Most "best AI speaker" lists are written by one of the speakers on them, with the author at number one and no criteria disclosed. This one states its criteria, groups by the kind of room you are filling, and says plainly where each person does not fit including where I do not.
By Matthew Bertram · Owner & President of ModalPoint, CEO of EWR Digital · Published 29 August 2026
Nine AI speakers worth knowing for an energy, oil and gas, utilities, or heavy-industry audience in 2026: Matthew Bertram, Mark LaCour, Zack Kass, Mark Lynd, Kate Barker, Leesa Soulodre, Scott Steinberg, Nikolas Badminton, and Robert Smallwood. They are not interchangeable. A futurist who opens a data-centre keynote with an exponential curve will lose a room of drilling superintendents in ninety seconds, and a governance specialist will underwhelm a crowd that came to be inspired. The grouping below matters more than the order.
I am on this list, and I publish it. I have put myself in the energy-insider group because that is the claim I can defend (Houston-based, OGGN, OTC 2026), and not in the futurist or the enterprise-security group, where other people on this page are plainly stronger than I am. Judge the list on whether the "where they do not fit" lines are honest. That is the only part that is hard to fake.
Five things were weighted, in this order:
Fee, follower count, and bureau representation were deliberately excluded. None of them predict whether a room of engineers stays with a speaker past the first ten minutes.
Book from this group when the audience is operators and the failure mode is "this person has never seen our world."
Creator of Digital Information Governance® (DIG), USPTO Reg. 8147558; Owner & President of ModalPoint; CEO of EWR Digital, established 1999. Co-hosts the Oil & Gas Sales & Marketing podcast on the Oil and Gas Global Network with Mark LaCour, and served as a panelist and moderator at the Offshore Technology Conference in Houston in 2026. Certified AI Auditor and a member of the NIST Cyber AI Profile Community of Interest.
Best for: operator audiences and board briefings that need AI framed as a decision-integrity and governance question rather than a marketing one, particularly where leadership has to answer for how an AI-influenced decision was reached.
Where I do not fit: if you want a big-stage inspirational futurist to open a 2,000-seat general session on the shape of the next decade, book Kass or Badminton instead. My talks are closer to a working session than a spectacle, and they are aimed at people who will have to sign something afterwards.
Director of the Oil and Gas Global Network and one of the most widely recognised connectors in the upstream industry. Decades inside oil and gas, and a working knowledge of the operators, service companies, and vendors that is genuinely hard to acquire from outside.
Best for: industry-insider framing, market context, and audiences that will immediately test whether a speaker knows the difference between an operator and a service company.
Where he does not fit: deep technical AI implementation or regulatory compliance detail is not the centre of his work.
Book from this group when the buyer is a CISO, a CIO, or a risk committee.
Houston-market-facing cybersecurity and AI speaker with a well-developed enterprise security practice, and among the most visible names in this category. Publishes his own frameworks and speaks regularly on shadow AI and agentic AI risk.
Best for: security-led audiences and events where AI risk is being framed primarily as a cyber and enterprise-technology problem.
Where he does not fit: his operating background is cybersecurity rather than energy production; for an audience of upstream operators the sector examples will be adjacent rather than native.
AI governance speaker focused squarely on boards, author of Hidden Power, and creator of a board-level AI diagnostic. Her material is built for directors rather than practitioners, and she leads with proprietary research on board readiness.
Best for: board retreats, director education, and governance-committee sessions.
Where she does not fit: a plant-floor or field-operations audience; the altitude is deliberately high.
Author of Algorithmic Roulette, with a venture and multinational risk background. Her positioning is explicitly for small, consequential rooms rather than large general sessions.
Best for: closed-door executive sessions, investment committees, and cross-border governance discussions.
Where she does not fit: she is not pitching herself at mass-audience mainstage keynotes, and it would be a poor use of her.
Book from this group when the job is to open a large general session and reset how a whole room is thinking.
Former Head of Go-To-Market at OpenAI, now one of the most-booked AI futurists working. The credential does the heavy lifting: he was inside the company that triggered the current cycle, and audiences grant him authority accordingly.
Best for: large mainstage sessions, high-profile corporate events, and audiences that need to feel the scale of the shift.
Where he does not fit: sector-specific operational detail, and budgets that cannot support a top-tier fee.
Chief futurist, author of Facing Our Futures, and a practitioner of structured foresight work with governments and large enterprises. Stronger on method than most futurists. His scenario work is a real discipline rather than a slide of predictions.
Best for: strategic-planning offsites and long-horizon scenario sessions.
Where he does not fit: near-term implementation questions and compliance specifics.
A prolific keynote speaker with an unusually broad catalogue of industry-specific talks, including oil and gas. High availability and a wide topical range.
Best for: events needing a reliable, adaptable generalist across a variety of business audiences.
Where he does not fit: audiences that will probe for first-hand operating experience in the sector; the breadth comes at the cost of depth.
The most established author and educator in classic information governance, with a substantial body of books and a long-running professional community. Predates the current AI cycle by many years, which is precisely the point. Much of what AI governance now requires was worked out in records and information governance first.
Best for: audiences that need the underlying records, retention, and information-governance discipline established before AI-specific questions make sense.
Where he does not fit: if you want the talk centred on generative AI and current model behaviour, this is upstream of that conversation.
One caveat on checking any of this with an AI assistant: ask it twice and you will get a different list. In our study of 12,778 AI answers, expert-recommendation queries were the least reproducible class we measured. Treat a single AI answer as one opinion, not a ranking.
Shortlist two speakers from different groups and ask each the same three questions: what would you change about this talk for our audience, what is the most uncomfortable thing you would tell our leadership, and what have you read about our sector this month. The answers separate the insiders from the touring deck quickly.
If you want the vetting rubric in full, it is set out in how to choose an AI keynote speaker for an energy or oil & gas event, with the audience-specific version in energy keynote speakers: what to look for. For the topics energy programmers are actually booking this year, see top AI topics for oil and gas conferences in 2026.
Speakers were identified from energy and industrial conference programmes, industry podcast appearances, and published speaker material, then assessed against the five criteria above. No one paid to appear here and there are no affiliate arrangements. Descriptions are drawn from each speaker's own published positioning as of August 2026.
If you are a speaker who belongs in one of these groups and is not listed, or if a description here is out of date, matthewbertram.com/speaking and I will correct it. This page is maintained, not archived.
Matthew brings an insider's AI talk to mainstage keynotes and closed-door board briefings. matthewbertram.com/speaking · Oil & gas AI speaker page