Azeem Azhar

Azeem Azhar is a strategist, analyst, product entrepreneur, influencer, and writer with a passion for all things technological. Azhar runs a very popular newsletter on the societal implications of technology called Exponential View, which has garnered more than 200,000 subscribers, including investors, academics, and journalists around the world. Formerly, Azhar was also the Vice President at the global media company Schibsted Media Group. He is an award-winning entrepreneur, backed by VC, with a successful exit and an investor in many tech startups, especially in the AI sector. He has held corporate strategy roles at Reuters and the BBC. Azhar has spoken on TV and radio (BBC, Sky, CNN, amongst others), FT Columnist, and lectured or spoken at LBS, Harvard, TechCrunch, WHU Founders Conference, Medialaan, Deutsche Telekom, and dozens of other places.

Azhar has a chart-topping podcast titled "Exceptional View" that has featured guests including Yuval Noah Harai, Reid Hoffman, and Tony Blair. He has also written two books: "The Exceptional Age: How Accelerating Technology is Transforming Business, Politics and Society" and "Exceptional Order and Chaos in an Age of Accelerating Technology." Both books, like his platform Exceptional View, provide in-depth tech analysis and apply them to societal themes.

The early part of Azhar’s career took him to journalism, where he held corporate roles at Reuters and the BBC and served as an editor at The Guardian and The Economist, where he was their first-ever internet correspondent. He founded PeerIndex in 2010, where they applied machine learning to large-scale social media graphs to make predictions about web users. Brandwatch acquired PeerIndex in 2014. In 2017, Azeem was accepted onto the editorial board of the Harvard Business Review and held that position until 2023. He is a member of the World Economic Forum's Global Futures Council, a senior advisor at PwC, and a contributor to publications including the Financial Times, Prospect, and the MIT Technology Review.