Greg Lindsay

Futurist and urbanist Greg Lindsay explores how AI, cities, and infrastructure are reshaping how we live and work.

Request price and availability Request price and availability

Canada

Non-binding request for Greg Lindsay

Call us

+1 347 223 5128 +44 20 3744 5675

Engaging, intellectual style with excellent content for target audience.

Deirdre Toner

American Society of Landscape Architects, Illinois Chapter

Read all reviews

Book Greg

Non-binding request for Greg Lindsay

Call us

+1 347 223 5128 +44 20 3744 5675

Why book Greg Lindsay for your next event

Greg Lindsay delivers high-energy keynotes that decode AI, cities, and infrastructure, helping leaders navigate uncertainty and long-term risk.
As Urbanist-in-Residence at BMW MINI’s URBAN-X and contributor to Intel’s Passenger Economy, he brings rare real-world insight.
His talks combine bold future thinking with engaging storytelling, making complex global shifts clear, relevant, and actionable.

Non-binding request for Greg Lindsay

Futurist, urbanist, and global voice on AI, cities, and innovation

Greg Lindsay is a futurist and urbanist known for illuminating how cities, technology, and globalization are evolving in an era defined by artificial intelligence and rapid disruption. As the co-author of the international bestseller Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next, Greg has spent years examining how transportation, infrastructure, and economic systems shape where and how we live. Today, his work increasingly focuses on how AI is transforming the built environment, mobility, and organizational decision-making. From digital twins of cities to emerging agentic AI systems, Greg helps leaders understand what the future holds — and how to prepare for it. His keynotes are engaging, thought-provoking, and often described as “scary” in the best possible way.

Greg Lindsay: Cities, AI, and the Future of Human Systems

Greg Lindsay is a leading futurist, urbanist, and expert on the future of cities, technology, and globalization. He is the co-author, with John D. Kasarda, of the international bestseller Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next, a seminal work examining how global connectivity is reshaping urban life and economic development.

Greg speaks and writes extensively about the intersection of transportation, urbanization, innovation, and emerging technologies. His work connects global trends with on-the-ground realities, helping organizations understand how structural change unfolds and why it matters now.

From Urban Mobility to the Passenger Economy

Greg helped develop Intel’s Passenger Economy project and serves as Urbanist-in-Residence at BMW MINI’s urban tech accelerator, URBAN-X. In these roles, he works closely with startups, corporations, and policymakers exploring the future of mobility, cities, and infrastructure.

He is also a visiting scholar at New York University’s Rudin Center for Transportation Policy & Management and a fellow of the Hybrid Reality Institute, where he explores the co-evolution of humans and technology. His insights bridge strategy, design, and policy, offering audiences a holistic view of how innovation reshapes daily life.

Artificial Intelligence and the Built Environment

In recent years, Greg’s focus has expanded to include artificial intelligence and its growing influence on cities, infrastructure, and organizations. He has led interactive threatcasting and futures workshops for institutions such as Arizona State University’s McCain Institute, building scenarios around the risks and unintended consequences of AI-driven decision-making systems.

From self-driving organizations to digital replicas of cities, Greg examines how AI is quietly rewiring governance, work, and human agency often faster than leaders expect.

A Globally Recognized Voice on the Future

Greg Lindsay speaks frequently at high-level forums around the world, including appearances at 10 Downing Street, the United States Military Academy, Sandia National Laboratories, the OECD, Harvard Business School, the MIT Media Lab, and the Aspen Ideas Festival.

His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, The Financial Times, McKinsey Quarterly, Time, Wired, New York, Travel + Leisure, Condé Nast Traveler, and Departures. He was previously a contributing writer for Fortune and an editor-at-large for Advertising Age.

Why Book Greg Lindsay for Your Event

Organizations book Greg Lindsay to challenge assumptions and provoke new ways of thinking about the future. His keynotes blend sharp analysis with engaging storytelling, offering audiences clarity in a world shaped by geopolitical tension, technological acceleration, and systemic uncertainty.

Known for his professional yet entertaining delivery, Greg leaves audiences informed, energized, and ready to act. As a two-time Jeopardy! champion and the only human to go undefeated against IBM’s Watson, he brings both intellect and wit to every stage.

Book Greg Lindsay for your event to gain a compelling, future-focused perspective on AI, cities, and the systems shaping tomorrow.

Customer Reviews

Engaging, intellectual style with excellent content for target audience.

Deirdre Toner American Society of Landscape Architects, Illinois Chapter

Keynotes

Keynote by Greg Lindsay:

Threatcasting the Hidden Risks of AI Decision-Making

Artificial intelligence is rapidly moving from decision support to decision authority. Algorithms now influence hiring, logistics, security, infrastructure, and public policy, often faster than leaders can understand the consequences.

In this keynote, futurist and urbanist Greg Lindsay introduces threatcasting, a futures methodology designed to identify and stress-test the hidden risks of AI-driven decision-making before they escalate into real-world crises. Drawing on his work with institutions such as Arizona State University’s McCain Institute, Greg guides audiences through plausible future scenarios where AI systems fail not because of malice, but because of scale, speed, and misplaced trust.

Rather than focusing on distant speculation, this keynote examines how AI is already reshaping cities, organizations, and governance and where accountability begins to blur. From automated infrastructure to agentic systems operating without human oversight, Greg challenges audiences to rethink how decisions are made, who is responsible, and what happens when systems optimized for efficiency collide with human values.

The result is a compelling, often unsettling keynote that equips leaders to ask better questions, design smarter safeguards, and reclaim strategic control in an AI-driven world.

After this keynote, audiences will:

Understand how AI decision-making systems actually fail and why most failures are systemic, not technical
Learn the core principles of threatcasting and how it differs from traditional forecasting and risk management
Identify early warning signals that AI systems are drifting beyond human oversight
Recognize where accountability breaks down when decisions are automated across organizations and cities
Gain a practical framework for stress-testing AI systems before they are deployed at scale
Leave with clear questions leaders must ask when AI begins to make decisions on their behalf

Request a quote

Special Virtual Keynote by speaker Greg Lindsay:

Inoculating the Planet: Life After COVID-19

While the world awaits a vaccine, how will we inoculate our cities, workplaces, homes, and families against another pandemic? For example, how will fluid organizations balance the mental- and physical health of employees with new remote/office work hybrids? Will social distancing kill mass transit and ridehailing in favor of driving alone — or will cities turn streets over to cyclists, scooters, and pedestrians?

How will deliveries, “dark kitchen,” and automation threaten to turn retailing and restaurants inside-out, threatening main streets, mom-and-pops, and real estate as we know it? And where will millennials — now the victims of a second financial crash — choose to raise their children, “Generation C?”

Drawing on his research and foresight work for NewCities, the Atlantic Council, MIT’s Future Urban Collectives Lab, the Bloomberg Philanthropies, and dozens of recent interviews, Greg Lindsay delivers a sweeping view of how the pandemic and resulting economic crash will alter the trajectory of our lives for decades to come.

Request a quote

Keynote by speaker Greg Lindsay:

The New Suburbia

Yes, there are many young people who prefer the urban core, but today's fastest-growing cities are actually Sunbelt metros, like San Antonio, Phoenix and Dallas. Furthermore, huge outflows of people are moving from "superstar cities" due to the lack of affordable housing, a trend that we could expect to grow as Millennial's start families. In this game changing session, Greg cuts through confusion and stereotypes surrounding millennial's housing preferences and outline a new suburban formula that will entice this generation.

Speaker Greg is a leading voice on Millennial migration and how we can anticipate and build for their changing lifestyle.

Understanding how new forces are transforming expectations and lifestyle choices for the Millennial generation

Exploring why urban Millennials are opting for smaller metros or suburban/exurban fringes of large metros and taking their lifestyle preferences with them

Identifying community features and urban amenities Millennials desire such as walkable neighborhoods, co-working spaces, transportation alternatives and other hallmarks of their youth

Recognizing the opportunities these new forces and trends will enable, including neighborhoods, new uses and new products and services, recombing once-tired formulations of live, work and play.

Request a quote

Keynote by speaker Greg Lindsay:

The Metaverse Metropolis

“
The Metaverse” may be the future, but what
is
it? While Mark Zuckerberg hopes you’ll never leave your home again, in reality the next generation of the Internet will beckon us outside, into a world in which information is everywhere —
if
you can see it. Welcome to the real-world metaverse, where you can change reality like changing a channel.

How will this change our relationship to each other and to the world? How will these reality channels transform where we live, how we shop, and how we move through enchanted worlds? Drawing on his “Metaverse Metropolis” project at Cornell Tech university, Greg Lindsay offers real advice and lessons from the technologists, designers, and experts building this real-world metaverse.

Request a quote

Keynote by speaker Greg Lindsay:

Where Will You Live in 2050?

Nearly half of Americans were victims of a climate disaster last year — whether fire, floods, heat waves or hurricanes — with insurable losses of more than $100 billion. As people wake up to the realities of climate change — and the growing threat to their homes, livelihoods, and families — many are beginning to ask, “Where should I live someday?” Fortunately, we have answers. Combining climate science with demographics and using artificial intelligence, we can predict tomorrow’s more resilient regions.

Climate change isn’t just a story about mounting catastrophes, but also opportunity — if we harness the right technologies, policies, and political will to build back better elsewhere. Drawing on his work with the startup Climate Alpha, Greg Lindsay offers cutting edge analysis and maps to explain why and where a warming world may still have shelter for us all.

Request a quote