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The Lavin Agency Speakers Bureau

A speakers bureau that represents the best original thinkers,
writers, and doers for speaking engagements.

We are the founding generation of the new workplace. Leading this workplace means embracing a pragmatic, creative approach to AI and online work.

Digital Workplace Expert | Author of Remote, Inc. | Author of JSTOR Daily's "Unfolding AI" Column

Alexandra Samuel | Digital workplace expert | Author of Remote, Inc.
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The Future of Work Conversations You Need to Have with Your Whole Team (2:42)

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The New Workplace Shouldn’t Look Like the One We Left Behind (2:01)

Lavin Exclusive Speaker

The transition to AI-enabled work is inextricable from the transition to hybrid and digitally-enabled work, says Alexandra Samuel. “The new hybrid work isn’t just home plus office,” she says. “It’s humans plus AI.” How can we equip our teams to make effective use of AI—not just to increase productivity, but to strengthen the way we work together both in and outside the office, and to create engaged, vibrant organizations? As a digital workplace expert and author of Remote, Inc., Alexandra has a unique perspective on how we can use AI to boost collaboration, tackle digital overload and drive innovation. “AI can redefine your professional and personal limitations,” she wrote in her cover story for The Wall Street Journal’s Report on Artificial Intelligence. In grounded, actionable talks, Alexandra shows you how to work smarter with AI, coach your team towards AI fluency, and develop the skills you need to use these tools effectively. “Precisely because AI is so challenging, AI adoption needs to be led by people who are thoughtful about human relationships and organizational culture,” she says. “It’s crucial that we provide our organizations with the resources and mandate to explore this new space.”

Remote, Inc. is a timely and practical guide, explaining how we can recharge, reset, and bring our full attention to the work that really matters.

—Arianna Huffington

A regular contributor to The Wall Street Journal and the author of Harvard Business Review’s Work Smarter with Social Media series, Alexandra Samuel has over 25 years of experience with digital transformation and productivity, and she brings her wealth of practical knowledge to her honest, down-to-earth talks. Along with MIT Sloan’s Robert C. Pozen, Alexandra co-authored Remote, Inc.: How to Thrive at Work… Wherever You Are. A practical and thoughtful roadmap to the new world of work, it’s been called “a must-read for today’s professionals”  (Jenny Rooney, Chief Experience Officer of Adweek).

Alexandra is the author of JSTOR Daily’s “Unfolding AI” column, where she explores what we need to understand about AI and how to use it in our everyday work. As the data journalist for the annual Forbes list of the World’s Most Influential CMOs, she has a deep understanding of how top brands and executives navigate digital transformation and the realignment of employee and customer experience in a hybrid world. She works regularly with companies like Sprinklr and Microsoft on reports and workshops that address the biggest challenges in digital business.

As the co-founder of Social Signal, Alexandra built one of the world’s first social media agencies while working out of her home with her husband and their first hires. She holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard University, where her dissertation was the first comprehensive study of hacktivism (politically motivated computer hacking). While at Harvard, she researched the impact of technology on social capital for Robert Putnam’s groundbreaking book, Bowling Alone.

Testimonials

As I started looking for experts to share practical tips and strategies to help our customers manage the remote and hybrid experience, I found Alexandra. She came highly recommended as a passionate, authentic speaker on this topic. Alexandra was a pleasure to work with and always responsive. The webinar audience comments were overwhelmingly positive. I highly recommend her as a speaker for your next event!

Zoom
Testimonials

Alexandra listened to the briefing that we gave her, which meant that she uniquely tailored her keynote to the needs of our audience. It was so perfectly aligned to the workshop prior to her speaking, that it really added to our meeting. Alexandra was engaging, confident, and backed all her points up with research—we especially valued that she prompted us to think differently about how we approach our hybrid workplace. I would certainly recommend Alexandra as a keynote speaker.

BC Lottery Corporation
Testimonials

Alex is amazing! We just loved her, and the audience did as well.

SGI/SGI CANADA

Speech Topics

Artificial Intelligence
Work Smarter with AIDoing Your Best Work with the Power of Artificial Intelligence

The era of artificial intelligence has arrived. But how do you get your team up and running with AI, so that you see immediate productivity and performance benefits? This practical and engaging talk lays out the steps that take teams from AI anxiety to AI mastery, while enhancing team trust and collaboration.

The author of the Harvard Business Review’s “Work Smarter with Social Media” series, Alexandra Samuel is a master at explaining how to use technology to improve productivity and support collaboration. In this session, you’ll learn how to use AI to conquer digital overload, accelerate innovation and improve your team’s deliverables. You’ll get memorable, creative case studies that can inspire your team’s AI use, and leave with a roadmap for helping your team work smarter with AI.

“A good litmus test of whether your organization is using AI effectively: Are people experiencing new ways of thinking? Are people taking on entirely new types of projects?” Alexandra says. “If you’re just doing what you used to do a little faster, you are barely dipping your toe in the water.”

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Corporate Culture
Forging the Hybrid WorkplaceCulture and Collaboration in the New Office

The Covid pandemic catalyzed an overnight shift to remote work, but the real transformation lies ahead. With offices reopened, organizations are learning to manage teams that mix in-person and remote workers, and employees are still learning to manage their schedules to get the best of both worlds. This transition offers the ideal opportunity for employers to renew their culture and strengthen team collaboration—not just by asking employees to spend some time in the office, but by providing employees with the guidance they need to make the most of their days at home.

“These hybrid arrangements will require a massive rethinking on the part of bosses,” author Alexandra Samuel observed in her cover story for The Wall Street Journal’s Work from Home report. “No longer will they be able to manage remote workers like they’re office employees whose desks happen to be really far apart.”

In this inspiring and pragmatic presentation, Alexandra draws on her extensive research (distilled in her book Remote Inc.) and long experience with remote work to show your managers and team the way forward. Starting with identifying the unique advantages of time in the office, as well as the unique advantages of time at home, she’ll show you how to build an organizational model and culture that enables employees to shift between lively collaboration and focused solo work. Alexandra will leave your team ready to turn your remote + office combination into a powerful competitive advantage for attracting great talent, enabling strong performance, and delivering excellent results.

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Leadership
The Oreo RevolutionHow Managers Can Transform Organizational Culture

We love stories about bottom-up, grassroots change, especially in contrast to the command-and-control, hierarchical model of organization. In this talk, digital workplace expert and Wall Street Journal contributor Alexandra Samuel explains why the next workplace revolution will look more like an Oreo, and run from the middle out—led by the middle managers who are creating a new organizational culture for the hybrid, digital workplace.

Alex lays out the research that shows that while the C-suite is often led by extroverts who overvalue in-person collaboration and undervalue what we can accomplish together online, middle managers sit closer to both employees and customers and work more like the people they manage. These managers have a direct stake in ensuring high performance and service excellence — but also in promoting employee engagement and wellbeing and preventing burnout. In this inspiring and provocative talk, Alex explains why middle managers are going to drive the renewal of organizational culture, and lays out the specific steps that managers can take to level up engagement and performance on their own teams.

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ChatGPT and Generative AI
The New Hybrid Work: AI + HumansManaging the Changing Landscape in the Future of Work

The rise of AI and the rise of remote work aren’t two separate forces driving us towards a new workplace: They’re deeply connected changes that can only be understood and addressed in tandem. In this thought-provoking keynote, Alexandra Samuel explains how the AI revolution will be profoundly shaped by our experience of remote and hybrid work, and how the advent of AI will help address some of the biggest challenges around remote work and the return to office, like isolation and digital overload.

“The power of AI doesn’t come from the fact that it can give you a complete sentence in a second,” she says. “It comes from working for an hour—but accomplishing in an hour with an AI what you couldn’t do with a roomful of people in a day.”

Drawing on more than two decades of work on digital transformation and productivity, Alex shows how the productivity, performance and personal benefits of AI depend on integrating our thinking about work location (remote vs office) with our thinking about work collaboration (with humans vs with AIs). Alex’s practical and engaging approach to working with technology gives audiences a clear and actionable roadmap for leading their teams through a period of profound change, as well as inspiring and memorable stories from the new workplace.

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