Sophie Hackford is a futurist, lecturer and business builder who has successfully synthesized science and interconnected technologies from around the world.

From satellites swarms to artificial intelligence demonstrating intuition, we are becoming entangled with machines and will be surprised by the consequences.

Sophie’s interventions are designed to create the enthusiasm and conditions for a constructive dialogue around emerging technologies that are often received with fear and inertia by the business world. She wants to help the public to ask the real questions about the future and try to provoke a positive debate among decision makers.

As part of her research, Hackford advises executive teams and boards of large companies on understanding new technologies defining the new economy.

Sophie Hackford is also founding CEO of a data and AI company, 1715 Labs, which she is currently working on out of the Astrophysics department at Oxford University.

Previously, Sophie Hackford launched and managed the WIRED Magazine consulting firm, bringing together the architectural contractors of the future in a meeting room. She spent 7 years at Singularity University in Silicon Valley, a group based in a NASA research park whose mission is to understand and exploit exponential technologies. Before California, she worked for Oxford University and raised more than $120 million in investment for a research group on the future called the “Oxford Martin School”. She regularly speaks for corporate audiences on the subject of the explosive future of technologies.