Tom Wujec

Every industry is becoming computable. As digital technologies automate more of what we do everyday, the nature of our work—and our livelihood—will undergo a radical transformation. 

This keynote explains, provokes, and inspires. It clearly explains how three classes of technology—tools that capture, compute, and create—are propelling the evolution of companies. It provokes by shining a light on the fast approaching future, illustrating how the idea of value is unfolding in unexpected ways. And it inspires, showing how individuals, leaders, teams, and organizations can take advantage of emerging digital tools to not just automate, but to augment their work, unleashing superpowers that scale impact and deepen fulfilment. 

Wujec also shares first-hand stories of how manufacturing, construction, pharma, healthcare, education, and financial organization are reimagining work as they disrupt their industries.

The future of work has never been more relevant. As technology continues to accelerate, we all need to understand how to can take advantage of digital tools, rather than be replaced by them.

This immersive, high-energy, and visually rich workshop helps you map the future of your work by charting how digital tools change the nature of value and where your specific industry and skills fall into this largely uncharted new terrain. This workshop turns what can be complex and overwhelming about new tech into simple, clear, and manageable action.  

Through collaborative brainstorming and value/technology mapping, you can survey the technologies that matter now, clarify their impact on your business, and discover how to dramatically augment—not automate—the talents that matter to you. 

In this talk, chief disruptor Tom Wujec will illustrate the dramatic transformation Autodesk has made to the cloud—from delivering software products to providing comprehensive team-based service solutions. Being “Born in the Cloud” means much more than just off-loading applications to remote servers. Cloud computation creates fundamentally new value propositions, business models, and infrastructure solutions. It equips customers with new ways to do their work. With fascinating examples, Wujec shows how manufacturing, construction, pharmaceutical, finance, media, entertainment, and other industries are being upended in surprising and powerful ways by cloud computing—and what that means for sales.

Innovation speaker Tom Wujec’s “Marshmallow Challenge” is a design experiment that reveals surprising lessons about teamwork, collaboration, and project management. Tom’s experiment sounds simple enough: teams try to build the tallest freestanding structure they can out of 20 sticks of spaghetti, 1 yard of tape, 1 yard of string and a marshmallow. What makes it difficult, though, is the need for teams to organize, prototype and finally build the structure in the short time frame. The results are astounding—children tend to outperform MBA students, due to their ability to redesign on the fly rather than plan a rigid structure and execute, even if the structure is doomed for failure. Through his “Marshmallow Challenge,” which he has presented at TED, Wujec has helped countless groups learn the value of true collaboration. And unlike a lot of other teamwork exercises, it’s actually fun!