Alexandra Samuel

When we’re facing a tough decision, we often look for other people to coach us. But what if the best coach you’ll ever have isn’t a human at all? Tech journalist and frequent Wall Street Journal contributor Alexandra Samuel built an AI coach as a 10-week experiment—and the results taught her more than she could have expected about work, creativity, and what it means to be human.

In this hands-on talk, Alex shares the story of her 10-week experiment building “Viv,” a custom AI coach that helped her navigate a critical career pivot. She argues that the true power of AI lies not in getting it to do your work for you, but in using it to clarify your own values, goals, and strategic intentions—and she moves beyond the story to give you the blueprint for building your own custom AI coach.

Audiences will learn her signature “AI interviewer” method, a technique that forces you to take your “internal editor offline” and surface unfiltered, authentic insights. She introduces practical tools like the “reverse feedback sandwich” designed to stop AI from being a sycophant and instead force it to challenge your assumptions. Whether you need a ruthless strategic critic or a creative muse, Alex provides the specific prompts and frameworks to customize a tool that fits your unique needs.

“If you are engaging with AI, you need to think of it as an imaginative tool, rather than a search engine,” she says. “Entering into this space of imagination and creativity can open up much bigger possibilities than just copy-editing something 12% faster.”

The rise of AI isn’t just changing how we work as individuals—it’s transforming how we work together. In this practical and engaging talk, Alexandra Samuel shows how leading teams and organizations are using AI to reshape collaboration, communication and innovation. You’ll learn how AI can help break down silos, foster creativity, and ensure every team member’s strengths are utilized to their fullest potential. Alex will share real-world examples of AI-driven collaboration, and provide a roadmap for integrating AI into your own collaborative processes.

In this illuminating session, you’ll discover how to use AI to streamline workflows, enhance communication across distributed teams, and break down organizational silos. You’ll learn strategies for leveraging AI to facilitate more inclusive brainstorming, provide real-time language translation for global teams, and analyze team dynamics for improved performance. Alex offers inspiring case studies of organizations that have successfully integrated AI into their collaborative processes, and you’ll leave with a practical roadmap for transforming your own team’s approach to collaboration.

“AI gives us an unprecedented opportunity to rethink how we work together,” Alex says. “The organizations that thrive will be the ones that harness AI to create more vibrant, engaged and productive teams.”

What happens when machines think for us? The rapid adoption of ChatGPT and other generative AI tools has raised profound questions about the future of critical thinking, learning and innovation. But AI doesn’t have to be the end of the human story: Instead, it can open a new chapter—once we reckon with how AI transforms our relationship to knowledge, creativity and one another.

Drawing on her AI stories for The Wall Street Journal and Harvard Business Review, Alexandra dismantles the false choice between either uncritically embracing AI’s productivity gains or rejecting it as an existential threat. Instead, she argues for using AI to hone our own human capacities for creativity and critical thinking and provides practical tactics you can use and share.

You’ll gain a new framework for thinking about AI—one that will transform how you approach your own work, your relationships, and ultimately, how you help others navigate this new landscape.

AI can boost individual performance, strengthen teams and drive organizational innovation—once we embrace the tactics that ensure AI makes the most of our human talents.

In this engaging talk, journalist and technology researcher Alexandra Samuel shows you how to apply the approaches she covers in her AI stories for The Wall Street Journal and Harvard Business Review. When we use AI to address the chores and frictions that drain our energy and chip away at our relationships, Alex shows, it can become a catalyst for more effective, rewarding and collaborative work.

In this talk, Alex shares specific tactics that deliver on the promise of AI-supported collaboration, so that you leave with a new understanding of AI, and concrete steps to put it into practice.