Post-Industrial Forum

Join our Community
for Visionary Leaders Building the Future

 

Post-Industrial Forum

Join our Community
for Visionary Leaders Building the Future

 

;

Post-Industrial Forum

Join our Community
for Visionary Leaders Building the Future

;

AI and Decentralization are Remaking the World.

Trillion Dollar Industries are Being Born Today.

Are you part of Building the Future?

AI and Decentralization are Remaking the World.

Trillion Dollar Industries
Are Being Born Today.

Are You Part of
Building the Future?

The industrial era brought unprecedented productivity, infrastructure, and material abundance. Its organizations were based on centralization and top-down control.

Now we are moving toward a post-industrial civilization, fueled by decentralization, Artificial Intelligence, and other exponential technologies.

Humanity stands before extraordinary possibilities:

  • AI fueling creativity and super-productivity
  • AI agents enabling autonomous organizations
  • Robots helping us care, build, and operate
  • Decentralized manufacturing everywhere
  • Automated and decentralized agriculture
  • Breakthroughs in health and longevity
  • Cheap and abundant energy is within reach
  • Customized lifelong education with AI
  • Autonomous transportation systems
  • Planet-wide hypersonic travel
  • Off-world expansion is already beginning

We will use technology to remake ourselves, adapt nature to our needs, and fulfill our full potential as a species.

The challenge? Outdated mental models, legacy systems, fear of change, regulatory friction, and political fragmentation are blocking progress.

To create our post-industrial future, we need Visionary Leaders able to build new kinds of organizations, using new frameworks and paradigms.

The pressure is on to change faster.

AI First

Startups are now beginning to deploy AI Agents instead of hiring staff. What is your ratio of AI agents to employees?

CEOs will be fired.

74% of CEOs now believe they will be fired by the board if they do not get results from AI transformation the end of 2026.
(Dataiku)

 

Flattening Organizations

20% of CEOs are planning to eliminate half of middle management positions by the end of 2026.
(Gartner)

Agents everywhere

57% of enterprises IT leaders report they have implemented AI agents in the last two years.
(Cloudera)

AI Strategists

89% of CEOs believe an AI can develop a strategic plan that is at least as good as some of their executive team members.
(Dataiku)

..very soon

97% of enterprises are expanding their use of AI Agents
(Cloudera)

..are 4X better

50% of CEOs expect  an AI could replace four of their executive team members for strategic planning purposes
(Dataiku).

1/4 of workflows

25% of enterprise workflows expected to be AI-powered by the end of 2025.
(IBM)

Visionary Leaders Take Action.

As builders

they they are founding new AI-first businesses and products, as startups or within large enterprises.

Top challenges include:

  • Defining a viable vision in an AI-saturated world
  • Leveraging AI in ops, R&D, and customer acquisition
  • Competing for top-tier technical and strategic talent
  • Developing effective  ecosystem partnerships​
  • Finding advisors who actually help
  • Fundraising in a crowded, noisy capital environment
  • Developing a brand that stands out

As transformers

they are remaking their organizations to lead the future. They include CEOs, CIOs, CHROs, CPOs, CSOs, Chief Transformation Officers, Chief Innovation Officers, and Chief AI Officers.

Top challenges include:

  • Scouting emerging technologies, markets, and ideas
  • Articulating a vision for an AI-transformed organization
  • Architecting and executing transformation strategies
  • Rearchitecting supply chains and legacy infrastructure
  • Competing for top-tier technical and strategic talent
  • Leading workforce and culture transformation
  • Driving profitable growth amid greater uncertain

As builders

they they are founding new AI-first businesses and products, as startups or within large enterprises.

Top challenges include:

  • Defining a viable vision in an AI-saturated world
  • Leveraging AI in ops, R&D,
    AND customer acquisition
  • Competing for top-tier technical
    and strategic talent
  • Developing effective  ecosystem partnerships​
  • Finding advisors who actually help
  • Fundraising in a crowded, noisy
    capital environment
  • Developing a brand that stands out

As transformers

they are remaking their organizations to lead the future. They include CEOs, CIOs, CHROs, CPOs, CSOs, Chief Transformation Officers, Chief Innovation Officers, and Chief AI Officers.

Top challenges include:

  • Scouting emerging technologies,
    markets, and ideas
  • Articulating a vision for an
    AI-transformed organization
  • Architecting and executing
    transformation strategies
  • Rearchitecting supply chains
    and legacy infrastructure
  • Competing for top-tier technical
    and strategic talent
  • Leading workforce and
    culture transformation
  • Driving profitable growth
    amid greater uncertain

Insights + Tools + Relationships + Inspiration Action

Introducing the
Post-Industrial Forum

Operated by  the Post-Industrial Institute, the Post-Industrial Forum is a membership community for Visionary Leaders building the Organizations of the Future.  It was launched in London in 2019 and Silicon Valley in early 2020.

The purpose of the Forum is to accelerate the development and progress of its members and help them build the future faster.  We provide individual executive memberships as well as organizational memberships.

Sessions that lead to action

Every session (on-person and online) is built for time-starved leaders seeking deeper insight, actionable ideas, and practical tools.

Relationships with impact

Members are selected for mandate, mindset, and momentum—not just job titles. Builders and Transformers learn from each other across boundaries—strategy, people, ops, product, and tech.

Speakers who
make a difference

We regularly invite senior leaders and industry experts to share what their organizations are doing and how new technologies are reshaping industries and enterprises.

Compounding knowledge

The Forum surfaces patterns across industries, firms, and functions. Over time we accumulate a body of shared knowledge that helps members see what’s emerging, what’s working, and where the frontier is moving.

Shared language and tools

Members gain access to frameworks for modeling and transforming industries and organizations.

Be a pioneer
Grow your influence

As a member of the Post-Industrial Forum, you’ll be part of a bigger effort to create new thinking,  tools and frameworks that other pioneers such as yourself will need.  You will have an opportunity co-author and publish your contributions.  You will also learn how to build alliances for change within your organization.

A Supportive Community

Post-Industrial Forum members are all on the same journey, building the organizations of the future. It can be very difficult, even on a good day, and being part of a supportive community can make all the difference. You are not alone.

Your Membership Includes:

Annual Summit

Members receive a 50% discount on tickets to our annual summit, which is held in Silicon Valley.

Our next annual summit will be held on November 5-6, 2025. This year the focus is on Autonomous Organizations.

Members have access to recordings of all the sessions.

Post-Industrial Academy

Members will have free access to an executive-level course on the history and future of organizations, which will debut in the fall of 2025.  For other courses, members will receive a discount.

Quarterly Executive Sessions

Every quarter we hold an evening event with multple speakers in Menlo Park. These events provide insights from senior business leaders and industry experts on topics essential to developing next-generation companies. There is also an opportunity for non-members to attend for a fee.

This year our topics have included AI Agents and Strategy, Organizational Intelligence, and the Global Agent Economy. We have had speakers from SRI, Hitachi, Salesforce, Cisco, NVIDIA, Wayfront, and Swisscom. Members get access to event recordings and may also access a live stream via Zoom.

Quarterly Workshops

Workshops focus on collaborative discussion and co-creation of insights and solutions for a hot topic. They are held in-person in Silicon Valley, but with remote participation also available. Currently workshops are held in the afternoon in Menlo Park on the same day as the evening events. The outcome of workshops are shared among members. 

Online Programming

Every month we hold online dicussions with invited industry experts, senior executives, founders, and investors.  The curremt focus is on the impact AI is having on leadership, both in terms of what organizations are transforming into, and in terms of HOW leaders work.

Working Groups

Working groups focus on topics of particular interest to members.  They meet once a month in person (with remote participation)  or online. Current working groups include:

  • Organizational Development
  • Leadership
  • AI Agents

All Working Groups have an online discussion forum for dialog between meetings.

Roundtables

All members are assigned to roundtables of maximum twelve peers. These roundtables meet online or in-person once a quarter and serve as a sounding board for challenges.

Event Archives

Members have access to event archives going back to January 2020.  Online and in-person events, including the annual Summit, are recorded and the recordings are made available

Membership tiers

Learn more about membership options

Participating Organizations

Over the last five years our speakers and attendees have included senior leaders from a “who is who” among leading organizations:

Invited Speakers

More than a hundred speakers have shared their thinking with our attendees, including the following:

Premier Partner: SRI

SRI (fmr. Stanford Research Institute)

SRI, which in 2023 also acquired PARC from Xerox, is one of the world’s preeminent research institutes. It was founded in 1946 as a spin-off from Stanford University.

SRI performs client-sponsored R&D for government agencies, commercial businesses, and private foundations. It also licenses its technologies, forms strategic partnerships, and creates spin-off companies.

SRI pioneered AI Agents in the late 1960s, helped create the Internet, invented micro-satellites, pioneered the computer mouse and the windows user interface, and developed the technology that led to Siri, an SRI spin-off that was acquired by Apple.

SRI hosts our events in Silicon Valley and also provides access to leading experts in a variety for exponential technologies.

Membership Tiers

$6500/Year

Organizational Membership

  • Three executive memberships
  • Additional seats can be added for $950/year
  • Exclusive Working Group for Organizational Development
  • Faciliated introductions to community members and speakers
$1450/Year

Executive Membership (Individual)

  • Quarterly Executive Sessions
  • Quarterly Members-Only Workshops
  • Annual Summit
  • Introduction course in Post-Industrial Academy
  • Discounted access to future courses
  • Online platform with discussion forum,
    video discussions, exclusive content
  • Event Archive (five years of deliberations)