The future of retail and consumer brands.
Change Has a Pattern, built for retail leaders. The cycle every big change follows, applied to the forces reshaping your world right now. Your people walk out ready for it.
Attention has been here before.
Department stores. Catalogs. Big box. E-commerce. The printing press, radio, television, search, social. Every one of them was a jetpack, and every one followed the same cycle: the incumbents used the new channel to do the old thing, the challengers used it to do something new, and the gap between them became the decade's biggest transfer of value.
Generative AI is the current one, and it is the first channel that makes the creative itself. Generated influencers with real followings. Product photography with no product. Campaigns produced in minutes. Recommendation engines that shape demand rather than serve it.
The question isn't whether the machine can produce. It's what an audience will trust when production is free. The brands that steer this will own the next decade of consumer attention.
Change Has a Pattern
In this keynote, Sam Rad shows retail 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.
Proving what's real, at scale.
Before the keynote, Sam built the infrastructure. Chronicled, the company she co-founded, put cryptographic identity into physical products so a brand could prove an item was genuine without trusting whoever was holding it. The work ran with footwear and apparel brands facing counterfeiting at scale, and it is where the perceptual security argument she makes on stage started.
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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