Introducing the BCI World Hybrid 2025 Keynote Sessions
Keynote 1 - Empowering teams to thrive in a techno world
Speaker: Petra Velzeboer
Date & Time: Tuesday 11th November, 09:20 - 10:05
Room: Plenary (live streamed)
Subject Area: Workforce and personal resilience
Abstract
In a world shaped by rapid change, misinformation, and digital overwhelm, how can leaders protect their teams from burnout while building truly resilient cultures?
Petra combines personal experience—escaping a cult, overcoming addiction—with practical strategies for fostering adaptive teams and sustainable business cultures. Challenging surface-level wellbeing, she will explore how vulnerability, critical thinking, and authentic leadership can transform pressure into purpose.
This session offers tangible tools to set boundaries, prevent burnout, and reframe legacy through influence and connection—empowering individuals and teams to thrive amid uncertainty in an AI world.
Join Petra as she delivers a powerful blend of lived experience and actionable insights to get you ready to design resilient workplaces that endure.
About the Speaker
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Petra Velzeboer
Renowned Mental Health Leader, TEDx Speaker, Author, CEO of Consultancy PVL
In an age of global uncertainty, tech addiction and AI, Petra Velzeboer is the go-to expert on mental health culture and resilience in the workplace. A dynamic TEDx speaker, psychotherapist, and CEO of mental health consultancy PVL, she draws on her personal journey—escaping a cult and overcoming addiction—to deliver powerful insights into wellbeing, leadership, and performance.
Petra challenges superficial approaches to mental health, tackling issues like burnout, technostress, digital addiction, and AI anxiety. She equips audiences with practical tools to foster psychological safety, connection, and adaptability in high-pressure, hybrid work environments.
Author of "Begin with You and Digital Wellbeing: Recharge Your Focus and Reboot Your Life", Petra has been featured in Newsweek, The Huffington Post, CEO World, and Harvard Business Review
Keynote 2 - Resilient by design: navigating geopolitical risks and disruptions with predictive intelligence
Speakers: Andrew Morkot MBCI, Paul Cutler MBCI
Date & Time: Tuesday 11th November, 16:10 - 16:55
Room: Plenary (live streamed)
Subject Area: Supply chain & geopolitical resilience
Absract
In today’s hyper-connected and increasingly volatile global landscape, supply chains face unprecedented challenges from geopolitical tensions, trade wars, pandemics and climate crises.
This keynote sets the stage for a critical exploration of how organizations can move from reactive to proactive by leveraging predictive intelligence and scenario planning to strengthen and future-proof their supply chains. It will delve into how data analytics and AI are reshaping the way we forecast disruptions, assess geopolitical risk, and make strategic decisions.
Paul and Andrew will highlight real-world examples of how leading organizations are embedding flexibility, and resilience into their supply networks ensuring continuity, agility and competitive advantage.
About the Speaker
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Andrew Morkot MBCI
Principal Managed Services Consultant, Riskonnect, United Kingdom
Andrew is a UK-based Principal Managed Services Consultant at Riskonnect with 30 years' experience in the resilience field across government, tech and big pharma sectors. This includes 15 years leading Business Continuity programs in UK FTSE100 businesses.
He specializes in helping organisations build practical Business Continuity and Crisis Management programmes that align with Operational Resilience, organizational strategy, and customer needs.
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Paul Cutler MBCI
EMEA Delivery Manager, Riskonnect, United Kingdom
Paul has over 40 years’ experience within the IT services industry working in New Zealand, Australia, and the United Kingdom.
He has a background in business continuity and resiliency and his experience includes uplifting a client’s technical recovery capability following a cyber-attack and supporting clients to operationalize their business continuity solutions.
Keynote 3 - The resilient future: harnessing AI - A practitioner's journey
Speaker: Jason Hoss
Date & Time: Wednesday 12th November, 09:20 - 10:05
Room: Plenary (live streamed)
Subject Area: Cyber security & AI-driven resilience
Abstract
This presentation explores how AI transforms business resilience by empowering organizations to adapt and thrive during disruptions.
Jason will share practical applications of AI for resilience professionals, including data analysis, exercise development, and risk management.
Key themes include augmented intelligence where humans lead and technology accelerates, managing AI hallucination risks, implementing ethical governance, and adopting a measured approach to AI integration.
The journey showcases concrete workflows using tools like Claude, Gemini, and NotebookLM, with recommendations for starting small and building capabilities gradually.
About the Speaker
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Jason Hoss
Founder and CEO, Whirlybird Labs Ltd, United States of America
Jason Hoss brings over a decade of transformative experience to business resilience, evolving from photography business owner to enterprise resilience expert, now pioneering human-AI integration at Whirlybird Labs.
He combines emotional intelligence with technical expertise to translate complex concepts into accessible strategies, while championing the critical balance between artificial intelligence and human wisdom in organizational resilience.
Drawing from his own journey of transformation, Jason actively shapes industry standards and education, demonstrating how organizations can harness AI's potential while preserving their essential human core.
Keynote 4 - How can organizations unleash their collective intelligence to gain a competitive edge?
Speaker: Hannah Critchlow
Date & Time: Wednesday 12th November, 15:20 - 16:05
Room: Plenary (live streamed)
Subject Area: Resilience as a competitive advantage
Abstract
In this keynote session, Hannah combines cutting-edge neuroscience with real-world insights to explore how understanding the brain as a "prediction machine" can transform team dynamics, leadership, and innovation.
Drawing on the latest insights from neuroscience, she will examine how our brains process uncertainty, anticipate threats, and are shaped by cognitive biases, with direct implications for horizon scanning, collective decision-making, and organisational resilience.
Hannah will then reveal how this joined-up thinking and strong team dynamics can strengthen leadership, enhance communication, and position resilience as a strategic asset and true competitive advantage - helping future-ready organisations not just survive, but excel, in an unpredictable world.
About the Speaker
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Hannah Critchlow
Bestselling Author, Broadcaster & Neuroscience Presenter, Named by Nature as “Rising Star in Life Sciences”
Dr Hannah Critchlow is an internationally-acclaimed neuroscientist, broadcaster, author and Fellow at Magdalene College, University of Cambridge. She regularly appears on BBC, ABC and Korean TV and Radio, most recently in the EPS Great Minds Series, as Science Presenter in Family Brain Games, Tomorrow’s World Live, BBC Radio 4 Destiny and the Brain, Start the Week and profiled on The Life Scientific.
Her book on Consciousness: A Ladybird Expert Guide, was published with Penguin in 2018. The Science of Fate, published with Hodder in May, 2019, made The Sunday Times Bestseller list, receiving international press coverage and was translated into 8 languages. Her third book: Joined up Thinking: the science of collective intelligence was published with Hodder in August 2022 to critical acclaim and translated to English and Chinese territories to date.
She has spoken internationally on the science of collective intelligence to a range of audiences including business leaders, government officials, financial institutions and energy providers. In 2022 Hannah received an Honorary Doctorate for her work in science communication. In 2019 Hannah was named by Nature as a ‘Rising Stars in Life Sciences’. Hannah Critchlow was recognised as a ‘Top 100 UK scientist’ by the UK Science Council in 2014 and one of Cambridge University’s most ‘inspirational and successful women in science’ for her work in science communication.
Register for BCI World Hybrid 2025
Don’t miss your chance to be part of BCI World Hybrid 2025—register today to gain access to world-class keynote sessions, cutting-edge insights, and a vast and dynamic programme designed to inspire and inform business continuity and resilience professionals everywhere.
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