Conversation Design Institute

As Global Head of Sales at CDI, I lead the charge in expanding our reach and impact across the world. My role focuses on aligning innovative sales strategies with our mission to empower businesses at every stage of their conversational AI journey—whether they’re just starting out or scaling to new heights.

With a dual focus on training and consulting, I work to drive growth across CDI’s core offerings, including hands-on workshops, comprehensive audits, and strategic consulting. My goal is to ensure businesses are equipped with the knowledge, tools, and support they need to implement impactful, future-ready conversational AI solutions.

In this role, I’m passionate about building strong partnerships, guiding teams toward success, and contributing to CDI’s evolution as a global leader in conversational AI. Let’s connect and explore how we can shape the future of conversational AI together!

Global Head of Sales

Companies around the world are looking for conversation designers, a rare breed of people that helps them advance communication between people and AI. That's where we help!

Conversation Design Institute teaches a human-centric workflow that has proven itself to organisations around the world. We work closely with tech partners, agencies and other key players in the industry. With this support, Conversation Design Institute is well on its way to becoming the number one platform in conversation design.

Become a certified professional, join one of our online courses, or work with our experts.

Business Development Specialist

Scaled Sales 

Good business coaches are there to help you see the blind spots and serve as your compass to make sure you are heading in the right direction. A business coach serves as an important objective third party to regularly check in to make sure that you are on the most direct path to your ideal destination. Oftentimes, the biggest hurdle to success is that you don't know what you don't know. You can't Google your way out of a problem that you aren't sure how to articulate—or worse, how to anticipate.

One pro for hiring a business coach for yourself is that it allows you to get constructive criticism from someone that doesn’t necessarily know you. 

A business coach is more like a person you're accountable to. No matter what level of success you have attained, there is a tendency to stay in your own lane and not observe habits and patterns that have been successful for others. A strong business coach can help increase awareness of methods and keys to success that have worked for other people and may be analogous to your own situation. 

One of the best investments you can make is in yourself. If you find yourself struggling in your professional career, or desire to increase your sales or improve your business relationship, then a business coach is an invaluable asset. One of the major advantages of having a coach or mentor is that they help you navigate through challenges and meet personal goals with their insights.


Steve Jobs once said, "We hire smart people so they can tell us what to do." Where, if not coaching, could this apply to more? 

One of the biggest benefits of hiring a business coach is that they will help you stay on the right track. Building a business is tricky, especially if you're a startup. It's also very easy to get distracted by all the opportunities that come your way, but you can't possibly do it all. The key is setting the goals, developing the action plan on how to reach these goals and executing to make them happen.

Business Consultant

Yell 

Senior Sales Manager

Fingo - AMi

Digital Strategy Director

As a Business Development Specialist at Conversation Design Institute (CDI), I help organizations around the world create human-centric AI Assistants, such as chatbots and voice assistants. 

At CDI, I work closely with tech partners, agencies, and other key players in the industry to offer high-quality e-learning programs and live sessions for teams and individuals. I have trained hundreds of professionals in strategy, design, and development for AI Assistants, using our proven workflow and best practices.

My goal is to empower more people to design, deploy, and manage valuable conversational experiences.

Benjamin Taylor

RMIT University

Director of FORWARD - The Centre for Future Skills and Workforce Transformation, building an innovative learning ecosystem at scale, creating new collaborative applied research and inventing next-generation skills solutions that will catalyse workforce development in the future-oriented industries crucial to Victoria's economic renewal.

Director

I’ve been appointed a Regenerative Futures Fellow at RMIT University, as part of my role leading FORWARD. Regenerative Futures moves beyond sustainability—seeking to restore, renew and revitalise our social, economic and environmental systems. It’s about integrating the needs of nature and society while creating technologies, processes and practices with a genuinely positive impact.
I'll be supporting the development of the Regenerative Futures Initiative on behalf of the College of Vocational Education, connecting applied learning with regenerative thinking across disciplines and industries.

Regenerative Futures Fellow

Professors Without Borders

Professors Without Borders (Prowibo) is a UK-based charity that runs short-course higher education programmes mainly in developing countries expand access to higher education worldwide.

Member Board of Trustees

CDI Foundation

The Conversation Design Institute Foundation is a non-profit organization that represents, promotes and develops the conversational AI community. It does this by promoting design patterns and best practices for creating human-centric and inclusive AI assistants and by doing research, education and industry development.

Board President and Chair

Contributing to the adoption of human-centric design standards for AI Assistants as part of the CDI Foundation board.

Advisory Board Member

Kimekai Schools Academy

The Kimekai Schools Academy is a curriculum-aligned programme of martial arts-based coaching and development for schools in Australia.

Academic Director

QV Systems

I am strategic advisor for this UK-based software company, helping them to bring their QV Accelerate proposition, a lending, leasing and financing platform, to the APAC market. This involves strategy development, generating market insights and product visibility for specific customer segments.

Overseas Strategic Advisor

I am Global Education Strategist for the Conversation Design Institute, responsible for global strategy development for education products. We have created The School for Conversation Design, the world’s first curriculum-aligned programme of learning about conversational AI for K12 students. A joint venture with the Conversation Design Institute, the school will teach students about the theory and practice of conversation design and give them the knowledge and skills that will help them continue their learning, or even build future careers, in the emerging conversational AI industry. The school will launch in Australia in 2024 followed by a global rollout later in the year.

Global Education Strategist

THEORICA

THEORICA is a global community to exploit emerging technologies, deliver strategic design, inform future regulation and enhance skills for the future of finance.

CEO and Founding Partner

Beijing Normal University

I am visiting Professor and Dean for International Projects for the International
Institute for Big Data in Finance, as part of the Business School at Beijing Normal University, China.

Dean for International Projects

I am visiting professor at Beijing Normal University and co-chaired 9 International conferences on Identification, Information and Knowledge in the Internet of Things (IIKI) in peer-reviewed international conference events.

Visiting Professor

MANIFESTO GROUP LIMITED

Manifesto is a cooperative of researchers, designers, art directors, writers and specialists in social media, web technology and learning who work together across timezones to deliver whatever a project demands, whenever it's needed.

Medicine Unboxed

For a decade, we have curated a series of annual events that bring medical professionals together with artists, writers, philosophers and performers. In Medicine Unboxed: VOICES, we are creating a series of conversations that explore life, mortality, social justice, science and care as viewed through medicine and the arts.

Creative Director, Executive Producer Medicine Unboxed: VOICES

I'm the inaugural director of RMIT FORWARD, a Victorian government-funded ecosystem that explores the workforces and skills of the future, where I work with a global network of almost 60 Senior Industry Fellows to deliver strategy, technology and education projects to the public and private sector clients. 

Previously, I founded and led HaileyburyX, the award-winning global learning innovation environment at Haileybury School in Melbourne, Australia; I was co-founder and executive director of The Leasing Foundation, working across two hemispheres with a board of 16 C-suite directors and 170 industry  fellows; served as visiting Professor of Financial Innovation at Falmouth University, advising on the development of the Business School, and where I designed, implemented, led and taught on the innovative industry-linked part-time MA in Business Finance Innovation. I was also CTO of Serco eBusiness, and founder and editor-in-chief of the peer-reviewed research journal Personal and Ubiquitous Computing for over two decades. 

At the start of my career, I founded the world’s first research centre in mobile and personal communications, led government missions to Japan and India, published industry vertical journals, raised over $15M in public and private funding, and trained researchers at postgraduate, doctoral and postdoctoral levels. I have designed and chaired over 30 international commercial and research conferences, including three Appliance Design events with Hewlett-Packard, 13 International IIKI conferences in Beijing, the CDI Foundation Beyond Boundaries AI event in Europe, and published over 170 peer-reviewed scientific articles, books and popular articles.

I hold a number of global senior advisory and board roles including Strategic Advisor for QV Systems, a UK-based software company; Senior Adviser for AI in Higher Education for the Conversation Design Institute in the Netherlands, where I am also co-founder of The School for Conversation Design, the world’s first curriculum-aligned programme of conversational AI education for K12 students, and Board Chair and President of the CDI Foundation. I am Principal Adviser for Education and AI Transformation for global cybersecurity education company TNK.  

I serve as creative director of Medicine Unboxed, an Arts Council funded project in the arts and medicine where I designed ten international sell-out events with internationally known artists, scientists, philosophers, writers and performers, and serve as deputy chair and trustee for Professors Without Borders/Professeurs Sans Frontières A.S.B.L.

taplio

The Battle

Benjamin Taylor

Peter Thomas

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