Keynote SpeakerLinda Bernardi

Linda Bernardi lives and breathes technology disruption and innovation. Today, technology is evolving like never before, and Linda is involved in cutting edge technologies across all sectors, such as Finance, Retail, Healthcare, High Tech, Logistics, Automotive, Consumer Goods, and all others. Her focus is to enable all enterprises to imagine, disrupt, innovate at record pace, and make the impossible become possible. She works with startups all around the globe, as well as large companies, to enable and inspire enterprises to build a culture of mindful innovation. She loves to practice the beautiful Art of Imagination – the first step towards innovation.

Linda believes that the best ideas are the ‘crazy’ ideas, stemming from a keen sense of unbounded imagination, and she works to unleash people’s imaginations. Over the last few years, she has focused a lot of her work around the topic of how to disrupt and innovate in today’s (possibly permanent) virtual/disconnected world and the art of Leveraging the Digital Workforce to enhance innovation in companies. Unless we mindfully and creatively adopt new ways of thinking about innovation, we will not succeed in this new world. This is at the center of her 3rd book to be published in 2023.

Linda’s background is equally focused on her history as a highly successful serial entrepreneur, as well as a serial high-level executive. She is a very active technology disruptor and a passionate innovator. She helps clients imagine, develop a vision, build products, reshape, and re-imagine their future. As a well- known author in technology disruption and innovation, she reaches thousands of people each year, helping re-shape companies. Today she is embarking on her most ambitious startup – connecting the world of video gaming and music, dynamically via AI and machine learning. Like many other ideas, she is told this is ‘crazy’ and impossible, and she welcomes the challenge!

Linda’s academic and professional background is in data and AI, focused on understanding large scale data to build the best (and always evolving) customer experiences and products. She was founder and CEO of the very first IoT company in the world, where she helped people imagine/realize a world where everything would be connected to the internet and how this would change the world. She was told it was impossible! Her other startups have disrupted numerous areas of technology. In her role as Chief Innovation Officer at IBM, she was involved with introducing Watson to the world and enabling IBM’s Fortune 100 companies to disrupt and innovate at a rapid rate. She was SVP and head of products at Element AI in Montreal, building AI products for enterprises. In her role as Head of Strategy at Consensys, Linda was involved in blockchain and cryptocurrency (Ethereum) adoption, especially by the financial sector. She also built the largest clinical trial software product used by all pharmaceutical companies today, and large-scale satellite detection and pattern recognition systems, used by Aerospace and Defense today. Linda purposefully works across all sectors, never limiting the possibilities of disruption and innovation, and always practicing the art of imagination.

To further promote the concepts of disruption and innovation, she authored her first book, ProVoke, (2011), talking about the necessity of cultures of innovation. Her second book, The Inversion Factor (2017), received Best Business Theory Award at MIT, 2018, and high praise from the WSJ. The Inversion Factor discusses how technologies such as AI, IoT, blockchain, along with an open mindset, can allow us to build experiences, not just products. ‘Customer Experience’ is now at the core of all companies’ innovation agendas.

Linda’s graduate degree is in Applied Mathematics from UCLA. She is an avid learner, a relentless innovator, and excited to be part of your disruption and innovation journey.