keynotes & workshops on the human side of AI

AI was never your edge.
Your people are.

A keynote and a two-day workshop on the one thing your competitors can’t download: human capacity that gets more valuable as the machines get cheaper.

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Tim Miles giving a keynote speech on company culture.
thanks to the companies, conventions, and colleges who’ve trusted us, including:
the new keynote

HQ > AI: Who Rises When The Machines Come

For owners, executives, and thoughtful leaders who’d rather understand this moment than react to it.

When execution gets cheap, something else gets expensive. In the age of AI, the uniquely human layer of work becomes the only thing left worth paying for. This keynote is a guided tour of what changes, what doesn’t, and who rises when the machines come.

Three Keynote takeaways:

  • A working framework. For telling machine-replaceable work apart from human-essential work, plus the language to defend that line to a skeptic.
  • The three pillars. Belonging, Betterment, Breakthrough, and how to put each one to work without a six-figure consulting budget.
  • One small habit. Something a leader can install Monday morning that begins to close the Shadow, the measurable gap between what leadership believes and what the frontline lives.

Somewhere in your company, right now, a manager is being told to “save money with AI.”

The person telling her read a headline. The person who wrote the headline read a press release. The press release was written to move a stock price. And so far, across industries, the results have been bad. Not mixed. Bad.

Every leader has been handed a tool that can write the memo, run the analysis, draft the contract, and synthesize the research faster and cheaper than the humans who used to. The instinct is to celebrate the productivity or mourn the displacement. Both miss the real story.

When execution gets cheap, something else gets expensive. Judgment. Trust. Originality. The capacity to see a colleague as a person and not a role. Belonging. Meaning. Moral weight. In the age of AI, the uniquely human layer of work becomes the only thing left worth paying for.

Who Rises When The Machines Come is a guided tour of that shift. What AI actually changes. What it doesn’t. And what becomes more valuable, in the companies that intend to still have humans in them a decade from now.

For owners, executives, and thoughtful leaders who’d rather understand this moment than react to it.

Bring this keynote to your event.

How wonderful—thanks for sharing! So many participants approached me to share how much they enjoyed your presentation and had several takeaways/actions to follow up on…

Domenica Neal
McDonald’s Corp.

meet tim

Hello in there…

As a nerdy, small town, painfully shy 17-year-old freshman farmboy at the University of Illinois, he got a D-minus in public speaking. A few decades later, companies, conventions, colleges, and conferences consider Tim Miles one of the most engaging public speakers on the planet.

Today, in addition to being founder and head custodian of EmpraxisHQ, Tim’s a bestselling author, amateur squirrel chaser, and owns a successful marketing and management consulting company for family businesses and nonprofit organizations. He’s helped hundreds of companies and thousands of people communicate more powerfully to engage customers and employees alike.

He’s a chronically curious father of two and a guy who—to paraphrase screenwriter David Freeman—took everything that made him weird as a kid and got people to pay him money for it as an adult.

Download Tim’s speaker one-sheet (PDF)
Tim Miles, Keynote Speaker
before it had a name

The first time I said any of this out loud.

In 2012 I gave a TEDx talk about my son, and about the people whose whole job was to help him do the things he couldn’t do yet. Therapists. Doctors. Nurses. Teachers. I had spent a career being called a communications expert, and I sat in rooms watching these people communicate in ways I never could.

There was no framework then. No score. No method. Just a question I couldn’t put down. If this works in the hardest rooms in the world, why don’t we use it where we work?

Everything EmpraxisHQ does now started with that question.

That’s the best keynote speech I’ve ever seen.

Casey Melancon
Easter Seals

what it’s like to work with me

My job is to make the person booking the event a superhero.

If your name is on the event, you are carrying the risk. The wrong speaker can flatten a room you spent a year building. Here is what it’s like to hand that room to me.

Every talk is built for your room, not pulled off a shelf. Before the date, my team and I interview your people, survey your members, and learn the specific pressures they are under. Your audience hears their own challenges named from the stage.

One fee, however many times you need me. I carry days of tested material. On a multi-day program I will often speak two, three, even four times on connected themes, and the fee does not move.

I will not turn your stage into a sales pitch. You’ve sat through that talk. So have I. It will not happen on your watch.

Your attendees leave with everything and lose nothing by being present. Every audience gets a private resource page: the slides, the research behind the talk, the sources, the exercises, the further reading. They can be fully in the room and still take it all home.

I will help you fill it. We run a full production studio. Custom promo videos, podcast spots, posts, whatever helps you sell seats. Promoting your event is part of the job, not an upsell.

I know I am a reflection of you. Before, during, and after, your guests are watching how the speaker treats them. I will meet every one of them with warmth, because I was raised by humble Midwestern farm people who would have it no other way, and because they have earned it.

Download Tim’s speaker one-sheet (PDF)
before you book

How the fee works

Keynote fees are available on request and flex for associations and mission-driven events. They also flex, quite frankly, for absurdly fun locations. If you’re an association weighing a fit for your members, start there. We’ll find the right arrangement.

two-day workshop for a single leadership team

HQ > AI: The Last Competitive Advantage

A two-day, lab-format workshop for the leadership team of one organization. No mixed cohorts. No strangers in the room. The people who shape your culture, working on your culture, with us.

We teach the HQ Method end to end, diagnose, build, grow, deploy, across four five-hour working sessions. Your team leaves with your four beacons drafted, your first Tool selected and customized, and a Year One rollout plan you can start executing the following Monday.

The room stays small on purpose. Small enough that every voice matters and all the work still gets done.

Talk To Us About Dates
Tim standing at the front of a room teaching a workshop at Wizard Academy.
three ways to run your workshop
We come to you

Two days at your offices, your conference center, or a cool offsite venue in your city. Best for teams who can’t travel easily, or who want the work happening where it will actually live.

Nashvegas

Two days in or near Nashville, hosted by us. Best for teams who do their sharpest thinking away from the office. Lunches and a team dinner included. We handle logistics so your people can focus on the work.

Wizard Academy

Two days on the Wizard Academy campus near Austin, a non-traditional business school built for exactly this kind of work. The setting itself tells your team this is different. Best for organizations that want a formative event their people reference for years.


Prefer to come on your own? The HQ Method also runs as a public Wizard Academy course in Austin, twelve seats, November 11-12, 2026.
Learn more at The Academy’s site…

Tim Miles is nothing short of amazing. He’s entertaining and transformational. I cannot recommend him to you enough. Your team will be better because Tim spoke to them. They’ll be better communicators and quite possibly, better human beings.

Brian Sanders
Corner House Agency

Ai is available to everyone. you are not.

Bring HQ > AI to your stage, or bring your leadership team in for two days.

Tell me about your room. Who’s in it, what they’re up against, and what you need them believing when they walk out. That conversation costs nothing, and it’s where every good event starts.

Speaking Form