Based in New Orleans, Professor Berthelsen speaks at conferences, association meetings, and leadership retreats in the city and beyond. Most audiences want to leave knowing how they can use AI in their own work, and every talk is built around the people in the room: their field, their tools, and their level of experience. He works with organizers beforehand to make sure the content is relevant and pitched at the right level.
His talks draw on his Tulane University courses and AI consulting work. Beyond industry-tailored talks, his topics fall into two categories: Applied AI (how it works and how to use it well) and AI and Society (the impact of AI on industries, the workforce, and the world). Most topics are available as a talk, a keynote, or a hands-on workshop.
Your Industry, Your Audience
The most requested talk for association conferences, annual meetings, and leadership retreats, built around the audience in the room.
The Impact of AI on Your Industry
AI is already changing how work gets done in every sector, but the specifics matter. This talk examines how AI is affecting a particular industry, what the real opportunities and risks are, what’s already changing, and what organizations should be thinking about now. The content is fully customized based on the audience. Industries explored include:
- Healthcare and Research: The AI-mediated patient journey, the administrative burden on practices and care teams, and how researchers can use AI carefully
- Hospitality and Food Service: Guest and staff communication, scheduling and planning, and how AI changes what guests expect
- Senior Care and Aging Services: Documentation and staffing pressure, communicating with families, and where AI can and cannot support care teams
- Manufacturing and Trade Associations: Quality and supply-chain analysis, training a workforce, and how an association can help its members adopt AI
- Legal: AI as a research tool that compresses weeks of work into minutes, and what that means for billable-hour models and training new lawyers
- Education: Personalized AI tutors, rethinking assessment, and the shift from grader to mentor
- Creative and Design: The shift from creating to curating, brand consistency, and hyper-personalized marketing
- Small Business and Startups: How a solo founder can now build software, generate marketing, and analyze contracts without hiring a team
Other industries, including real estate, financial services, and nonprofits, can be developed based on the audience’s specific context.
Applied AI: How It Works and How to Work With It
Practical, skills-oriented talks for professional development events, corporate teams, faculty groups, and anyone who wants to get meaningfully better at using AI. All applied topics can be delivered as a presentation or as a hands-on workshop where participants work with AI tools in real time.
How AI Works and How to Work With It
The essential foundation. Most people use AI without understanding what it’s actually doing, and that limits how well they can use it. This talk explains how AI models work (in plain language), demonstrates what current tools can actually do, and shares the practices that separate casual users from power users, including how to give AI the right context, how to push back when it tells you what you want to hear instead of what you need to hear, and how to personalize your tools so they understand your work.
From Chatting to Doing
AI can still chat, and it has gotten much better at it. This year it also learned to do. This talk shows what changed: memory and context engineering that make AI tools genuinely personal, agents that work on a schedule, on a trigger, or proactively, and connections to email, calendars, task managers, and browsers that let AI act on your behalf. Drawing on Professor Berthelsen’s own setup, from daily briefings to a conference trip planned end to end, it gives audiences a practical way to find where to start, at work and at home.
Transformation Over Generation
AI can generate content from scratch, but for most professionals the bigger value lies in transformation, turning meetings into action items, messy data into dashboards, long documents into briefs, and chaotic information into structured plans. This talk reframes how organizations should think about AI and provides a practical workflow that anchors AI in your existing knowledge and assets, dramatically improving both speed and accuracy.
Vibe Coding and the Democratization of Software
The barrier to building software has dropped to near zero. We’ve entered the era of “vibe coding,” where plain English is the new programming language. Drawing on live experiments building functional apps in minutes, this talk explores how non-technical professionals can now build their own tools, automations, and solutions, and what this means for the future of technical skills and the workforce.
AI and Society: The Impact of AI Now and in the Future
Bigger-picture talks on how AI is changing industries, the workforce, and society. Suited for conferences, leadership retreats, civic organizations, academic events, and executive briefings.
AI: What’s New and What’s Next
AI is moving fast, and it’s hard to separate signal from noise. This talk cuts through the headlines to explain what actually matters in recent developments: new models, new capabilities, agentic AI, autonomous browsers, and what’s likely coming next. Useful for leadership teams and professionals who need to stay current without tracking every announcement themselves.
AI Strategy for Leaders
A focused briefing for executives and leadership teams who need to understand where AI fits into their organization’s strategy. This isn’t a technology demo. It’s a strategic conversation about which AI investments make sense, which don’t, and how to think about implementation without overspending or falling behind. Typically 60–90 minutes with discussion.
How AI Will Change Our Jobs
The narrative that AI will take our jobs is half-right: it will take the parts of our jobs we hate. This talk shows how AI automates the administrative work that consumes professionals’ time, freeing them to return to the core of their craft. It also addresses the flip side: the looming apprenticeship gap, where AI eliminates the entry-level tasks we’ve traditionally used to train the next generation of experts, and what organizations can do about it.
AI and the Environment: Greener Than You Think
AI’s relationship with the environment is more nuanced than most coverage suggests. One less hamburger per week saves more resources than a decade of AI usage. This talk debunks common myths about AI’s energy and water consumption and explores how AI is being used to address environmental challenges, from optimizing energy grids to precision agriculture that eliminates chemical herbicides.
Format and Logistics
Talks are typically 45–90 minutes and can include Q&A, live demonstrations, or a hands-on component depending on the setting. Applied AI topics can be extended into half-day or full-day workshops. Professor Berthelsen speaks in person in the New Orleans area and virtually anywhere. Outside of the regular semester he is available for in-person events further afield from New Orleans.
To discuss a speaking engagement, reach out through the contact form or connect on LinkedIn.
Organizers can download a one-page speaker bio with short and long bios and an introduction for the emcee, and high-resolution headshots in portrait and landscape.
