Jennifer Ewbank delivering her TEDx talk "Winning the Secret War for Your Mind."

FROM INTELLIGENCE TO IMPACT

Former CIA Deputy Director Jennifer Ewbank is one of the few keynote speakers who combines firsthand intelligence operations experience with expertise in AI governance, cognitive security, and digital risk. Jennifer speaks to executive, board, association, industry, and government audiences on the convergence of national security and emerging technology.

Jennifer delivers dynamic keynotes shaped by lived experience at the intersection of intelligence, technology, and leadership. Drawing on decades spent operating in the shadow world of global intelligence and leading digital transformation at the CIA, her talks confront a defining challenge of our time: how leaders make sound decisions, preserve trust, and retain human agency in an era of AI-driven influence and invisible conflict.

Her speeches move beyond headlines and hype. They illuminate how emerging technologies are already reshaping power, perception, and truth, and what leaders must do to respond with clarity, resilience, and purpose.

Download speaker one-sheet.

SIGNATURE TOPICS

Winning the Secret War for Your Mind

Algorithms and adversaries are already shaping how your people think, decide, and act. Jennifer draws on decades of CIA experience, from espionage operations to digital transformation, to equip leaders with Mind Sovereignty™, a practical framework for recognizing manipulation, protecting judgment, and building cognitive resilience across their organization. Read more here.

After the Unthinkable: What the CIA’s Worst Day Taught Me About Leading Through Yours

Every leader will face a crisis when the operating model breaks and the people counting on them need answers they don’t yet have. Jennifer draws on the CIA’s post-9/11 transformation, the most consequential institutional transformation in modern intelligence history, to deliver five pressure-tested principles for leading when certainty is gone.

The Spy in the Machine

Techniques once reserved for sophisticated intelligence services now run at machine speed: deepfake video calls, AI-generated personas, and automated targeting of your most vulnerable employees. As a former CIA executive who built defenses against these tools, Jennifer takes leaders inside the adversary’s playbook: how your people are being targeted, what makes them susceptible, and the steps that reduce exposure before the next attempt succeeds.

Operation Doppelgänger: Defending Trust in the Age of Synthetic Everything

Deepfake-enabled fraud will cost U.S. businesses over $40 billion annually by 2027, and only 14% of organizations feel ready to respond. A former CIA executive who led digital transformation, Jennifer now serves on boards for companies leading the way in deepfake detection and dark web data analytics. In this keynote, she takes leaders inside the adversary’s playbook and delivers a practical framework for defending the perimeter that matters most: trust.

The Technology Cold War: What Your Business Needs to Know Now

Many analysts can explain the US-China technology competition. Jennifer watched it unfold from inside the CIA’s digital mission, where the stakes weren’t market share; they were national security. She translates that experience to help illuminate how China’s technology strategy works at the infrastructure level, where risks are concentrating in your supply chain, and what decisions your board and leadership need to consider now.

Flexible Formats

All themes are available as 20-40 minute keynote addresses or 60-90 minute workshop sessions.

WHY ORGANIZATIONS CHOOSE JENNIFER

For executive and board audiences: Your team is making decisions about AI, data governance, and digital risk faster than most boardrooms can track the threats. Jennifer spent 4.5 years as the CIA's senior leader for digital transformation and AI policy. She provides frameworks your leadership can apply immediately to evaluate AI risk, algorithmic influence, and adversarial manipulation. See Jennifer's current board roles.

For conference and association programmers: You need a speaker who anchors your program, not fills a slot. Her talks are narrative-driven, grounded in operational experience, and consistently receive enthusiastic feedback from audiences ranging from 200-person executive retreats to 3,000-person industry conferences.

For government and defense audiences: Jennifer spent three decades in intelligence operations, including leading the CIA's pivot to compete with China in the technology domain. When she talks about adversarial AI, cognitive operations, or the technology cold war, she draws on firsthand experience.

For technology and cybersecurity audiences: Most cybersecurity speakers focus on technical defense. Jennifer approaches the problem from the adversary's perspective, using intelligence tradecraft to show how nation-states exploit the gap between technology capability and human judgment. She applies classic espionage motivation frameworks to AI-enabled manipulation, giving technical audiences a strategic layer that complements the tactical knowledge they already have.

Jennifer Ewbank on stage at Black Hat MEA.

YOUR AUDIENCE WILL LEAVE WITH:

Jennifer Ewbank giving a speech before the Women's Foreign Policy Group.

A clearer understanding of how AI influence, deepfakes, and information manipulation are already shaping decisions, trust, and risk in organizations, markets, and democratic societies.

A practical framework for protecting human judgment and cognitive agency in environments driven by algorithms, speed, and uncertainty, which is essential for strategic leadership.

Insight into how intelligence professionals evaluate emerging threats, and how adopting this mindset can bolster leadership, strategy, and resilience.

A more grounded perspective on cyber and digital risk, reframed as leadership challenges rather than merely technical problems.

Confidence to lead through ambiguity, informed by real lessons from moments when the stakes were high, the information was incomplete, and the consequences were significant.

SAMPLE SPEECHES AND PANELS

Coming Soon: TEDxUF

Jennifer delivered her TEDx talk, "Winning the Secret War for Your Mind," in April 2026. The talk draws on three decades in intelligence to examine how foreign adversaries and the commercial attention economy are together eroding cognitive autonomy, and what individuals can do about it. The video will be available here when it is released on YouTube.

coming soon

Outrunning the (Cyber) Storm

In this fireside chat with Rich Baich, former CIA Chief Information Security Officer, Jennifer draws on her experience leading digital transformation at CIA to explore what it takes to build cyber resilience when failure is not an option. Together they examine how adversarial thinking, offense-informed defense, and government-private sector partnership can help organizations navigate a threat landscape now moving at machine speed. (Black Hat Middle East and Africa)

watch here

Outpacing the Adversary

Jennifer Ewbank on stage at OODACon 2025

This speech explores how speed, purpose, and partnership shape real advantage in an era defined by rapid technological change. Drawing on lessons from intelligence and national security, it shows why time-to-field now matters as much as the technology itself, and how mission-focused urgency can guide innovation. It offers a clear call for collaboration across government, industry, and allies to stay ahead of determined adversaries.

(OODAcon, October 2025)

Watch Here

Is This Our Digital Sputnik Moment?

In this keynote at GEOINT on America’s “Digital Sputnik moment,” Jennifer explains how cyber, AI, GEOINT, and open-source data are transforming both the threat landscape and the business of intelligence. She offers a candid inside look at CIA’s digital transformation—from cloud and data strategy to AI-enabled analysis and industry partnerships—while emphasizing that machines are there to augment, not replace, human judgment. Jennifer challenges audiences with a simple but urgent choice for national security and industry alike: innovate with purpose and speed, or risk being outpaced by determined adversaries who are already weaponizing the digital revolution.