The future of higher education.
Change Has a Pattern, built for higher education leaders. The cycle every big change follows, applied to the forces reshaping your world right now. Your people walk out ready for it.
Universities have been here before.
The printing press. The lecture hall. The MOOC. Every one of them threatened to make the university obsolete, and every one followed the same cycle. Institutions that used the tool to do the old thing faster stagnated. The ones that reset on the real goal defined the next century of learning.
Generative AI is the current jetpack, and it arrived inside the classroom before anyone had a policy for it. The question isn't whether students use it. It's what a degree certifies when they do.
Change Has a Pattern
In this keynote, Sam Rad shows higher education leaders the cycle every big change follows, why the new tools aren't paying off yet, and the four moves that turn the corner. The pattern has repeated for five thousand years, which is why it lands with any room in this industry.
The four moves
See the pattern. Let go of the old way. Lead the jetpack. Take it off. The arc underneath: recognition, reassurance, challenge, agency, practice, hope.
We don't have an adoption problem. We have a reinvention problem. The returns happen after you redesign.
Three forces Sam maps on stage.
Sam doesn't just predict the future. She lives in it.
Sam Rad is an anthropologist and four-time technology founder. She built companies across AI, blockchain, and connected hardware: two that used AI to map personal taste, then Chronicled, the San Francisco company bringing trust to global commerce and supply chains, and NYOUM, a London-based generative AI communication platform.
Trained in anthropology and linguistics, her research runs to simulated realities, cognitive security, and post-human society. She holds a family of patents linking the physical and digital worlds, and her early blockchain protocols contributed to ERC-721, the standard behind NFTs. She has advised the United Nations, the World Economic Forum, and the Federal Reserve Bank, keynoted on five continents, and written two #1 bestsellers, Radical Next and Bitcoin Pizza.
She was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 for enterprise technology and spent a year off-grid in the Amazon. Before the boardrooms she was a competitive skydiver, which is where the keynote's jetpack metaphor comes from, and why the reassurance at the end of it lands.
See the room react.
Governments. Fortune 500s. Global institutions.
Sam has keynoted on five continents for organizations including Cisco, Dell, SAP, the United Nations, the World Economic Forum, and the Federal Reserve Bank.
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Sam Rad is the speaker you book when you are facing change, and you want the room to walk out inspired to shape what comes next.
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