Peter Leyden
AI & tech expert, thought leader on the future, strategic foresight advisor, former WIRED managing editor & serial entrepreneur
Peter Leyden is a tech expert and thought leader on artificial intelligence, the implications of transformative technologies like clean energy, and the positive possibilities of the near future.
Leyden has followed the front edge of technological change ever since coming to San Francisco to work with the founders of WIRED magazine at the beginning of the Digital Age and the arrival of the internet.
His first book The Long Boom foretold from that time how the digital economy would transform the world over the next 25 years — and largely did. That started him giving keynote talks as a tech expert and futurist on roughly a monthly basis throughout America and occasionally Europe that continues to this day.
He’s become known for figuring out the potentially positive impacts of transformative technologies and his writing and keynotes are generally optimistic takes on what’s possible in the near future.
The Great Progression: 2025 to 2050 is his latest iteration that does for The AI Age what The Long Boom did for the Digital Age. The new book project now in the form of a magazine piece, Substack series, and frequent keynotes lays out a new narrative about how we could harness AI and other transformative technologies to drive progress, reinvent America, and make a much better world.
Leyden is well positioned to give audiences a comprehensive understanding of all the key issues surrounding Artificial Intelligence after hosting one of the premier event series at ground zero in San Francisco called The AI Age Begins for the two years after Generative AI burst on the scene. He convened an extraordinary network of top tech experts in the region to come up with answers to the key issues surrounding the arrival of this world-changing tool.
Leyden frequently has stepped beyond the role of thought leader and been an entrepreneur who founded three startup companies on that front edge of tech change. They all focused on convening remarkable innovators in gatherings that tried to get early insights into what’s probably coming in the next decade.
Today Leyden is founder of his own strategic foresight firm Reinvent Futures, where he advises senior leaders on the four key questions that he has pursued throughout his career: What’s really going on today? What’s probably coming in the next decade? What’s possible to achieve in the next 25 years? And what should we do now?
Leyden started his career pursuing those questions as a newspaper journalist working in several regions of America including the Deep South. He also worked as a foreign correspondent in Asia covering the early China story mostly with Newsweek. He has visited more than 50 countries and always maintains a global perspective.
He was born and raised in the heartland in the Twin Cities of Minnesota and started on his lifelong learning journey to figure out those questions, first as graduating summa cum laude at Georgetown University in Washington DC, and then getting two masters at Columbia University in New York City.
