Mike is the creative force behind our podcast, with a passion for conversations which are provocative, profound and practical driven by infectious curiosity and quick wit. He was a serial CEO of high technology companies and then for the last 20 years has been coaching and facilitating agility in the C-Suite globally with clients and boards, advisory boards and his greatest passion which is peer-advisory-boards, tapping into the power of collective intelligence. As an author and keynote speaker, he proudly shares that he has been called naive at every stage of his career including this one! He never wants that to change, as it means he's stuck his head up into a new arena of learning. AI is certainly that for him which is why he feels a grave responsibility to help communities of CEOs, executives and leaders make sense of it to future-proof themselves, with the agility required!

Ryan Niemann helps mid-market, PE-backed SaaS and tech-enabled companies thrive in the age of AI. A multi-time CEO and board member, he’s led growth-stage businesses through GTM transformations, cloud-native platform launches, and strategic exits - always with a focus on practical AI and technology adoption that drives retention, margin, and enterprise value. Ryan’s journey with agility took shape in 2018 at a CEO conference when Mike Richardson asked, “Who else is feeling the weight of Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity in your business?” Only a few hands went up as the VUCA tsunami hardly appeared on the horizon. It sparked his passion to help mid-market leaders turn VUCA into a competitive edge through modern leadership and sharper, faster decision-making. He believes that adaptive AI agents, often working with human-in-the-loop oversight, can own and drive core workflows to create agility, generate cash flow, and, for SaaS, build the ultimate retention moat - if you don’t enable AI to own the workflow, someone else will. In the mid-market, speed beats size, and the AI jetpack is accelerating every day. Today, Ryan helps CEOs and their teams harness that acceleration and scale with purpose - exploring where business, AI, and leadership intersect.

It has taken Mark 25 years to become an overnight sensation in organisational effectiveness and people performance. A former Ad agency exec, Mark was CEO of a software company for 12 years that developed a patented Natural Language Processing platform for social media content. He was talking AI in 2010 and it turns out he was 15 years too early on that. Having since been a Chief Marketing Officer and Chief Technology Officer for three multi-billion dollar companies, Mark has fire for how organisations run and how people do their best work, and he now spends his days with awesome companies and leaders creating high performing teams that can get stuff done. And guess what - it’s never just about the tech. It’s about the people who use the tech. So let’s talk about how we get the people part of this incredible revolution right.

Tom Adams is an executive coach, strategic advisor and serial entrepreneur who transforms generative AI breakthroughs into practical wins for small and mid-sized businesses; an early adopter since GPT-3 first opened its API, he prototypes voice agents, vector-search workflows and “vibe-coded” prompts across OpenAI, Claude, Gemini, Mistral, Pinecone, n8n and ElevenLabs, sharing what works in webinars and from keynote stages worldwide; drawing on two decades of P&L experience leading a B2B web-marketing agency, a regional menswear chain and a commercial records-management firm, he blends systems thinking with candid accountability so leaders can embrace AI without losing their humanity; a Stage 3B rectal-cancer survivor, he lives with his wife Becky on the Niagara River in Lewiston, New York, where boating and spy-novel daydreams keep his curiosity lively.