Ian Beacraft
CEO
Futurist
Strategist
Creative Technologist
Futurist
Strategist
Creative Technologist
Speaking and Advisory Clients
SELECT TALKS
SXSW 2023: How AI and the Metaverse Shape Society
Generative AI is digitizing skillsets, making them programmable and upgradeable. As a result, a new class of Generalists will dominate the era of generative AI. As expertise and experience are no longer needed to perform with proficiency in new fields, those with a breadth of experience and passionate curiosity will rise to the top. With AI, individual creators can become armies of one. This will flip the corporate world on its head and is already disrupting training and education.
Masters and Robots: AI and the Future of Creativity
What happens when society experiences tectonic shifts that shatter established norms? When the outputs of fields from art and music to law and science are commoditized? The coming wave of creative destruction will coincide with a creative revolution. This transformation will benefit society, but our assumptions of what it takes to succeed and to create value will be challenged. Many things we hold to be true, or obvious will cease to function as truth.
SXSW 2021: AI AND THE FUTURE OF CONTENT
The technology that brought us Deepfakes is permanently reshaping the way we create content of all kinds – from movies and music to apps and websites. The idea of applying algorithms to manipulate or generate media isn’t new, but several advances in computer science have brought the technology out of the halls of academia and into the hands of anyone and everyone with a will to create. In this session, we’ll explore how synthetic media and computational design are inspiring all sorts of machine-assisted creativity and how it’s changing the overall creative process. We’ll get hands-on with some cutting-edge tools to demonstrate their power, show their impact on workflow, and see how they’ll power the future of new platforms like the Metaverse.
About Ian
Considered one of the top voices in AI and the future of work, Ian Beacraft is a trusted advisor to the world’s most innovative companies. The founder and Chief Futurist of Signal and Cipher, Ian leads a strategic foresight and development agency guiding companies through the rapidly changing technology landscape to find meaningful routes to innovation that impact the bottom line, inspire cultural change, and create new products and services.
Previously responsible for P&L’s and innovation departments at the largest agencies in the world, Ian is known for making bleeding-edge technology understandable and monetizable. Brands he has advised include Samsung, Intel, Coca-Cola, Google, Microsoft, Nike, Universal Pictures, and dozens more.
He’s known as a Gonzo Futurist, actively experimenting with new and emerging technologies before they leave the research lab to understand the implications and applications for the future of work and society at large. Ian is the first person ever to host a news segment as a synthetic human, the Future Report on Defiance Media, streaming to over 100 million devices around the world.
About
Ian
Considered one of the top voices in AI and the future of work, Ian Beacraft is a trusted advisor to the world’s most innovative companies. The founder and Chief Futurist of Signal and Cipher, Ian leads a strategic foresight and development agency guiding companies through the rapidly changing technology landscape to find meaningful routes to innovation that impact the bottom line, inspire cultural change, and create new products and services.
Previously responsible for P&L’s and innovation departments at the largest agencies in the world, Ian is known for making bleeding-edge technology understandable and monetizable. Brands he has advised include Samsung, Intel, Coca-Cola, Google, Microsoft, Nike, Universal Pictures, and dozens more.
He’s known as a Gonzo Futurist, actively experimenting with new and emerging technologies before they leave the research lab to understand the implications and applications for the future of work and society at large. Ian is the first person ever to host a news segment as a synthetic human, the Future Report on Defiance Media, streaming to over 100 million devices around the world.