Richard Foster-Fletcher
Independent AI researcher. Chair of MKAI. Speaker on what AI does to the organisations that adopt it.
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About Richard
Richard Foster-Fletcher has spent years inside the AI field as Chair of MKAI, convening researchers, senior leaders, and practitioners across industries and geographies, running forums and summits, and building a body of published research. His work charted the arrival of large language models into mainstream organisational use.
Once AI became pervasive, the research narrowed to a single question: what does AI do to us.
Richard is an independent researcher. The work stays at the consequences of AI adoption and the connective tissue between them, without institutional affiliation and without commercial obligation to any vendor or platform. That position is deliberate and it is permanent.
His research covers the full arc of what happens when AI enters institutional life, from how the models actually behave through to the governance consequences of that behaviour, including the vendor dynamics and incentive structures that shape how organisations encounter the technology in the first place. He works across multiple language models continuously, testing them adversarially to surface the behaviours that only become visible when models are compared against each other.
He has delivered sessions and contributions at Oxford, LSE, Imperial, UCL, Cranfield, Salesforce, and Telefónica, with contributions to UK Parliament and United Nations convenings. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He was named among the UK's Top 20 AI Researchers and Entrepreneurs (Favikon, 2026).
Selected engagements
Salesforce
Commissioned executive analysis and leadership masterclass on the strategic implications of autonomous AI agents for enterprise organisations.
Telefónica
Keynote on AI strategy and governance for senior leaders at the annual BE-Terna Brand conference.
Henley Business School
Executive education on AI adoption and its consequences for leadership teams and MBA programmes.
Cranfield School of Management
Sessions for the Director as Strategic Leader programme on how AI adoption reshapes leadership judgement and institutional responsibility.
UK Parliament
Evidence and strategic perspective on AI governance, institutional accountability, and regulatory oversight.
Formats
Keynote Talks
Conference sessions on what AI is doing to the organisations that adopt it, built from ongoing published research.
Board and Executive Briefings
Private sessions for boards and leadership teams on AI's consequences for governance, accountability, and institutional decision-making.
Event Chairing and Moderating
Conference and panel chairing for senior audiences.
Roundtables
Facilitated discussions for senior leaders on AI adoption and its organisational consequences.
Signature talks
Resilience and the human edge
AI adoption alters the capabilities organisations rely on when circumstances shift. The organisation continues to function while its capacity for independent reasoning diminishes. Governance structures that assume human capability may find that assumption no longer holds.
Reconstruction and accountability
AI changes how decisions are made inside organisations. It also changes whether those decisions can be traced, explained, or defended after the fact. Boards face questions about accountability that their existing records cannot answer.
Residual Logic and the authored organisation
Documents that boards sign now contain reasoning that first appeared in machine outputs. This logic persists through successive edits until the final version carries a human signature. The organisation presents authored work that contains reasoning no individual wrote.
Keynote - Harnessing AI for Türkiye's Economic Growth:
What's New With Richard
Named Top 20 UK AI Researcher
Favikon's 2026 ranking placed Richard alongside Andrew Ng, Demis Hassabis, Mustafa Suleyman, Emad Mostaque, and Zahra Bahrololoumi.
'What Still Matters' Achieves Over 5,900 Subscribers
A weekly essay on what AI is doing to reasoning, accountability, and professional capability inside organisations. Read by senior leaders across industries
IT Directors Forum, Athens (October 2025)
Keynote on AI adoption and organisational distinctiveness at Greece's largest CIO gathering.
Salesforce Agentic AI Masterclass (November 2025 – January 2026)
A three-part commissioned masterclass on the governance, data, and technical infrastructure behind autonomous AI agent deployment in enterprise organisations.
Testimonials
"Richard delivered a truly engaging and thought-provoking session at our Director As Strategic Leader programme. His insights into the opportunities and challenges of AI were both enlightening and inspiring. His ability to articulate complex concepts in an accessible manner made the session highly impactful."
— Graham Bell, Director of Digital Education, Cranfield School of Management
"The physicist John Wheeler once remarked, 'We shape the world by the questions we ask.' If that's so, then Richard is shaping the world. I was profoundly impressed with the depth, generosity and thoughtfulness of his questions. He's a star!"
— Andrew Zolli, Chief Impact Officer, Planet
"I thoroughly enjoyed my recent conversation with Richard Foster-Fletcher. His thoughtful approach to the important intersections of AI, ethics, and education allowed us to explore critical issues in a way that was both engaging and insightful."
— Dan Ariely, Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics, Duke University
"Richard provided an excellent platform for our discussion, skillfully getting to the heart of the matter. His thoughtful questions, combined with a warm and engaging manner, made for a truly insightful conversation."
— Sir Anthony Seldon, Author, Historian and Educator
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