Paul Zikopoulos

In a rapidly transforming world, data has become the new competitive advantage. And according to future trends expert Paul Zikopoulos, “Every day we walk by solvable problems, leaving opportunities untapped.” The VP of Technology Unit Skills and Enablement at IBM, Zikopoulos discusses how working these “solvable problems” creates disruption in the marketplace and how golden signals of opportunity can be found within mountains of noise. 

Paul is changing the way audiences are looking at their businesses in terms of potential sales, obstacles, potential for growth, and how they utilize technology, such as cloud applications, to support their organizations. He shares future trends that are starting to happen in real-time and have multiple applications. Paul easily discusses the next generation of technological change from the power of machine learning and voice-to-text, to the opportunities in reading digital body language and joining the Internet of Things trillion sensor economy, and more. 

Incredibly energetic and easy to follow, Paul amazes audiences with the amount of information available to change the conversation about your industry. By sharing his insights on where big data comes from and the idea that “If you aren’t paying for it, you are being sold,” Paul breaks apart the roles of data collection and decision making for executives seeking the opportunities for disrupting their industry and leap-frogging the competition.  

At IBM, Paul leads from the front, owning accountability and strategic direction in a “tech years are like dog years” world for the entire IBM Technology Unit’s (all IBM software and hardware) sales, tech sales, and partner ecosystem learning journeys, and upskilling programs.  

Paul is an award-winning tech thought leader and writer who has shared his expertise on AI and big data on the popular TV show, 60 Minutes, as well as in publications such as Technopedia and Analytics Week. He has published 21 books, including Cloud Without Compromise: Hybrid Cloud for the Enterprise and three ‘For Dummies’ titles, and more than 360 articles. Among the leading voices in tech and big data, Paul has been named in dozens of global “Experts to Follow” & “Influencers” lists, including Analytics Insight’s “Top 100 Global AI & Big Data Influencers” and SAP’s “50 Big Data Twitter Influencers.”