Russell Chambers Keynote Speaker

Senior Advisor at Anthropic – leading boardroom and C-suite relationship development.
35-year investment banking career: Senior Managing Director at Merrill Lynch, Investec, UBS and Credit Suisse; CEO of Credit Suisse UK and Ireland.
Advised UK and Irish Government’s on a wide range of significant privatisations

Russell Chambers's Biography

Russell Chambers is one of the most experienced senior relationship advisors working at the intersection of European boardrooms and enterprise technology. He brings 35 years of investment banking and advisory experience to Anthropic, where he serves as Senior Advisor focused on building boardroom and government relationships across EMEA.

Russell began his career as a solicitor at Hogan Lovells before moving into investment banking in the late 1980s. He spent thirteen years at Merrill Lynch International, rising to Managing Director with responsibility for UK and Ireland corporate clients – including landmark IPOs and equity transactions for companies including Eircom, National Power, BSkyB, BT, Centrica, Carphone Warehouse, Inmarsat, Worldpay and Aer Lingus. He advised the Irish Government on the Eircom privatisation and led the Telecom Éireann IPO, one of the largest European flotations of its era.

He subsequently held senior roles at Investec as Head of UK Investment Banking, at Wit SoundView Europe where he co-founded a technology-focused investment banking operation, and at UBS as Managing Director UK and Ireland. He joined Credit Suisse in 2007, serving as CEO of the UK and Ireland business through some of the most turbulent years in modern financial history before moving into a senior advisory capacity.

In 2021 Russell moved into enterprise technology, joining ServiceNow as Vice-President Customer Strategic Advisory and founding and chairing their EMEA Global Advisory Council – a new kind of role connecting boardroom relationships with technology strategy. That experience brought him to Anthropic, where his focus is on the earliest and most consequential conversations about AI in the enterprise.

Outside his professional roles, Russell is a trustee of the Royal Marsden Cancer Charity, a founder shareholder in the Five Guys European joint venture, and the founder of Mentore, a structured mentoring platform supporting women’s progression to board level. He served as an advisor to the Prime Minister on business interface from 2003 to 2004. He was a governor of Fuldown Academy and a trustee of the Social Business Trust alongside Permira, British Gas and Bain.

Trust at the top

How senior relationships are built, sustained and compounded over decades.

Networks that compound

How a handful of early relationships shape an entire career's reach.

The technology inflection point

What the shift from digital transformation to AI means for board-level governance, risk and competitive strategy.

AI in the enterprise boardroom

What chairs and CEOs actually need to understand, and why most of them are still asking the wrong questions.

He speaks from direct boardroom experience – not theory. Thirty-five years advising chairs, CEOs and CFOs of major FTSE, DAX and European listed companies on the most consequential decisions they face.
He sits at the frontier of enterprise AI. As Senior Advisor at Anthropic, he is engaged daily with the questions European boards are only beginning to ask about artificial intelligence.
He built and led one of the first major enterprise AI advisory councils in Europe at ServiceNow – a model for how technology companies earn genuine boardroom trust.
He translates complexity into clarity. His career has been built on making difficult capital markets, regulatory and strategic questions legible to non-specialist audiences.
He brings an unusually wide European perspective, with deep client relationships across UK, Irish, German and French corporate life built over more than three decades.