“A happy mind performs better. A connected team delivers more. And a stressed culture is expensive”.
Mo Gawdat
About
Mo Gawdat is the former Chief Business Officer at Google [X], 5x international bestselling author, founder of the One Billion Happy movement, and co-founder of Emma.Love. With a career spanning 27 years at IBM, NCR, Microsoft, and Google, Mo helped launch close to half of Google’s global operations and later led business strategy at Google [X], home of projects like self-driving cars, Project Loon, and Makani.
Driven by a passion for solving humanity’s biggest challenges, Mo has cofounded more than 20 companies and mentored countless startups. After the loss of his son Ali, he developed the happiness model at the heart of his bestselling book Solve for Happy (2017), sparking his global mission to make
one billion people happy.
He went on to launch Slo Mo: A Podcast with Mo Gawdat (2020), now a leading mental health podcast. His book Scary Smart (2021) predicted the rise of AI, gaining renewed recognition with the release of ChatGPT in 2022 and establishing him as one of the world’s most respected AI experts. He followed with That Little Voice in Your Head (2022), Unstressable (2024), and Alive (2025), all international bestsellers.
His latest project is Emma.love, a revolutionary group of advanced AI’s designed to address one of the modern world’s greatest challenges—finding and keeping genuine love—while at the same time teaching AI about what makes us most deeply human: the way we love.
Why Should You Listen
to Him?
What You’ll Learn
How to innovate without losing your humanity. How AI can serve people, not swallow them.
Why You’ll Love Him
He blends moonshot thinking with emotional intelligence - a rare mix.
What’s Unusual
Mo brings the kind of calm, wise provocation that makes people rethink everything they assumed about tech… and themselves.
Don’t Rage Against the Machine! A wake up call for leaders in the age of AI
Artificial intelligence is neither positive nor negative. It is what you make of it. In this candid and forward looking keynote, Mo Gawdat cuts through the noise to explore the reality of AI in 2026. While many argue that AI is overhyped, those building with it know the opposite may be true. What we are currently seeing represents only a fraction of what the technology is capable of.
This session will explore:
• What AI is actually capable of today versus what the public perceives
• Why AI is not a threat but an amplifier of human intention
• How leaders and entrepreneurs can maximize personal and business value using AI
• The speed of change and what it means for business strategy
• How to move from fear to opportunity in the age of intelligent systems
Drawing from his own experience building AI driven ventures and even co authoring books with AI, Mo will share personal, practical examples of how to deploy AI effectively, strategically, and responsibly.
This is not a hype session. It is a wake up call.
From Impossible to Inevitable
Google [X] does not attempt to achieve incremental improvements in the way the world works, but instead, it tries to develop new technologies that will reinvent the way things are and deliver a radical, tenfold—10X—improvement. This leads to seemingly SciFi ideas such as: Project Loon, which aims to use high-altitude balloons to provide affordable internet access to the 5 billion people on every square inch of our planet; Project Makani, aiming to revolutionize wind energy generation using autonomous carbon fiber kites; as well as self-driving cars, Google Life Sciences, and many more. The business team under Mo’s leadership designed innovative business models analogous to the disruptive technologies [X] creates and created deep partnerships and global deals that enabled [X] to thrive and build products fit for the real world.
Get to Know Mo
Meet the other BBF
2026 Speakers
