When innovative companies like Google, 3M, Cisco, Pepsi, Rogers, and SAP want to help their leaders and teams understand and get excited about AI and the opportunities it brings, they call David Usher. He is the founder of the AI venture studio Reimagine AI, a bestselling author, and the lead singer of Moist, with more than 1.4 million albums sold and four Juno Awards. Usher draws on his unique background to deliver dynamic, interactive presentations that blend live music, storytelling, and onstage AI demonstrations to explore what’s really happening with AI, where it’s heading, and why human creativity matters now more than ever.
Usher’s perspective on AI comes from building it. In 2014, long before ChatGPT, he created his first AI agent with Google: a system that collaborated with humans on writing song lyrics. In 2018, he launched Reimagine AI, where he and his team develop AI platforms across memory, healthcare, and entertainment, including SecondEcho, an AI-powered living-memory archive.
More than a decade of building at the forefront of AI has given Usher a practitioner’s view of both its extraordinary opportunities and challenges, including trust, safety, and increasingly autonomous systems. His message is simple: AI is too important to leave only to technologists. The more of us who understand it, the better the future we’ll build with it.
Usher is the author of the Globe and Mail bestseller Let the Elephants Run: Unlock Your Creativity and Change Everything and co-creator of the Climate Clock, which tracks global warming in real time. Audiences leave his keynotes with a clear understanding of AI’s potential, practical ways to think more creatively, and the confidence to become agents of change.