectors and across the world. We are seeing disruption, innovation, and agility demonstrated across ALL industries, predicated by COVID-19, but Bernardi has always believed humans can innovate at a much higher rate. In Bernardi’s talks, she goes through 10-15 detailed examples across all industries, and as she discusses these topics, audiences get super excited about the potential ahead. You see the change instantly. C-Agility has certain components, which Bernardi covers in detail, and her audiences become very confident that it applies to them and that they can innovate much faster and much better. Bernardi’s second book, The Inversion Factor, talks about how companies can build better products and offerings once they understand their customer data (AI)- and Bernardi is seeing Inversion, her IP, getting tons of traction. This is exciting, because it means that companies are disrupting and innovating faster and more meaningfully. This is hyper-exciting for audiences across all sectors, and is factual + meaningful + inspirational.

Connected Virtual Culture

In the C-Agility topic, Linda Bernardi talks about how disruption and innovation are now growing at maximum speeds. In her first book, ProVoke, Bernardi talks about how we (humans) need to get out of our own way, and need to accept disruption and innovation! This creates cultures that are capable and confident that they can innovate and have the permission to disrupt. We humans are at the moment disconnected, but connected in objective, speed, and purpose. C-Agility brings us together, like never before. However, to fully succeed, we need to embrace the challenges and focus, re-thinking those things that ‘bind’ our organizations together. We cannot just be a culture of Zoom-Connected-People working virtually together; we need to bind and connect meaningfully and continue this massive positive trajectory of disruption and innovation. This topic is also highly factual AND inspirational for audiences in all industries as Bernardi discusses the Disconnected-Connected-Company-Cultures.