Looking for fees and availability for Ben Sauer ?

Keynote SpeakerBen Sauer

Author, Speaker, Design and Product Leader

Ben Sauer isn’t one to be pigeonholed into STEM or the humanities. As a teen you might have found him performing comedy, hacking away at software, or studying for his English literature degree. Discovering that he wrote terrible code (but passable iambic pentameter), he turned to designing how humans interact... Read more

Popular Talks

Always Be Creating Clarity - daily habits for strategic storytellers
Humane, not Human: how to communicate with humans without losing your soul to AI
Reliably Unreliable - approaches to AI in times of rapid change
Circular Reasoning: how to manipulate time with a metaphor

Request Fees & Availabilities

One of our consultants will get back to you soon

Biography

While working at the award-winning design agency Clearleft, Ben earned Apple’s App of the Year, shaped a groundbreaking science journal, and even redesigned a social network or two. As voice AIs like Alexa emerged, he became fascinated by the future of human-computer interaction beyond the screen.

Hired by O’Reilly, he trained people all over the world in designing conversations with machines over chat and voice, including at NASA. His workshops consistently earned 10/10 ratings. Ben’s communication design frameworks have been adopted by Amazon, Google, and the BBC. In the healthcare sector, he led the creation of $100m AI products for patients.

From Helsinki to Tokyo, he is now a seasoned global keynote speaker, having spoken at events like NEXT, and for brands including the Financial Times, VW/Audi, and Penguin Random House.

Drawing on his public-speaking experience, Ben wrote *Death By Screens*, a guide that helps creatives tell strategic stories about their work. He frequently sells out of books at conferences—often emerging as the day’s top-rated speaker. Most recently, he’s been speaking about a future where communication is mediated by AI, and what that means for mere mortals.

"Ben has the rare ability to both captivate and educate an audience, leaving them happier and smarter in the process." Event Curator of Leading Design, UX London, and dConstruct

"Ben pulls lessons from movies, stand-up comedy, and messy real-world design work. Smart, super-practical, and surprisingly fun!" Organiser, DesignUp Bangalore

"Ben is an inspiring and authentic speaker - and our audience agrees with us! It’s that combination of genuine, tangible passion for storytelling, combined with the credible authority that comes from his experience." Organiser, PUSH Munich

Popular Talks by Ben Sauer

Always Be Creating Clarity - daily habits for strategic storytellers
The secret of gaining strategic influence isn’t what you say about your idea, it’s the story you present around it. But you shouldn’t need a PhD in storytelling to avoid boring your audience with an endless series of slides on screen. From mindful metaphors to hard-hitting headlines, Ben...
The secret of gaining strategic influence isn’t what you say about your idea, it’s the story you present around it. But you shouldn’t need a PhD in storytelling to avoid boring your audience with an endless series of slides on screen. From mindful metaphors to hard-hitting headlines, Ben will share the most practical habits you need to become an engaging, clear communicator, based on his book Death by Screens.

Takeaways
- Learn practical, unshowy ways to grab the attention of your audience, and hold it
- How to create better headlines that explain key ideas quickly, using patterns
- Simple, theory-free methods for ensuring your story structure makes sense
Humane, not Human: how to communicate with humans without losing your soul to AI
People are using AI to do the talking and the thinking for them, without much consideration about what that means for human relationships, or society at large. Countries like Estonia are proactively funding AI literacy for schoolchildren. But if we don’t use it mindfully, we risk becoming clear...
People are using AI to do the talking and the thinking for them, without much consideration about what that means for human relationships, or society at large. Countries like Estonia are proactively funding AI literacy for schoolchildren. But if we don’t use it mindfully, we risk becoming clear but bland, boring communicators. Or worse, lose our critical thinking skills.

In this talk, Ben outlines the latest research in how AI is affecting human communication (for better and worse!), and identifies the ways in which we should, and should not use it to communicate for us.

Takeaways:
- Key research findings on how using AI affects human communication.
- Societal implications of those outcomes.
- Principles for the humane use of AI in communication
Reliably Unreliable - approaches to AI in times of rapid change
Marvin Minsky called AI a ‘suitcase’ idea: it needs a lot of unpacking! We know change is coming, but what kind of change? The naysayers are predicting doom, and the hype factory is promising the earth. The rest of us are left to try and make sense of...
Marvin Minsky called AI a ‘suitcase’ idea: it needs a lot of unpacking! We know change is coming, but what kind of change? The naysayers are predicting doom, and the hype factory is promising the earth. The rest of us are left to try and make sense of what’s real and what’s not.

In this hype-free talk, Ben will try to make sense of the suitcase by covering some of the current trends, some eternal truths, and how we can approach AI while knowing that we don’t know exactly what change is coming.

Takeaways:
- Strategic principles for AI in times of rapid change.
- Why metaphors are secretly important for creating a positive AI future.
- How to avoid the most common misconceptions about AI
Circular Reasoning: how to manipulate time with a metaphor
Our attitude to time, and by extension, our lives, is deeply embedded in the way we design technology. From a clock that expresses time in poetic verse, to the South American tribe, the Piraha, who have no concept of time in their language; it’s a feedback loop –...
Our attitude to time, and by extension, our lives, is deeply embedded in the way we design technology. From a clock that expresses time in poetic verse, to the South American tribe, the Piraha, who have no concept of time in their language; it’s a feedback loop – we make the tools, and then they make us. The metaphor of a circle on a clock face reinforces the idea that time is circular, when it is anything but.

In this talk, Ben will look at how technology affects our perception of time, and how the metaphors we use in designing it shape how we “spend” our lives, and indeed, if we change, them, how it might escape our pessimistic view of the future.

Takeaways:
- How the way we design shapes our perception of time.
- How the language and metaphors we choose shape how we spend our time.
- How we might change our approach to future crises (like climate) by rethinking how we design for time.