Cassie Kozyrkov

Best known as Google’s first Chief Decision Scientist and founder of the field of Decision Intelligence, Cassie Kozyrkov helps organisations decide when to use AI, what to trust it with, and how to measure whether it worked. AI, in her telling, is a force-multiplier for human judgment — good or bad.

For over nearly a decade, Kozyrkov personally trained more than 20,000 Googlers in data-driven decision-making and AI, shaping over 500 initiatives at scale and influencing how one of the world’s most powerful companies learned to ask questions, not just answer them. Fun fact: her internal workshops became so oversubscribed that attendance had to be rationed by lottery!

Today, as CEO of Kozyr, Cassie Kozyrkov advises senior leaders at organisations including NASA, Gucci, Spotify, Meta, Salesforce and GSK. Her work focuses on how to extract real value from AI without outsourcing responsibility, clarity or ethics to machines. She says, leaders must become “authors of meaning” — people capable of defining success, measuring what matters and translating infinite technological possibility into disciplined action.

Kozyrkov is a widely read writer whose work has reached millions, a long-standing LinkedIn Top Voice, and for many years the most-read AI writer on Medium. She has appeared on the cover of Forbes AI and been featured by Harvard Business Review, WIRED, Fortune and Fast Company. As a keynote speaker, she has spoken at the United Nations, the World Economic Forum, SXSW and Web Summit.

Born in South Africa and academically precocious (she began university at 15), Kozyrkov has never lost sight of the human stakes beneath technical progress. Her central message is not about faster algorithms or smarter machines. It is about responsibility. AI can generate answers endlessly, but deciding which answers matter, which are safe, and which are worth pursuing will always be a human task.