Speakers Parag Khanna

Dr. Parag Khanna is a visionary strategic futurist and bestselling author. He is the founder and managing partner of FutureMap, a boutique advisory firm that marries rigorous data analysis, sophisticated scenarios, and cutting-edge mapping to generate foresight for confident decision-making. A world-renowned authority on globalization, Dr. Khanna was named one of Esquire's “75 Most Influential People of the 21st Century” and featured on WIRED's “Smart List”. His analyses are regularly featured in influential media sources such as CNN, Bloomberg, CNBC, BBC, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, TIME, The Economist, Financial Times, Fast Company, Harvard Business Review, Foreign Affairs, Quartz, and Foreign Policy.

Khanna is the leading forecaster of how our complex global system is rapidly evolving, making him highly sought after by the world’s most powerful corporations. He delivers data-rich visualizations that distill geopolitical, economic, and technological megatrends into a comprehensive picture of our rapidly changing world. Khanna's presentations are tailored and detailed, embodying his deep expertise and firsthand experiences in more than 150 countries. All of his engagements deliver strategically insightful and actionable value.

Khanna has provided his expertise and foresight to over thirty governments, including serving as an advisor to the U.S. National Intelligence Council and on the Singapore government's Committee on the Future Economy. He currently serves on the advisory boards of the UAE’s Ministry of Economy, Graticule Asset Management Asia (GAMA), Geoquant, and Datarama, and previously on the Innovation Advisory Board of DBS Bank.

Khanna’s newest book is MOVE: The Forces That Are Uprooting Us and Will Shape Humanity’s Destiny, a bold roadmap to harness the world’s talent pool and regenerate our societies and economies amidst today’s onslaught of disruptions. His book, The Future Is Asian: Commerce, Conflict, and Culture in the 21st Century (2019), earned high praise from Larry Summers, Jim Rogers, and many other luminaries. It was called “dazzling” by Kirkus Reviews and hailed as “authoritative… a standard reference,” by the Financial Times, which named the book to its Summer Books of 2019 list.

Khanna is also the author of a definitive trilogy of books on the future of world order beginning with the bestsellers The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order (2008) and How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance (2011) and concluding with Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization (2016). These books garnered accolades from many leading authorities, including Eric Schmidt, Chuck Hagel, Fareed Zakaria, Mark Mobius, Robert Kaplan, Kevin Kelly, Martin Sorrell, and Klaus Schwab. The New York Times Book Review hailed Khanna as “a foreign policy whiz kid.”

Khanna also authored two other books, Technocracy in America: Rise of the Info-State (2017) and Hybrid Reality: Thriving in the Emerging Human-Technology Civilization (2011) (co-authored with his wife Ayesha Khanna, CEO of ADDO AI). The former was strongly endorsed by notable intellectuals such as Tyler Cowen and Lawrence Lessig, and the latter was celebrated by Alvin Toffler, Peter Diamandis, Peter Schwartz, and others. His books have been translated into more than twenty languages and received feature coverage in leading publications in all major countries of the world.

Khanna was a featured speaker at TED in 2016 and TED Global in 2009, with his talks garnering more than three million views online.

Before founding FutureMap, Khanna was a Senior Research Fellow in the Centre on Asia and Globalisation at the National University of Singapore, as well as a senior fellow at New America and the Brookings Institution. In 2007, he deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan as a senior geopolitical advisor to U.S. Special Operations Forces. He also worked at the World Economic Forum in Geneva and the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

Dr. Khanna holds a Ph.D. from the London School of Economics, a Bachelor of Science in International Affairs, and a Master of Arts in Security Studies from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He speaks German, Hindi, French, Spanish and basic Arabic. He has traveled to nearly 150 countries and been honored as a Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum.