Monika Bielskyte’s keynotes take audiences on cinematic journeys across possible futures. By the time an opportunity appears in a trend report, much of its advantage is gone. Her talks reveal what becomes visible only when science, culture, industry and geopolitics are read together. Storytelling and images give unfamiliar developments human stakes without flattening their complexity.
Monika’s keynotes are structured for the room and its digital afterlife: filmed excerpts preserve the argument, memorable lines retain their substance and visual sequences translate naturally into short-form video. She also does executive briefings, foresight workshops, and media commentary. See the FAQ section for further details about all formats, and Youtube for past talks and interviews.
SPEAKING TOPICS INCLUDE
THE FUTURES EDGE: An organization’s value is a claim about its future. Its research, investments, products and partnerships either bear that story out or expose the distance between promise and trajectory. That gap is where legacy becomes an obsolescence trap — or emergent science opens an entirely new field of demand.
TECH, SCIENCE & POWER: Where scientific reality collides with AI mythology. The central divide is augmentation versus simulation: tools designed to complement human ability, or synthetic approximations driven by fantasies of replacement. The same technology can expand our agency — or intensify distraction, manipulation and exploitation.
SCI-FI & STORYWORLDS:Why do we keep reproducing exhausted futures — and how do dystopias become product roadmaps? Drawing on her Hollywood work, including Disney/Marvel’s Black Panther, Monika examines how fictional depictions of the future can also be used to energize real-world transformations.
EMBODIED FUTURES: At what point does optimizing human performance become optimizing the human out of it? Drawing on her work as Nike’s first Futurist in Residence, Monika examines biology as the real frontier and disability, neurodivergence and sensory variation as sources of edge intelligence.
PROTOPIA & LIFE-CENTRIC DESIGN: What if the future could be everything we hoped for, rather than what we were conditioned to expect? Protopia and Life-Centric Design connect human agency with ecological interdependence, making regenerative change imaginable and desirable.
COGNITIVE WARFARE:How do disinformation, synthetic media and exploited uncertainty turn a society’s defenses against its own people, destabilizing markets and industries along the way? Cognitive warfare operates as a weaponized autoimmune response: a population fighting itself need not be invaded.
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