Speaker: Tim Sanders, Best-Selling Business Author (2025)

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Tim Sanders is theVice President of Customer Insights at Upwork,driving their customer-centric approach to help businesses solve their talent gap problems. As a strategic consulting for leading global brands, government agencies, and trade associations, he has helped individuals and organizations tackle marketing innovation, sales performance, talent management, leadership development, and organizational culture. He’s served on advisory boards for several startups, including the social reading website Goodreads, which was purchased by Amazon.

Tim is the author of five books, including the New York Times bestseller,Love is the Killer App: How to Win Business and Influence Friends. His publications have over one million copies in print with bestseller status in India, South Korea, Italy, Brazil, and Denmark.

Throughout his career, he’s been on the cutting edge ofinnovationandchange management. Fresh out of graduate school, he was deeply involved in the quality revolution, which disrupted manufacturing in the 1980’s. He joined the cellular phone industry the year it debuted in North America. He was an early stage member ofMark Cuban’sbroadcast.com, which had the largest opening day gain in IPO history. He went to Yahoo! when they acquired Cuban’s company for almost six billion dollars and rose to the Chief Solutions Officer position and later was named the company’s leadership coach.

Tim credits his passions of research, critical thinking, and public speaking to his high school days, where he was the captain of the debate team, and then later in college, a national champion. He points to his years of fronting a rock band as the epicenter of his innovative approach tomarketing.

Today, his mission is to bring all of his life experiences and his unconventional, disruptive – yetinspired strategies and perspectivesto thousands of people every year, helping them to boost theirleadershipeffectiveness,human connection, andbusiness performance.

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This Business Of AI:How to Convert the Hype into Business Growth. Join us for an enlightening session with Tim Sanders, an authority on driving business growth through Artificial Intelligence. In a landscape inundated with technology enthusiasts, Tim stands out as a pragmatic expert, dedicated to translating AI's potential into tangible returns on investment.

With a global reputation for guiding executives through the complexities of AI strategy, Tim's insights are invaluable for any organization seeking to leverage exponential growth to create value. As an executive fellow at Harvard Business School's Digital Data Design Institute, he spearheads insight development, aimed at democratizing AI for business leaders worldwide.

Tim's approach is not just about adopting AI for the sake of innovation; it's about strategically reframing business challenges as "prediction problems" to ensure maximum return on AI investments. Through engaging dialogue and real-world case studies, he will demystify AI for you and empower you to put it to work in your business.

Drawing from his extensive experience, Tim also sheds light on the often-overlooked pitfalls of AI implementation and shares actionable strategies to mitigate risks and optimize investments. By collaborating closely with meeting stakeholders, Tim tailors his remarks to address specific business challenges and event objectives, leaving attendees equipped with practical insights to drive transformative change within their organizations.

Key Learning Objectives:

• Gain a strategic framework for ensuring Return on AI by reframing business challenges as prediction problems.
• Explore the booming landscape of GenAI and identify high impact use cases for delivering ROI.
• Navigate the hidden costs of AI implementation and learn how to avoid common pitfalls.
• Discover proven strategies to de-risk AI programs, enabling more “swings at the plate.”
• Reveal how managers and leaders can measure the value of AI investments.

Innovating Faster - Why Collaboration Changes Everything. Leaders in every industry prioritize innovation but are frustrated with how long it takes to bring breakthroughs to market. According to bestselling author and consultant Tim Sanders, the best way to speed up the innovation process is to promote a culture of collaboration across your organization and externally with partners, customers and competimates.

Over his career, Tim has studied leaders that practice what he terms ‘disruptive collaboration,’ a problem-solving style that leverages surprising alliances along the fault-lines of a company or its market. He’ll reveal how the biggest leaps and turnarounds in history came from collisions of thought, not safe work in our silos of excellence. Tim’s eye-opening keynote will deliver actionable insights and tools that will accelerate the rate of innovation, drive agility and quickly produce breakthrough business outcomes.

Learning Objectives:

• Why Companies That Practice Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration Outperform Rivals
• How to Leverage the Power of Multiple Perspectives to Solve Problems 3X Faster
• How to Bring Multiple Stakeholder Needs From “Me-to-We” in a Collaborative Project
• Why Innovation Requires a Focus on Building a Collaborative Web of Relationships
• How to Connect the Silos, One Collaboration Project at a Time

TheGrand Redesign. If you want to increase your company's velocity and competitiveness, embark on The Grand Redesign. This new leadership approach leverages design thinking to improve how the work is delivered and plans are met.

Tim Sanders, New York Times bestselling author and Upwork executive, offers a stunning collection of insights, statistics and customer stories that illustrate how leaders can tackle today's biggest challenges.

• Deliver a key value proposition to talent: Flexibility. This is emerging as a key to driving productivity, innovation and employee retention. This is done by employing the right design questions that will help leaders craft the perfect hybrid solution for their teams.
• Solve the top dependency for their most critical projects and programs: Someone with the skills to complete the work on time. This is done by designing the project canvas to ‘taskify’ and skill-source requirements early in the process, leveraging on-demand talent with an eye of building an elastic workforce.
• Lead talent based on outcomes, not attendance or effort. This is the most critical leadership skill because it enables true scale in any working environment. This is done by developing the ability to assign, resource and coach talents to deliver measurable results, regardless of role.

The last three years have been filled with change from Covid to digital disruption to the economy. Historically, times of great change are the best times to redesign key components of your culture – starting with “how we work now.”

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