Penny Locaso Book as a speaker/entertainer for your next event

Key Points for Penny Locaso

  • Penny Locaso is a Provisional Psychologist specialising in the Psychology of AI and the impact artificial intelligence is having on leadership behaviour, cognition, and organisational decision making.
  • She helps leaders and organisations recognise the hidden human costs of AI acceleration, including reduced critical thinking, cognitive overload, rushed decision making, and weakened behavioural awareness.
  • Penny combines over two decades of commercial leadership experience with evidence led psychological insight, delivering practical strategies leaders can immediately apply in high pressure environments.
  • Her work challenges audiences to rethink AI not only as a technology issue, but as a human capability issue, helping organisations strengthen judgement, trust, integrity, and leadership performance in an AI driven world.

Topics for Penny Locaso

  • The intentional AI advantage
    The busy will adopt AI. The intentionally adaptable will use it to shape what’s next.
    AI is not the risk. Unintentional AI is.
    Right now, leaders are buried. The pace of work has created a busyness that has moved beyond uncomfortable into structurally dangerous, where everything feels urgent and the ability to identify what actually matters breaks down. Leaders stop making deliberate choices and start reacting. AI lands on top of that crack and widens it. When leaders use AI reactively, the production of AI slop elevates: outputs look polished, move quickly, and feed straight into decisions without the scrutiny those decisions deserve. The downstream cost shows up in rework, eroded trust, and leadership choices that carry more consequence than the system was designed to hold.
    Underneath all of it, something more fundamental is happening. The research is early, but the direction is clear. When leaders consistently offload their thinking to AI, cognitive capacity starts to erode, degrading problem solving ability, memory and sound judgement. This is the brain rot risk. A measurable pattern in how human cognition responds to sustained cognitive offloading.
    Neuroscience is showing measurable atrophy in the regions handling critical thinking and memory, in as little as six months of daily AI use. Leaders who outsource their thinking are, over time, becoming less capable of the kind of judgement their roles demand. This keynote names what is happening, connects the threads, and gives leaders a practical way through.
    This is a leadership keynote about what it means to think well, decide well, and lead with integrity in a world that is systematically eroding the conditions that make that possible.
    Your leaders will be taken on a journey through the evidence connecting AI adoption, organisational pace, and decision quality, drawing on The Compassion Advantage research and the emerging science on AI cognitive offloading. We name the three risks directly: the busyness that kills prioritisation, the AI slop that corrupts decisions, and the brain rot that nobody is talking about yet. And then we get practical. What intentional AI use actually looks like. How to identify which decisions need more space. What each leader can do differently starting the next day.
    Nobody leaves inspired and unchanged. They leave with one concrete commitment and the language to talk about this with their teams.
  • The compassion advantage
    Strengthening leadership judgement and decision quality as pace accelerates.
    This keynote is designed for organisations operating under sustained urgency, where leadership decisions carry real human and commercial consequence. Drawing on behavioural science and original research behind The Compassion Advantage, Penny helps leaders understand how pace shapes judgement and what can be done, practically and immediately, to stabilise decision quality under pressure.
    Leaders leave with clearer judgement, stronger decision discipline, and practical ways to slow the right decisions while sustaining performance as pace and pressure increase.
  • Leading in an AI-shaped world
    Why faster systems demand stronger human judgement
    Designed for organisations investing in AI, automation, and digital transformation who are seeing leadership complexity increase alongside speed.
    Organisations strengthen the human judgement capabilities AI cannot replace, enabling leaders to hold accountability, ethics, and consequence as decision speed accelerates.
  • When busy becomes a leadership risk
    Moving from constant urgency to better decisions Designed for organisations experiencing overload, decision fatigue, and reactive leadership patterns.
    Leaders learn how to interrupt urgency-driven habits and reshape decision conditions so clarity, trust, and follow-through improve without adding more work.
  • Decision quality under pressure
    Leading when everything feels urgent
    Designed for leaders navigating high-pressure environments where decisions stack quickly, and tolerance for error remains low.
    Leaders gain shared language and practical techniques to reduce reactivity, widen decision space, and make sound choices when time, attention, and tolerance are tight.

Testimonials for Penny Locaso