Ani Attamian is an AI and business transformation keynote speaker, business adviser and Founder and Chief Solution Designer of LEMA Collective, known for helping organisations identify the structural problems that can prevent transformation from delivering lasting results. With more than 22 years of enterprise experience, including 11 years at Google, Ani brings extensive expertise across artificial intelligence, data, customer behaviour, digital innovation and commercial strategy. Her career has placed her at the centre of major technological shifts, giving her first-hand insight into how organisations adopt new technology, where transformation programmes go wrong and what leaders can do to create stronger foundations for sustainable growth.
Ani built her expertise through senior roles spanning technology, marketing, product development and client strategy. Early positions included Global Product and Client Manager for iSEBA at Aegis Media, followed by client services roles at iProspect and iCrossing. She later joined Google in San Francisco, beginning an 11-year career with Google in which she progressed through the retail and technology business and managed some of the company’s largest EMEA clients. Her achievements included securing a pan-EMEA Pathfinder Partnership with Dyson, leading a major collaboration with Jamie Oliver and working alongside agencies including Dentsu, Havas, IPG and Publicis. Ani later became Head of Publishing Product Partnerships for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, where she helped lead the EMEA launch of Google’s auto-narrated audiobooks, using machine learning and text-to-speech technology to expand opportunities within audio publishing.
In 2024, Ani founded LEMA Collective, bringing together specialists in business strategy, data architecture, software development, digital marketing and AI to address complex organisational challenges. Through this work, she developed her Data-to-Decision Sequence, a methodology designed to expose underlying problems, prioritise what needs addressing and ensure organisations build solutions in the right order. Ani’s approach has also been shaped by profound personal experience. Following the death of her mother, a psychotherapist who was killed by a patient, Ani spent years addressing the symptoms of her own trauma without confronting its underlying cause, eventually experiencing a serious health warning. The experience influenced her belief that lasting change requires leaders to identify root causes rather than simply treating visible symptoms. Alongside her commercial work, Ani is a Board Adviser to the ARI Literature Foundation, where she supports its work championing educational access.
As a keynote speaker, Ani challenges leaders to consider whether their organisations have the foundations required to make AI, data and business transformation deliver meaningful commercial results. She has spoken at World Travel Market, the GCVA Conference and The Tourism Society, served as a mentor at SXSW London and delivered a guest lecture at King’s College London. Her keynotes are particularly relevant to organisations investing significantly in AI while facing fragmented data, unclear accountability, disconnected teams or ineffective transformation programmes. Combining senior Google experience with current advisory work, Ani makes complex business and technology challenges accessible, showing audiences how to identify what needs fixing first, make stronger decisions and create the foundations for transformation that lasts. Ani holds degrees from Northeastern University and Boston University.
Ani Attamian's official speaking topics are listed below:
Human Systems Break Before the Technology Does
A leadership keynote on employee engagement, culture and customer experience: how leaders find the problem their organisation is avoiding, before it costs them too much to fix. Delivered by keynote speaker Ani Attamian, founder of LEMA Collective.
What is this keynote about?
Your teams are busy and the dashboards are green, but the needle is not moving. Most leaders respond by pushing harder on engagement, on culture, on customer experience, and the line lifts for a quarter, then settles back where it was. The effort is real. It is aimed at the wrong layer. What looks like productivity is often avoidance: the boxes get ticked, the programmes run, the pilots ship, and the thing that is actually broken never gets touched. Ani calls it the checkbox trap.
Who should book this keynote?
Chief People Officers and Heads of People, Chief Learning Officers and Heads of L&D, and CMOs and Heads of Brand who own engagement, culture or customer experience, alongside Heads of Events building a leadership theme. Built for conferences and leadership offsites on engagement, culture, customer experience and change.
What will leaders leave able to do?
- Spot the avoidance in themselves and their organisation: the activity that feels like progress but returns nothing.
- Run the silent-goals test with their leadership team and see how far the people at the top have drifted from a shared plan.
- Redesign in the right order, experience first, behaviour second, outcome third, instead of funding another engagement push that fades by the next quarter.
- Walk out with a ranked plan and one owner per problem, so the decisions hold after the offsite ends.
The team leaves with a fault-line map and the silent-goals test, and can re-score a quarter later to measure the shift.
You’re Building the Wrong Thing
Something broke and the team reacted. The reaction became a routine, the routine became the plan, and now most of the budget goes to keeping things from falling over. Nobody decided this. It crept in one quarter at a time, and the debt is compounding while everyone stays busy. 88% of business transformations fail to reach their original ambitions, and the strategy or intention is rarely the reason.
This talk opens the second door of the Sequence: Rank. Ten problems competing for the same budget become one ranked plan, with a name beside every problem and a reason behind every call. Exposure finds the problems. Rank is what stops a team drowning in them, because without it every fire looks equally urgent and the loudest one gets funded.
Leave able to
- Tell building apart from fixing on their own roadmap, before next quarter's budget locks the loop in for another year.
- Rank every live problem with an Outcome Filter: what it changes for the people inside the business, and what it changes for the customer they serve, B2B or B2C. Fund the problems that move both. Park the ones that move neither.
- Hold the line on diagnosis before spend, so money closes the real gap instead of renaming it.
- Leave their next leadership session with one named owner per problem, so the decisions hold after the room clears.
Your AI Is Standing on Broken Data
Every board wants the AI win, but few have seen the bill underneath it. Poor data quality costs the average enterprise $12.9 million a year, and it arrives disguised as stalled pilots, duplicated spend, and decisions made on numbers nobody trusts. 63% of organisations do not have the data practices to support the AI they are already funding.
This talk opens the third door of the Sequence: Build. Build comes last for a reason. You sequence the foundations before you fund the features, because building on data you cannot trust just moves the money to the bench. This is the unglamorous layer everything else stands on: data architecture, enterprise AI design, AEO/GEO, and the order of operations that decides whether AI investment returns anything. Foundations before features.
Leave able to
- Spot the $12.9M data-quality bill before the board approves the next AI line item.
- Test whether their data practices can actually carry their AI ambitions, using the questions the 63% never asked.
- Price AI discoverability as a revenue line, not an afterthought: a 5% shift in AI-driven discovery is worth tens of millions to a large consumer or publishing business.
- Sequence the build by root cause, with the right specialist on each problem and none of the budget sitting idle.
Official Feedback from In-Person & Virtual Events
"Ani has the rare ability to take complex issues and translate them for the masses, without dumbing down the detail. The perfect intersection of tech, consumer and publisher knowledge." - Nathan, Chief Strategy Officer, Beat Technology
"She took us on a journey through the customer's eyes, and challenged our attendees to reflect on their own programmes." - Hannah, Managing Director, Gift Card & Voucher Association
"Ani’s strategic insights and tactical awareness have been invaluable. She adroitly combines deep industry knowledge with business acumen plus an easy-going nature which means she is a dream to work with." - Madhav, Strategic Advisor, Former Google News, BBC & Associated Press
"Comprehensive analysis, practical guidance and relevant examples. Both accessible and transformative." - Tracey, Chair, ANTOR – Association of National Tourist Offices
"Genuinely insightful, audience-focused content, tailored perfectly to our objectives. A speaker who truly delivers." - Brooke, Conference Manager, World Travel Market
"Generous with her knowledge, highly engaging with students, and a huge contribution to the learning experience." - Paul, Digital Humanities, King’s College London
"She grounds abstract AI concepts in real publishing scenarios, and argues with precision." - Silke, Event Programmer, Digital Publishing Report, AI@Media
"Ani is a true partner. No matter how off-the-wall, complex, or unprecedented the solution you need, she's the one to bring it to. In an era of both AI anxiety and AI possibility, Ani can assure skeptics and dream with the dreamers. Thoughtful, resourceful, creative, and optimistic, she's a joy to collaborate with and a great person to have in your corner." - Meredith, Brand Strategist & Podcast Producer, Ethical AI in Publishing Summit
- 2026 - Selected as a Founder Mentor at SXSW London
- 2026 - Delivered a guest lecture on AI and algorithms at King’s College London
- 2026 - Delivered the ‘Tech and the Trust Gap’ keynote at the GCVA Conference
- 2026 - Delivered a keynote for The Tourism Society on travel consumer connectivity
- 2025 - Delivered a keynote at World Travel Market London
- 2025 - Delivered a masterclass at the International Congress of Arabic and Creative Industries
- 2025 - Spoke at the AI@Media Conference on the future of publishing content and AI
- 2025 - Spoke at Bologna Audio Forum on AI’s role in audio
- 2024 - Founded LEMA Collective as Founder & Chief Solution Designer
- 2024 - Completed an 11-year career at Google
- 2018 - Appointed Head of Publishing Product Partnerships for EMEA at Google
- 2014 - Appointed Senior Digital Industry Lead, Global Retail & Technology at Google
- 2012 - Joined Google as Digital Industry Lead, Global Technology
- 2010 - Appointed Account Director, Client Services at iCrossing
- 2008 - Appointed Client Services Manager at iProspect
- 2006 - Appointed Global Product & Client Manager for iSEBA at Aegis Media
How to hire Ani Attamian
Contact the Champions Speakers Agency to provisionally enquire about hiring Ani Attamian for your next event, today. To get in touch, simply call an official booking agent on 0207 1010 553 or email us at [email protected] for more information.
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