Jamil Zaki Keynote Speaker

Secrets from a Legendary Spyhunter: Decoding AI Deepfakes, Extortion & More

AI-generated voices, texts, and images now pose a grave threat—not only to national security, but to individuals and organizations everywhere. The latest jaw-dropping cases include kidnapping scams where parents hear what sounds like their child’s desperate cries for help, elaborate video conferences that trick teams into funding fake projects, and ransomware attacks in which cyber-extortionists hold critical data hostage.

In a world where technology increasingly drives our lives, the risks are growing more personal, more sophisticated, and more difficult to detect. Protecting yourself and your organization now requires a new level of awareness and action.

Empathy: A Key to Thriving Workplaces

Empathy is often stereotyped as a “soft” skill—either irrelevant to, or even at odds with, the bottom line. In reality, the opposite is true. Empathy is an organizational superpower that makes collaboration more efficient, employees happier, and leadership more effective. Research shows empathy tracks directly with business success: 85% of CEOs say empathy is important to their bottom line, and more than 90% of employees report they would be more loyal to an empathic company. In the competition to recruit and retain top talent, making people feel seen and heard is a decisive advantage, while also fostering more inclusive and open workplace cultures.

Yet a significant gap remains between intention and reality. As organizations attempt to roll empathy into corporate values, results are often mixed. In the same surveys where leaders praise empathy, more than 90% of employees say their organizations still fall short. The disconnect between what leaders say and what teams experience reveals that empathy cannot simply be declared—it must be built, practiced, and embedded.

In this talk, Stanford psychologist Jamil Zaki shares key insights from the science of empathy, demonstrating that empathy is not a single trait, that it is a learnable skill, and that it lives not only in individuals but in organizational cultures. Whether leading a global enterprise or a small startup, audiences gain concrete strategies for closing the empathy gap and building workplaces where people and performance thrive together.