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Ken Hughes

World-leading expert in customer experience and consumer behavior, Ken Hughes delivers unforgettable insights that transform brands and employee engagement.

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Why you should book Ken Hughes for your next event

  • Voted ‘Best Speaker’ at countless global conferences, Ken’s keynotes combine humor, insight, and impact to consistently exceed audience expectations.
  • With over 20 years as CEO of a leading consumer insights firm, Ken brings real-world expertise backed by data, research, and global market knowledge.
  • Ken has advised brands like IKEA, PayPal, and Unilever, offering transformative insights that elevate customer experience, loyalty, and marketing success.

Non-binding request for Ken Hughes

Mastering the Future Consumer Mindset

Recognized globally as the King of Customer Experience, Ken Hughes is one of the world’s leading authorities on modern consumer behavior and brand engagement. With over two decades of insight into digital culture, behavioral psychology, and retail futurology, he delivers electrifying keynotes that challenge, inspire, and entertain. From Gen Z to AI, customer loyalty to innovation, his sessions are packed with powerful storytelling, humor, and actionable takeaways. 

Keynote Speaker Ken Hughes is internationally recognized as one of the world’s leading authorities on modern consumer behavior, customer experience, and the evolving digital landscape. Known as The King of Customer Experience, Ken is a sought-after voice in the corporate world, trusted by global brands like IKEA, PayPal, and Coca-Cola to decode the shifting expectations of today’s connected consumer.

Blending over 20 years of experience as CEO of a consumer insight agency with his expertise in behavioral psychology, digital anthropology, and retail futurology, Ken delivers keynote experiences that are both thought-provoking and highly practical. His content empowers organizations to adapt, lead, and thrive in an era defined by disruption, innovation, and generational change.

Ken Hughes inspires audiences on critical topics such as Gen Z and Gen Alpha, the future of work, customer and employee engagement, AI, and the peer-to-peer economy. Known for his dynamic delivery, Irish wit, and unforgettable stage presence, his keynotes are designed to challenge thinking and spark meaningful action.

Whether you’re leading transformation, enhancing customer experience, or preparing your teams for the future, book Ken Hughes for your event to unlock deep consumer insights, fresh strategic direction, and a keynote your audience will talk about long after the applause ends. Keynote Speaker Ken Hughes doesn’t just inform, he transforms.

Keynotes

Keynote by Ken Hughes:

The Blue Dot Consumer: Understanding the modern customer connection

An exploration of the modern consumer, their values, expectations, and what brands need to do to win their race for relevance.

Like that pulsing blue dot on your Google Maps app, today everything revolves around the customer. They are at the centre, the frame of reference built around them. Everything is shown from their perspective. Their expectation is instant, personal, and contextual. They only want to interact with brands that are authentic, that deliver on experiential, and with whom they can collaborate as opposed to just ‘buy from’. We need to seek emotive engagement and push beyond the functional and transactional.

The values of the modern consumer continue to shift and this keynote explores what other brands and industries are doing to deliver on these values. As AI, Robotics, Metaverse and a maturing Gen Z & Gen Alpha consumer group emerge, the customer connection is set to fundamentally change. A keynote about where your customer is, where they are going, and what you may need to think about in order to get there before they do.

Request a quote: Ken Hughes The Blue Dot Consumer: Understanding the modern customer connection

Keynote by Ken Hughes:

Taylormaking: How to use CX to build brand success

An exploration of how emotive customer connections, continuous investment in customer and employee experience, and inviting customer collaboration builds brand tribal following. If Taylor Swift can do it, so can you.

How has Taylor Swift, a 34-year-old entertainer and entrepreneur risen to such superstardom, building one of the world’s most impressive tribal brand followings of our time? Her global Eras Tour has broken all records, a brand recouping the 15-year investment made in emotive customer connection.

Looking at the core values of modern customer and employee connection, this keynote explores the nature of brand relationship, emotive customer connections, customer excite & delight strategies, customer empowerment and tribal belonging, collaboration, brand authenticity, personalisation, and customer intimacy. Using Taylor as our jump-off point, we explore what brands and businesses are doing all over the world in the CX & EX space.

A keynote all about CX, EX and how continuous investment in both delivers significant emotive brand loyalty. Focus on the relationship not the transaction.

Request a quote: Ken Hughes Taylormaking: How to use CX to build brand success

Keynote by Ken Hughes:

AI, Data & Disruption: Winning the race for customer relevance

A cultural evaluation of the effect AI will have on the consumer decision making process and the world of marketing, branding and customer connection will change.

Technology has always enabled the advancement of commerce. From product and channel development to consumer expectations, technology has both catalysed and enabled change. In recent decades, the internet, broadband, WiFi, 4G, and the Smartphone have all step-jumped and catalysed consumer connections.

As AI, Metaverse, Robotics and the coming of age of Gen Z and Gen Alpha regarding consumer expectations converge, we are set for significant change. The AI conversation needs to be less about algorithms, deep fakes, data, and natural language models, and more about how brands need to prepare for a new way of doing business.

While AI will bring countless new touchpoints, it is about leveraging the new technologies to build more efficient, exciting, and engaging customer connections. Exploring the sociological, behavioural, and cultural history and impact of technology and AI, this keynote demonstrates that it’s not just the rules that are about to change, it’s the entire game.

Request a quote: Ken Hughes AI, Data & Disruption: Winning the race for customer relevance

Keynote by Ken Hughes:

Igniting the Spark: How creativity & risk drive the innovation engine

An understanding of how agility, risk, play, and creativity catalyse innovation at the personal, professional and organisation level.

Every organisation recognises that creativity and innovation are the fuel that will drive their engine to success. The problem is that most organisations fail in catalysing this creativity, and so the innovation wheel stops turning. If we are to push established boundaries, challenge norms and solve problems in new ways then we must change our approach.

Habit and routine are the enemy of growth, personally and professionally. Rigid bureaucratic structures are part of our problem. Templates, organizational structures, corporate procedures. In our new disruptive economies, agility is key and so we need to rewire our approach to change.

Understanding play, mischief, fear, and risk in relation to creativity, alongside exploring vulnerability and courage in our everyday are all strong leadership qualities. This is a highly motivating speech that challenges the individual and delivers an inspirational personal development message alongside the professional.

Request a quote: Ken Hughes Igniting the Spark: How creativity & risk drive the innovation engine

Ken Hughes. The King of CX | Showreel

Watch Ken Hughes in action

Time bending - 365 ways to unlock creativity and innovation by speaker Ken Hughes at TEDxUniversityofNicosia

Ken Hughes - video

Watch speaker Ken Hughes in action

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