Solidly researched, grounded in practice, interactive, and moderated to the point. Valuable for anyone who wants to understand the future — and help shape it.
AI Keynotes beyond the Hype.
Your audience has heard enough AI hype.Book the keynote that ends it.
The current AI hype produces mostly one thing: slides, pilot projects, and buzzword bingo. Björn Ognibeni talks about companies that are done debating and already shipping — competitors about to land in your market, often before you even notice. His focus: the biggest blind spot in Western AI strategy: the one market where AI has been running at scale for years.
Not keynotes about AI's future. Keynotes about what tomorrow's competitors already do with it today.
© Andreas Loechte Photography
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01 / The Problem
Nearly every company now uses GenAI. Only a few are seeing economic value.
The pattern is everywhere: Announcement. Pilot. Proof-of-concept. Internal victory lap. Then silence. Sound familiar?
Western companies are trapped in what we can call the Innovation Theater Cycle. And while it runs, the budget burns, the board asks where the ROI is, and nobody has an honest answer.
To find a different approach, you need to look to the one market that is still the biggest blind spot in Western AI strategies: Digital China. Here AI stopped being a pilot years ago — it's running factories, settling insurance claims, and driving P&L. Same technology. Different decision about what to do with it.
95%
of enterprise GenAI pilots reportedly show no measurable P&L impact
MIT NANDA, 2025
60%
of Ping An's insurance claims are now handled by AI — with many settled in under 60 seconds
Bloomberg, 2026
40
cars per hour at Xiaomi's highly automated Beijing EV factory — a glimpse of AI-enabled industrial execution at scale
Xiaomi EV, Beijing 2024
02 / The Approach
Not another Hype Merchant.
A Practical Visionary.
Visionaries see the future. Practitioners ship tomorrow. Björn is rare because he's both — and because he's been looking in the one direction most of the industry ignores.
— 01
Real talk, not innovation theater.
No hype curves. No "AI will change everything" platitudes. Björn separates pilots that look good in a deck from deployments that move revenue, margin, and time-to-market — and gives your audience a Monday-morning filter for their own AI plans.
— 02
Case studies you haven't seen before.
For nearly a decade, Björn has tracked the most advanced tech ecosystem in the world — Alibaba, ByteDance, Ping An, Tencent, SHEIN, Temu, BYD. Not through reports, but through direct work, site visits, and primary sources. He brings case studies your audience has literally never heard, because of an asymmetric ignorance: China knows everything about us — we don't even know what we don't know about China.
— 03
Strategy, not slides.
Björn doesn't just consult — he teaches strategy at HSBA and the University of Münster, runs the ChinaBriefs.io think tank, and co-founded Münster's XR Lab. A keynote from him is a compressed strategy session — your audience leaves with mental models, not inspiration porn.
03 / References
The people who've
booked him already.
▶ Watch the keynote
"Accenture Song
Björn corrects our often-wrong picture of China and shows — through digital cases across industries — how China's tomorrow is already working remarkably well today.
The moment you realize how little you actually know about China is worth attending alone. Time well spent — leaves a lasting impression and genuinely makes you think.
A top-class expert and speaker on digital transformation — and a genuine China expert who isn't just well-read, but actually knows the reality on the ground.
AlibabaBechtleBoschByteDanceDeloitte DigitalDMEXCOHSBAOTTO GroupPushconUC DavisUni MünsterVolkswagen
04 / Signature Talks
Six talks. One thesis.
Pick the one your audience needs.
All talks available in English and German · Live or remote · 20 to 90 minutes · Custom formats on request.
05 / What Your Audience Walks Away With
From GenAI paradox
to real business value.
01
A mental model to cut through AI vendor noise.
Your team stops confusing "we deployed a chatbot" with "we deployed AI." They leave with a filter sharp enough to cut through vendor pitches, board decks, and LinkedIn thought leadership — and call out what's real.
02
Unseen case studies from Digital China.
Dark factories. Zero-touch enterprises. Real-time treasury. AI-native commerce. The benchmarks most Western boards don't know exist — delivered with the specifics, the companies, and the dates that make the case impossible to dismiss.
03
A strategy beyond efficiency.
Most Western AI spend chases cost savings. Björn shows your audience how Chinese companies use AI to build new revenue, not just shave old costs — and gives them the questions to take into their next strategy meeting.
04
Questions that reshape the roadmap.
The talk ends with uncomfortable questions for the room — the kind that get quoted in the next leadership meeting, and reshape which projects get funded.
06 / The Speaker
Björn Ognibeni 欧博洋
PRACTICAL VISIONARY
For 20+ years, Björn Ognibeni has helped companies turn digital trends into real business value — mobile, e-commerce, social, now AI. Like most Western strategists, he spent most of that career looking West. Then in 2018 he went to China, and the posture changed.
Two decades of digital strategy plus seven years decoding China's digital playbook up close is why his AI keynotes cut through where most don't. He's not selling a Silicon Valley narrative. He's showing executive audiences what AI in production actually looks like — in companies like Alibaba, ByteDance, and Ping An — and what Western competitors are missing while they're still running pilots.
Beyond the stage, Björn runs strategy workshops for leadership teams and advises a small number of companies each year on their AI and digital strategy. The keynote is often where that work begins. More about Björn →
No innovation theater. Just the moves that move the business.
07 / Latest Thinking
Current perspectives on AI, strategy and deployment.
Björn regularly writes about AI beyond the hype — from deployment gaps and Digital China to business models, competition and what Western companies can learn from markets where AI is already being used at scale.
08 / Book Björn
Ready to skip
the theater?
Planning an AI event, leadership offsite, or strategy conference? Send a few lines — Björn will suggest the best keynote angle.
Direct Contact
Every inquiry reaches Björn personally. Usually answered within 24 hours.
Global booking
Live & remote events worldwide. In English or German.
Tailored, not templated
Every talk is tailored to your audience — industry, level, and stakes. No generic AI deck.
He also took real time beforehand to discuss the talk with us in detail.
Our conversations and projects have never once gotten boring. Always a pleasure to work with.
A conversation with Björn guarantees new ideas, inspiration, and fresh momentum.
Prefer email?
speaking@ognibeni.de →09 / Go Deeper
Want to go deeper than a keynote?
Björn also runs a public strategy workshop with Tomorrow Academy — for leaders and teams who want to move from GenAI hype to a clearer AI strategy.
— Bridge
From keynote impulse to strategic application
A keynote creates urgency and a shared language. The workshop gives teams more time to apply the thinking to their own AI use cases, tools, risks and strategy questions.
AI · Strategy
Public Online Workshop
AI Strategy — Developing AI Strategies with Perspective
Most companies now use AI — but only a few see measurable business impact. This half-day online workshop helps participants look beyond LLM hype, AI-generated workslop, and isolated efficiency projects. It introduces the strategic foundations of GenAI, Reasoning, World Models, and Agentic AI, and shows how companies can build AI-first strategies that create new value, not just lower costs.
- Basics: what has really changed in AI — and which trends matter in 2026
- Strategy: how to move beyond the efficiency trap and build an AI-first strategy
- Cases & learnings: international best practices, including AI platforms and cases from China
- Tools: how to use ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and specialized AI tools more effectively
- Perspectives: hallucinations, bias, alignment and the critical questions behind the hype
- Two breakout sessions to apply the concepts to participants' own work
Half-day online workshop · German language · 9:00–13:30 · 490 € plus VAT · seminar materials and certificate included
View workshop dates & book at Tomorrow Academy →
Hosted and booked via Tomorrow Academy.