DR CHRIS BRAUER — LONG BIO

Dr Chris Brauer is Chief AI Officer at FSP, where he leads enterprise AI strategy, responsible AI governance, and market positioning for one of the world's most trusted advisory and technology practices. He is also Director of Innovation at Goldsmiths, University of London, Chairman of Innovation at Edelman, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

Across twenty-eight years, Chris has built a genuinely rare combination of credentials: academic-grade research discipline paired with direct, accountable corporate leadership. He has spent as much time in PhD seminar rooms and peer-reviewed methodology as in boardrooms — and built his career refusing to choose between the two.

That combination has been tested at real scale. As Chairman of Innovation at Edelman and one of twenty-five Global Strategy Officers at the World Economic Forum, he has advised governments and boards on AI and energy-transition policy, co-authoring working papers that went on to influence EU policy. His research partnership with Microsoft has spanned successive UK CEOs — from Cindy Rose to Clare Barclay — producing some of the most cited AI-adoption research in the UK market, launched on stage alongside Microsoft's global CEO, Satya Nadella, and cited in Microsoft's own published research as the work of "independent researchers from Goldsmiths."

Chris co-founded Symmetry, an AI research and engineering venture built around a differentiated blend of strategic diagnostics and rapid delivery. Symmetry was acquired by FSP in 2025, and Chris moved into his current Chief AI Officer role — proof not just of AI thought leadership, but of building, operating, and successfully exiting a company others chose to acquire.

His current flagship research, "Agents of Change," developed with Microsoft, was the first UK study to address the specific opportunities and risks of agentic AI — built early enough in the technology's emergence that the methodology itself had to be invented alongside the findings. It is a pattern that has defined his career: reaching the frontier early enough to help shape how organisations respond, rather than reporting on what already happened.

Chris's research and advisory portfolio spans energy, logistics, luxury, aviation, cybersecurity, and technology — evidence of a mind that operates across sector boundaries rather than within one, and of real fluency in the complex, regulated, high-stakes environments where AI governance actually matters most. Responsible AI is not a slide in his deck; it is the throughline of his published research, from a UK-wide cybersecurity resilience model built with Microsoft to his current work on governance frameworks for increasingly autonomous systems.

His current thinking centres on what he calls AI's "adolescence": the idea that the technology is growing up at extraordinary speed, and that leadership's task is not to control it, but to responsibly parent what it becomes.

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