Savannah Kunovsky

The IDEO futurist asking the question AI conferences avoid: what is all this doing to the planet?

Futures-oriented, mission-driven, energetic. Pragmatic optimism.

Savannah Kunovsky runs IDEO's emerging technology business, working with organizations on what to build, how it should behave and why it matters. A former engineer, she co-founded Moringa School, which has graduated more than 20,000 technologists across Africa, and she has spoken at COP28 on generative AI and climate.

She designs under double uncertainty: nobody knows the trajectory of the technology, nobody knows the trajectory of the climate, and the choices have to be made anyway. Her advice starts by stepping outside the hustle of building and asking what you are actually trying to accomplish — then working alongside the people who will live with the result.

She'll be helping bring the weekend back to earth at the end, tying three days of ideas to consequences that are physical, planetary and near.

You'll take away: a connection to everything else you are thinking about. After three days of expansive thinking, she is the one who connects it to the decisions in front of you and the world those decisions land in — so you leave with something to do rather than a pleasant feeling that fades on the flight home.

ONE READ — "Your AI questions, answered," IDEO. She and Jenna Fizel take real questions from practitioners, plainly.