I speak at conferences, universities and professional organisations about how teaching, research and scholarly practice are changing, and what AI has to do with it. Most of that work is grounded in health professions education, where I’ve spent my career, though the questions travel further than that. My talks aim to help audiences make sense of this moment: what AI actually means for how we teach, learn and practise.
Watch a recent talk
This is a talk I gave at the ADAPT conference in late 2025. In it I argued that generative AI is widening access to expertise, and in doing so threatens the privileged role of universities as gatekeepers of professional knowledge. As AI becomes more capable of applying knowledge to solve problems and communicate complex ideas, it starts to function as an expert mentor — “expertise on demand” that makes learning personalised, contextualised, and cheap, independent of formal degree programmes.
I take the common criticisms seriously — bias, inaccuracy — but argue that AI is improving on these fronts, already has advantages over humans across a growing range of specialised tasks, and is becoming embedded across every kind of software and platform, providing intelligence wherever it’s needed.
Where universities have historically controlled access to the expertise that many careers require, AI democratises it: anyone can learn from a personalised disciplinary expert, teacher, or mentor. New approaches will emerge around AI-assistance, project-based learning, and authentic assessment, and universities will lose their monopoly on accredited learning as cheaper alternatives appear.
The response, I suggest, is to raise our expectations for what education can be now that learners can partner with capable AI. Rather than using it to write better essays, learners can build businesses, community projects, marketing campaigns, and products. Formal professional education may soon look very different in a world where expertise is abundantly available to everyone.
Upcoming talks
AI in school-based occupational therapy practice
Date to be confirmed · AI in OT Summit, OT Schoolhouse — Online
An invited session for school-based occupational therapists on AI in clinical practice and practice management, tailored to educational settings. Topics include clinical judgement and professional responsibility when using AI in schools, documentation and workflow during IEP seasons, and ethical considerations in educational environments.
Context sovereignty: Building human-AI coalitions in physiotherapy
24 September 2026 · Association of Trauma and Orthopaedic Chartered Physiotherapists conference — London
An invited presentation for the ATOCP session at the BOA Annual Congress 2026 at Olympia, London. As AI systems become more capable at diagnosis, empathy, and clinical reasoning, practitioners who control their context more effectively will also control the meaning of their AI interactions. The therapeutic relationship will transform into negotiation between patient-AI and clinician-AI coalitions, requiring ongoing work to bring context to practice.
Global Summit on AI in Physiotherapy
10–11 October 2026 · World Physiotherapy and the Taiwan Physical Therapy Association — Taipei
An invitation-only summit convened for World Physiotherapy’s 75th anniversary, bringing together a small group of experts across clinical practice, education, and research and innovation. I lead the Education pillar, which has been meeting online since July. The group’s work feeds into the Taipei Declaration on the responsible use of AI in physiotherapy, which will inform World Physiotherapy’s global guidance.
Masterclass: AI in private physiotherapy practice
24 October 2026 · Canadian Physiotherapy Association, Private Practice Education Committee — Online
A four-hour practical masterclass for private practice clinicians across physiotherapy, occupational therapy, osteopathy, and allied health on applying AI in clinical and business contexts. Covers practical activities and real workflows rather than theory, including AI for clinical communication, documentation, professional content creation, and business tasks, alongside guidance on evaluating different AI platforms and ethical and safe AI use. 12:30–4:30pm EDT.
Partner or foe? The rising role of AI in nursing and allied health practice
29–31 October 2026 · Sidra Medicine Paediatric Neurosciences Conference, Doha — presented remotely
An invited talk for Sidra Medicine on the role of AI in nursing and allied health practice: where AI genuinely supports clinical work, where it falls short, and how practitioners can engage with it as a professional tool rather than treating it as either saviour or threat.
Past presentations
AI-powered practice growth
9 September 2026 · International Private Physiotherapy Association Business Meeting — Hamburg
A full-day workshop for IPPTA delegates on AI in private practice, run in person as four linked sessions: how AI works and how to prompt it well, building content for a real client group, getting that content found and trusted, and drafting a three-year business plan. Delegates worked on their own practice throughout, keeping everything in a single practice file, so they left having built a persona, a piece of content in five formats, a communication plan, and a draft growth plan rather than only having heard about them.
Better than, or better with?
5 September 2026 · South African Society of Physiotherapy Symposium — Online
A panel presentation on ethics and the use of AI in physiotherapy. It argues against framing AI in healthcare as a capability contest to be won or lost, and asks a more uncomfortable question: whether keeping the human in the loop is sometimes less about patient benefit than about our own discomfort with the alternative. It closes with concrete ways to bring AI into the clinical conversation rather than manage it as a threat.
New therapeutic alliances
4 September 2026 · South African Society of Physiotherapy Symposium — Online
The first of two invited panel presentations at the SASP Symposium 2026, on AI and the future of physiotherapy education. Patients are already arriving at consultations having consulted AI first, and are increasingly able to get genuinely useful health guidance from it. The talk asks what that means for practice, research and education — not whether AI will replace clinical judgement, but how the profession prepares students and practitioners for patients who bring an AI-shaped health literacy into the room.
AI and the learning alignment problem
11 June 2026 · Global Research Nursing Education Network — Online
An invited keynote webinar for GRNEN’s international network of nursing educators, primarily from the US, Canada, and Africa. AI has exposed a longstanding misalignment between what educational systems measure and what they are meant to develop — optimising for measurable proxies like grades and artefacts rather than authentic developmental outcomes like judgement and professional becoming. The session explored what that misalignment means for nursing education design, and how shifting from control to cultivation can ensure AI becomes a partner in professional growth rather than a shortcut around it.
The use of AI within health and social care
11 June 2026 · National Back Exchange Moving and Handling Awareness Day — Online
An open webinar for the National Back Exchange’s annual awareness day, accessible to members and non-members. Designed for a broad audience — nurses, occupational therapists, physiotherapists, and moving and handling specialists — the session offered a practical and accessible introduction to AI in health and social care: what generative AI is, how it works, and what it can and cannot do in practice, alongside current and emerging applications, implications for professional roles, and how practitioners can engage with AI as a professional tool.
What is the work? Rethinking learning and assessment in an age of AI
9 June 2026 · Best Practices in Education Rounds — Online
Invited presentation for the monthly BPER series, co-hosted by the University of Toronto Centre for Faculty Development, The Wilson Centre, and the Centre for Interprofessional Education — an open session drawing 100+ attendees from across health professions education. The talk asked what generative AI does to the relationship between assessment and the learning it is meant to evidence, and what educators should treat as the real work now that AI can produce fluent artefacts.
AI in clinical practice and making sense of this moment
13 May 2026 · Musculoskeletal Association of Chartered Physiotherapists — Online
An invited lecture for MACP members merging practical AI integration with a philosophical sense-making framework: how AI tools support clinical decision-making, documentation, and patient communication, and what this moment actually means for the health professions — for expertise, judgement, and human contribution when machines can generate fluent text and pass clinical assessments.
Beyond the dataset — AI and the future of research
24 April 2026 · Physiotherapy Research Society Annual Conference — Hatfield
Keynote for the 44th PRS Annual Conference, themed “Beyond the Dataset: Engaging People, Powering Change.” The thesis is the artefact; the researcher is the product. AI can now execute much of the work through which doctoral researchers have traditionally formed their expertise. The talk explores the different relationships researchers build with AI, asks which struggles are formative and which are merely tedious, and argues that as AI becomes more capable, specifically human contributions — research taste, evaluative judgement, and the capacity to set direction — become more valuable, not less.
What is the work?
15 April 2026 · RCN Education Conference — Exeter
Keynote for the Royal College of Nursing’s Education conference, hosted with the University of Exeter. Generative AI has severed the inferential chain between an assessment artefact and the learning it was meant to evidence. The talk works from the current AI landscape through the premises of nursing formation to why discursive responses — policies, declarations, honour codes — cannot address what is a structural problem.
AI and problem-based learning
11 March 2026 · EU Blended Intensive Programme, Thomas More Hogeschool — Belgium
A session for students on an EU-funded Blended Intensive Programme. AI separates the production of artefacts from the learning they were meant to evidence, which is a particular problem for group inquiry. The talk covers what problem-based learning already does differently, how AI changes group work, and three practical shifts students can make in how they use it.
Introduction to AI with Copilot
5 March 2026 · CPC staff development session, University of Lincoln — Lincoln
An internal staff development workshop introducing AI through Microsoft Copilot: what AI is and isn’t, safe working practices, structured prompting, and hands-on practice, with everyone leaving with one specific task to try that week.
Beyond document management
10 February 2026 · Advance HE AI Symposium — Online
Professional curricula are comprehensively documented and almost entirely unqueryable. The talk introduces a three-layer architecture that treats a graph database as the source of truth for curriculum structure, with vector search for content retrieval and the Model Context Protocol for stakeholder interfaces.
Context sovereignty: building human-AI coalitions in physiotherapy
21 November 2025 · Chartered Society of Physiotherapy Founders’ Lecture — Newport, Wales
The CSP’s annual Founders’ Lecture. It opens with the disorienting evidence that AI now matches or exceeds clinicians on diagnosis, empathy, and ethical reasoning, then rejects the defensive sanctuary strategies that provokes. Because language models are stateless, static, and contextless, the professional context a practitioner brings is a structural necessity rather than a comfort — and controlling it is the distinctive human contribution.
AI and the business of practice
18 September 2025 · Lincolnshire Local Medical Committee Getting It Done Conference — Grantham
An invited talk on generative AI as a virtual business consultant for healthcare practices, working through six use cases: online presence, targeting patient groups, patient experience, strategic service development, ethical implementation, and change management.
An unstoppable force meets an immovable object
24 November 2023 · ADAPT International Conference — Online
Generative AI democratises access to professional knowledge and acts as a low-cost personalised expert mentor. That unstoppable force meets the immovable object of universities and their traditional role as gatekeepers of expertise. The talk asks what formal professional education is for when expertise is abundantly available, and argues for raising expectations rather than defending the gate.
With great power comes great ambiguity
6 October 2023 · ENPHE Conference — Prague
Keynote for the European Network for Physiotherapy in Higher Education. The dominant discourse traps us in a false choice between AI as saviour and AI as threat, when what the moment demands is a tolerance for ambiguity. Borrowing the antihero archetype, it reframes AI as an ambiguous partner in new human-machine coalitions, and treats wise adoption as an iterative process rather than a destination.
Every talk since 2023, including the ones without their own page, is listed year by year on the presentations archive.
Topics I speak about
AI in health professions education
How should we teach when students have access to AI? What does AI mean for assessment, clinical reasoning development, and professional identity formation? What should students learn as AI increasingly develops sophisticated expertise within and across professional domains? These questions don’t have settled answers yet, but educators can’t wait for consensus before working on the issues. I explore practical approaches for curriculum design, administrative support, assessment redesign, and pedagogical decision-making that help educators navigate this transition with confidence rather than anxiety. Talks in this area are grounded in health professions education theory and draw on concrete examples from medicine, nursing, physiotherapy, and other allied health professions.
AI for researchers
Using AI as a thinking partner for literature review, analysis, writing, and research design — not as a shortcut, but as a cognitive collaborator that amplifies scholarly judgement. This includes practical guidance on integrating AI into systematic review workflows, qualitative analysis, grant writing, and manuscript development, alongside honest discussion of the risks: hallucination, bias, and the erosion of deep reading habits. Aimed at researchers at any career stage who want to work more effectively without compromising intellectual rigour.
AI in clinical practice
How do AI tools support clinical decision-making, documentation, and patient communication? How should practitioners evaluate and integrate these tools while maintaining professional responsibility and patient safety? How are patients starting to bring AI agents into their own health contexts, and how does this influence the therapist-patient relationship? I look at the evidence around AI-assisted diagnosis and decision support, how to critically appraise AI tools before adopting them, and what practitioners need to understand about the limitations of systems trained on data that may not reflect their patient population or clinical context.
AI and practice management
Practical applications of AI in healthcare administration, workflow optimisation, and service delivery, with an honest assessment of what works, what doesn’t, and what the implementation challenges look like on the ground. This includes scheduling, documentation, administrative support, patient communication, and service planning, with attention to the organisational change management that determines whether AI adoption actually improves practice or just adds complexity.
Making sense of this moment
More theoretical and philosophical talks exploring what AI means for the health professions. How do we understand expertise, judgement, and human contribution when machines can generate fluent text and pass medical exams? What happens to the value of experience and tacit knowledge when AI can simulate competence? These talks help audiences develop frameworks for thinking about AI at wider scales rather than just reacting to it, grounding the conversation in the history and values of the professions rather than in technology hype.
Get in touch
If you’re interested in having me speak at your event, run a workshop, or facilitate a session, I’d be happy to discuss how I might contribute.
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