Amanda Johnstone Keynote Speaker

• How to See Around Corners

This is Amanda's most requested keynote and the one she is best known for. Seeing around corners is not prediction and it is not futurism for its own sake. It is the methodology Amanda has built over a decade at the edge of emerging technology, and it teaches senior audiences how to read the signals already present inside their own environments. Where accountability is quietly breaking down. Where the gap between leadership perception and operational reality is widening. Where the decisions everyone knows need to be made are being deferred, and what that deferral is actually costing. The keynote moves audiences from reaction to anticipation, gives them a repeatable discipline for spotting weak signals before they become obvious to competitors, and equips them to act early with intent rather than wait for certainty. It lands particularly hard with enterprise and government audiences wrestling with the gap between AI ambition and AI outcome, which is currently the most important unspoken number in enterprise technology. More than eighty percent of organisations are piloting AI. Fewer than forty percent of those pilots are producing meaningful outcomes. That gap is structural rather than technical, and seeing around corners is how leaders close it.

• Intrapreneurship as infrastructure

Amanda reframes intrapreneurship as a system level capability rather than a personality trait or a side project. The argument is that ownership scales only when it is built into rituals, incentives, governance and daily expectations rather than left to a few heroic individuals. Drawing on neuroscience and behavioural science, she shows how cognition is highly context dependent, how pressure without support pushes brains into risk avoidance and short termism, and how environments that combine high standards with high support unlock faster learning, better judgement and stronger outcomes. The keynote also covers the science of noticing others, why people who feel seen and trusted make better decisions, and why a bias for action is engineered rather than innate. It pairs powerfully with Seeing Around Corners as a same day program for engineering, product and operations leadership.

• Generative AI and the agent economy

The conversation about ChatGPT was the warm up. The real shift is the move from humans using AI tools to AI agents acting on our behalf, transacting, deciding, filtering and recommending. Amanda walks senior audiences through what the agent economy means for productivity, customer engagement, organisational design and competitive moat. She covers the harder question underneath it as well. The internet is moving from human first to agent mediated, which means visibility now depends on whether AI systems can understand, trust and recommend your organisation. If they cannot, you become invisible regardless of how strong your brand is with humans.

• The AI transformed workforce

Every leader is being asked to predict which roles disappear, which roles emerge and which roles transform. Amanda separates the hype cycle from the structural change underneath it. She covers reskilling that actually compounds, the new roles AI is creating rather than eliminating, and how organisations rebuild career architecture for a workforce that will spend the rest of its career working alongside intelligent systems.

• EmotionAI and the Internet of Bodies

Emotional, cognitive and biological data is becoming part of everyday infrastructure. Facial and emotion recognition is already deployed in retail, events and schools. Brain to computer interfaces are out of the lab. Wearables and implantables are tracking continuously, and the line between personal technology and personal biology is dissolving. Amanda holds patents in this field. She talks about what is real, what is hype, where the commercial opportunities sit, and where the ethical guardrails have to be drawn.

• Ethics in the age of data

This is the keynote leaders book when they want their organisation to take AI ethics seriously without slowing innovation to a halt. Amanda covers bias, fairness, privacy and transparency as design choices rather than compliance checklists. She gives leaders the language and frameworks to build cultures of trust, manage risk credibly, and make AI decisions that hold up to public scrutiny.

• Wearable, implantable and ambient technology.

From smart rings and continuous glucose monitors to ingestibles, neural interfaces and ambient sensing, the body is becoming the new interface. Amanda maps where personal technology is heading over the next five years and what leaders in healthcare, insurance, retail, workplace design and consumer brands need to be ready for.

• Augmented and virtual reality and the next digital frontier

Whether the headset wins or the glasses win or something else displaces both, spatial computing is changing how people learn, work, shop and connect. Amanda covers the practical state of augmented and virtual reality today, the realistic trajectory from here, and how organisations should and should not be investing.

• Healthcare transformed

AI driven diagnostics, digital therapeutics, remote monitoring, personalised medicine and the integration of mental and physical health into one continuous data picture. Amanda speaks to clinicians, executives and policymakers about where digital innovation is genuinely improving care, where it is creating new risks, and how to lead through both at the same time. She often illustrates this with ambient AI transcription in clinical settings, which has allowed doctors to remain fully present with patients rather than focused on note taking, and in dementia care has led to measurable reductions in patient distress.

• Smart cities and connected infrastructure

Sensors, data, AI and human behaviour are converging into a new kind of urban operating system. Amanda explores what this means for governance, mobility, safety, sustainability and the everyday experience of the people inside these systems, with particular attention to who benefits and who gets designed out.

• Modern leadership in a social economy

Amanda's leadership work is built around a conviction that visionary leadership is a cultivated mindset rather than an inherited trait. She speaks to intrapreneurship inside large organisations, the leadership of intersectional and neurodiverse teams, and the responsibilities that come with leading inside a social economy where employees, customers and the public expect organisations to stand for something. Her frameworks draw on neuroscience and psychology and address the harder edges of modern executive life, including burnout, performance mindset, the wellbeing of leaders themselves and the architecture of sustained high performance.

• Women in leadership and balancing the scales

Amanda is one of Australia's most requested speakers for International Women's Day, and her current program responds to the global theme of balancing the scales. Technology is not neutral. The systems we build either entrench inequality or help dismantle it, and the difference comes down to the integrity of the people designing them. Amanda unpacks how AI encodes bias, how those biases land disproportionately on women and girls, and what ethical design and accountable leadership actually require in practice. She moves audiences beyond performative equality toward systemic equity that can be measured, drawing on her experience advising governments and Fortune 500 companies to show how organisations recalibrate hiring, safety, progression and economic opportunity. Her own story, from seeking mentorship from Cotton On founder Nigel Austin at sixteen to building a global technology company from there, anchors a clear position. The rise of women in leadership is collective elevation, not a zero sum game.