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Ben Afia is a brand strategist, transformation expert, author and speaker with 30 years of experience helping some of the world’s best known organisations build distinctive brands, transform customer experiences and create cultures that drive change.
He has worked with major brands including Vodafone, Aviva, Google, E.ON, Boots, Legal & General, BP, OVO Energy, TalkTalk and LV=.
Today, Ben brings this experience to one of the biggest challenges facing organisations: how to adopt AI at scale without losing the human qualities that make a brand distinctive. His message is simple: everyone may be using the same AI models, but that does not mean every organisation needs to sound or behave the same.
Ben currently leads an AI transformation programme for a Fortune 500 life sciences company, building and scaling a team of AI agents to support the marketing workflow across more than 300 marketers.
His career has consistently focused on making organisations more distinctive and effective. He built Aviva’s brand voice to make complex insurance feel simple and distinctive, helped Vodafone transform how 1,000 customer service agents communicated with customers, contributing to an increase in NPS of 15 to 20 points, transformed Aldermore Bank’s entire customer journey and guided E.ON through a culture and brand transformation reaching 16,000 people. He also helped Ronseal define exactly what it should say on the tin and established tone of voice standards at Boots before the discipline became widely recognised.
He combines his practical experience of AI adoption with three decades of understanding brand, culture and customer experience, giving him a perspective that goes beyond the technology itself.
He is also the author of The Human Business, which explores why the human elements of business remain so important in an increasingly digital world.
Ben’s talks explore how organisations can use AI to increase productivity and scale while protecting the qualities that make them different. He challenges businesses to think beyond simply implementing AI and instead consider how technology can amplify their brand, culture and people rather than flatten them.
His approach is practical, thought provoking and grounded in real world experience, helping audiences understand not only what AI can do, but how to make it work in a way that remains distinctly human.
Here’s how to fight back
Generic AI creates generic brands. Right now, your competitors are using the same tools with the same defaults – and everyone’s starting to sound the same. This talk shows how to stay distinctive while getting all the benefits of AI.
Audiences learn:
How AI agents can think, plan and work like your best people
AI agents aren’t coming. They’re here. They can research, plan, write and make decisions – built on your brand, not against it. The businesses getting ahead aren’t just using AI as a tool. They’re building AI workforces that think and work like their best people.
In this talk, Ben shows how AI agents actually work – with a live demo of his own AI workforce – and gives you the steps to start building yours.
Audiences learn:
Perfect for – Leadership events, CEO and board-level audiences.
We won’t be covering prompting. Seriously. There are hundreds YouTube videos for that. This workshop is for teams who want to go further – to make AI a real working partner, not a fancy autocomplete.
Brief – Give AI what it needs Most people skip this and wonder why the output’s rubbish. Teams learn what to bring so AI knows what good looks like.
Build – Do the work together A conversation, not a command. They’ll brief well, iterate and push back when the first draft falls short.
Back – Their name goes on this AI helped make it. They stand behind it. They’ll spot where it gets things wrong and add what only humans can bring.
Perfect for – brand, marketing and other teams, whether they’re just getting started with AI or want to get a whole lot more value from it.
Ben spoke for us at Business Marketing Club. He was careful to understand our audience and objectives, as well as the setting for the event. His presentation was brilliant – passionate on the topic of bringing the human into business, engaging with his audience throughout the presentation and Q&A. Recommended.
Ben helped us transform our organisation – elevating our customer experience and making us more human. Ben’s incredibly engaging, knows what he’s talking about and is a pleasure to work with. This has been cultural transformation which has captured the imagination of the whole organisation.
