Jared Cohen

Jared Cohen is the President of Jigsaw and an adviser to Alphabet's Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt. He is also an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Previously he served as a close adviser to Secretaries of State Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton. Cohen is the New York Times bestselling author of four books. He has been named to the 'TIME 100' list, Foreign Policy's 'Top 100 Global Thinkers,' and Vanity Fair's 'Next Establishment.'

According to Jared Cohen, “You can’t understand the future of anything without applying both a physical and digital lens to it. There’s no such thing as cyberspace. There’s no such thing as physical space. It’s one world and companies and individuals are going to have to interact on both fronts.” As the president of the world’s preeminent technology incubator, Jigsaw (previously, Google Ideas, a top-ranked global think tank), chief advisor to Alphabet Executive Chairman (former Google CEO) Eric Schmidt, a best-selling author, advisor to two Secretaries of State and traveler to 93 countries, Cohen looks through both lenses with an acuity of vision and foresight that few on the planet possess. Whether he’s sharing his risky encounters with Somali pirates or his celebrated meeting with the Pope to talk ethics in tech innovation — Cohen’s dual-lens, wide-angle view informs the current state of the world, your industry or organization. It could even illuminate its future.

Identified simply as “Jared Cohen, Idea Man” when he was named as one of Time’s “100 Most Influential People,” Cohen has spent his remarkable career at the nexus of business, technology and global politics. After Stanford and Oxford, he joined the policy planning staff at the U.S. Department of State, advising both Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton. In 2010, he founded the highly influential think tank Google Ideas. Now a tech incubator called Jigsaw, its expanded mission as a group within Alphabet, Inc. is “to use technology to tackle the toughest geopolitical challenges, from countering violent extremism to thwarting online censorship to mitigating the threats associated with digital attacks.”

Jared Cohen’s keynotes are entertaining, inspiring and the perfect combination of weighty substance and sparkling storytelling. Speaking off of photos from his extensive travels, Cohen frames his core ideas to make them relevant to a broad range of audiences, industries and areas of interest — leaving all with an incomparable perspective on our rapidly changing world.