A note on a deliberate shift in how I'm spending speaking time in 2026. Last year, the bulk of my speaking work was conference keynotes. This year, more of it will be corporate workshops with leadership teams.
Worth being explicit about why, because the shift surprises some of the conference organisers I've turned down recently and a few people have asked the reasoning.
The leverage difference
A conference keynote, done well, reaches a few hundred people in a single sitting. Most of them encounter the material once. A few will follow up — a LinkedIn message, a conference-floor conversation — but the overwhelming majority hear the talk and move on with their day. The talk is, at best, the first encounter with an idea that may or may not lodge in their thinking.
A corporate workshop reaches 8-25 senior leaders over half a day or a full day. The depth of engagement is dramatically different. The participants apply the framework to their own context in real time. They surface their specific operational constraints. They leave with concrete next actions and, often, a follow-up engagement.
In leverage-per-hour terms, the workshop is more impactful by a wide margin. The conference is broader and more ephemeral. The workshop is narrower and more transformative for the people in it.
For a while I weighted the conference work more heavily because it served a positioning function — being on the BrightonSEO or MozCon stage signals something different from running corporate workshops in private. That positioning function is real but it's increasingly served by the writing, the LinkedIn presence, and the reputation built up over previous years. The marginal positioning value of another conference keynote is now lower than it was three years ago.
The marginal value of another workshop, on the other hand, has been increasing. The kinds of questions senior leadership teams are asking about agentic AI, GEO, and operating model design have been getting more sophisticated, and the workshops are where I find the conversation interesting.
What changed in 2025
A few specific things that pushed me toward this shift.
Workshop demand grew faster than conference demand. I was getting more inbound for corporate engagement than for keynote work in 2025, and the fit was generally tighter. The companies booking workshops had a specific problem they wanted help thinking about. The conferences booking keynotes wanted general inspiration. Both are valuable to the audiences they serve. The first is more valuable to me as the speaker.
The conference circuit became more saturated. The volume of GEO, agentic AI, and four-day-week talks at major conferences in 2025 was substantial. Some of them were excellent. Many were not. The signal-to-noise problem at conferences has gotten worse, and the marginal effect of one more talk has gotten smaller. The workshop format doesn't have the same saturation problem — the work is bespoke to each engagement.
The talks themselves benefit from the workshop work. Each workshop produces specific examples, specific objections, specific edge cases that I wouldn't have encountered without the close engagement with a senior team. The conference talks I do still give are sharper because the workshop work has tested the arguments against real operating contexts.
What corporate workshops actually look like
For organisers thinking about whether the format would fit their context, a brief description of what the work looks like.
Half-day or full-day format. Half-day works for most leadership teams. Full-day works when the team wants to apply the framework to a specific workflow or initiative in real time and produce concrete artefacts.
8-25 senior participants. Smaller than a typical training group, larger than a typical executive coaching session. The size is calibrated to allow real interaction while still surfacing diverse perspectives.
Pre-work for the team. I send the team some preparatory material a week ahead — usually a short briefing document, sometimes an exercise to bring to the workshop. The team comes in with context. The workshop spends time on application rather than introduction.
A specific problem or workflow as the working substrate. The workshops are most effective when there's a real operational question the team is trying to answer. "We're considering investing in agentic systems and want to figure out where to start" is a good substrate. "We want to learn about agentic AI in general" is not. The first produces concrete outputs. The second produces a more interesting talk.
Concrete artefacts as outputs. The team should leave with documents — a workflow map, an investment plan, a measurement framework, a decision document. The work isn't theoretical. The artefacts are the point.
The structure of any specific workshop varies by what the team needs. But the shape — pre-work, applied work, concrete outputs — is consistent.
Topics I run workshops on
Three current topics, broadly aligned with my speaking themes.
Agentic AI workflow design. How to identify which of the team's workflows are candidates for agentic automation, how to scope the build, what infrastructure is required, and what the realistic timeline and budget are. Usually a half day. Outputs: a prioritised list of candidate workflows, a scoping doc for the highest-priority workflow, and a measurement framework for the agent's value.
GEO strategy and measurement design. How to design a GEO strategy for the team's context, what to measure, how to integrate it with existing SEO and content work, and what operating model changes are required. Half-day or full-day. Outputs: a GEO measurement dashboard design, a content prioritisation framework, and an integrated SEO/GEO plan.
Operating model redesign for senior knowledge teams. Often booked by agency leaders or services-business CEOs considering a four-day week or a similar operational change. Walks through the operational redesign required, the financial implications, and the change-management work. Full-day, ideally on-site. Outputs: a transition plan with timeline, a client communication framework, and an operating model document.
I'll consider other topics if there's a strong fit, but these three are where the depth is and where the leverage of the format is most evident.
Booking
Corporate workshops are booked in advance — typically 8-12 weeks. The reasons: I do meaningful preparation per workshop (the pre-work, the bespoke materials, the working substrate), and my calendar runs tight. Last-minute requests are usually possible to fulfil but harder to do well.
The conversation usually starts with a 30-minute discovery call. Some workshops we end up not booking because the fit isn't right — sometimes the audience is more junior than the format requires, sometimes the topic isn't quite what the team needs. I'd rather decline a workshop than ship a half-fitted version of it.
If you're thinking about programming for a leadership offsite or a strategic planning event in 2026, the contact form is the easiest entry point. The calendar fills earlier than most organisers expect, particularly for the months either side of a major conference window.
The conference work isn't going away entirely. (The talks I'm currently giving and the one I won't give anymore are both up here.) I'll continue to do a small number of conference talks where the audience is genuinely the right fit and the topic is worth the format. But the bulk of the speaking time, this year, is going to corporate work. The leverage difference is too large to ignore.