Complementing our series of webinars with renowned and prestigious thought- leaders from different fields, yesterday we had the pleasure of hosting two international experts in the field of technology and innovation, Ian Khan and Mayur Gupta.

Ian Khan, Forbes collaborator and  a renowned Technology Futurist featured on CNN, is an advocate of emerging technologies, an advisor to companies in various sectors and governments such as Dubai and Canada. He helps organizations gain a competitive advantage in today’s era of disruption and rapid change and has spent the last 20 years working on ground breaking technologies such as cloud computing, the Internet of Things and emerging transformational technologies.

Ian considers himself as a technology futurist. “Someone who observes the world and notices those things that are producing great transformations and draws conclusions from those observations”. His point of view is that we are only going through a cycle of change, “life is about change, this is the cycle of life and the world we live in”.

He insisted that “we need to adapt to change and to the circumstances that we cannot see”. He added, “I cannot predict the future, but I can predict change. People who are able to adapt to change will survive”.

During his speech he recommended doing everything we can to keep “the doors open”, “if you don’t have a creative digital presentation, interact with your clients and stay relevant”. And he assured us that: “a company that has a learning culture where employees are constantly given the opportunity to learn, will succeed”.

The other participant was Mayur Gupta who is the former Global Vice President of Growth and Marketing for Spotify (2016-2019) and former CMO of Freshly, one of the world’s largest consumer packaging companies. At Spotify, Mayur was responsible for driving growth and innovation by testing new business models, partnerships and engagement strategies along with establishing marketing capabilities for fans, artists and B2B brand partners. He drove the vision and strategy to establish a connected marketing ecosystem and growth machine for the Spotify marketplace that connected the right artist to the right speaker through discovery and accessibility. In 2014, he was recognized by BrandInnovators as one of the “40 under 40” market leaders in the industry and also received the CMO Club’s CMO Programmatic Award. Harvard Business Review (HBR) and The Economist referred to him as a model Chief Marketing Technologist in 2014.

He believes that the COVID-19 forces us to rethink everything and that “it has brought the world closer and is driving faster disruption in the communications sector and has completely changed the working environment. He believes that the pandemic has accelerated the transformation of companies that had planned for 5 years to transform themselves”.

Mayur ended his presentation by arguing that “without confidence in building corporate DNA, companies will find it hard to survive”.

This webinar was moderated by Ian McCluskey, Managing Director of Thinking Heads Americas and Ivan Abanades, Global Director Speakers & Conferences Thinking Heads.

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