Media Kit
Short Bio
Tom Gruber is a product designer and entrepreneur who uses AI technology to augment human intelligence, individually and collectively. He was cofounder, CTO, and head of design for the team that created Siri, the first intelligent assistant for everyone. At Apple for over eight years, Tom led the Advanced Development Group that designed and prototyped new capabilities for products that bring intelligence to the interface.
Applying ideas from artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and design, Tom’s work explores how connecting people and machines can foster collaboration, learning, knowledge sharing, and getting things done. In addition to Siri, he has co-founded companies for helping travelers learn from the collective experience of others, enabling large communities of professionals to contribute to and learn from a collective body of knowledge, and creating music that adapts to the listener. Tom currently advises companies and organizations that use AI to have a positive impact on humanity, including leaders in collaboration, semantic search, natural language processing, mental health care, telehealth care, and assistive neurotechnology.
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Tom Gruber is an AI product developer, inventor, designer, humanist, and ocean advocate. He was cofounder, CTO, and head of design for the team that created Siri, the first intelligent assistant for everyone. In 2010 Siri was purchased by Apple and remains central to the user experience of all Apple products. Today, Siri is used more than a billion times a day in dozens of languages around the world.
Tom’s professional career spans four decades, from graduate school during the classical AI period, through research at Stanford during the dawn of the Web, through founding a series of companies, 8 years at Apple, to his present incarnation as speaker, writer, and impact advisor. Throughout his career Tom has pursued the question of how technology can help us live better lives. Applying ideas from artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and design, Tom’s work explores how connecting people and machines can foster collaboration, learning, knowledge sharing, and getting things done. Many of the innovations Tom created or influenced are taken for granted today, woven into the pattern of our digitally mediated lives.
As a speaker and writer, Tom advocates for what he calls Humanistic AI: Artificial Intelligence that augments and collaborates with humans, vs. competing with or replacing them. Leveraging his decades in AI development, Tom offers guiding principles and practical advice about how to make ethical choices when applying this powerful technology. In his main stage TED talk in 2017, Tom introduced the guiding philosophy of Humanistic AI. He shared his vision for a future where AI helps us achieve superhuman performance in perception, creativity and cognitive function.
A driving force in Tom’s work has been applications that augment human intelligence, individually and collectively. People need better ways to communicate, remember, learn from each other, and access the world’s knowledge. If you use Siri on your phone, learn from a threaded discussion on the Web, collaborate with colleagues in a virtual workspace, or use a computer to help you speak, it is likely that Tom helped invent it, influenced its development, or was designing an early version of it before it entered the mainstream.
As a serial entrepreneur, inventor, and designer of AI applications, Tom reached a career milestone with the sale of Siri to Apple in 2010. He stayed on to lead the Advanced Development Group, where he could explore dozens of new product ideas. After eight years at Apple, Tom “retired” to pursue Impact Advising, investing his time and expertise to maximize human impact.
Tom uses the guiding principles of Humanistic AI to curate his advisory portfolio. The companies and organizations he advises all use AI to augment humans for the benefit of society. From alternative gaming applications that optimize for self care and compassion to a wearable headset that allows you to speak with your brain, the products of these companies show how Humanistic AI applications can be instrumental in our ability to understand ourselves and our environment.
Tom is presently co-founder and CTO of LifeScore, which is creating a new way to experience music. Adaptive music is dynamically composed and produced as it plays, which allows it to adapt to contexts, personal needs, and the state of the listener.
For Tom, conservation photography is both a creative passion and an essential mission. He is privileged to travel around the world to dive in places where marine life still thrives. Through the medium of underwater photography and video, he hopes to create an empathy and connection with the natural world. As a technologist and entrepreneur, he’s working to ignite a change in global awareness, and a fundamental shift in the way we view our relationship with the ocean.
Above all, Tom is a humanist who believes in the potential of technology to support human collaboration and knowledge sharing and have a positive influence in the world. He’s dedicated his life as an innovator, artist and entrepreneur to advocating for the ethical use of technology that enhances our lives and protects the environment that sustains us.
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Sample Presentations
Live
How AI Can Enhance Our Memory, Work and Social Lives | Main Stage TED, Vancouver, BC | April 2017
How smart can our machines make us? In his talk at TED 2017, Tom introduces the idea of Humanistic AI that augments and collaborates with us instead of competing with or replacing us.
AI, Big Data, and Humanity in 2024: Our new relationship with AI | Keynote at the Amsterdam RAI Center | February 2024
A modern discussion of the latest AI, how it is created, how we might get the most from it, what to be careful of, and a glimpse into applications of the near future.
What Can AI Do for Humanity? | AI.X Conference, Seoul, South Korea | June 25, 2019
In this talk Tom shows how the misuse of AI by social media has led to unprecedented addiction and harm to society. He gives a technical analysis of how the technology is involved and how it might be deployed differently to avoid unintended consequences.
Colorful Lives: Photographic Stories From the Ocean | EG Conference, Carmel, CA | May 2015
In this lighthearted talk Tom is your guide to the colorful lives of underwater animals through the lens of art photography in an endeavor to create empathy and connection with the ocean.
Virtual
What AI and Big Data Can Do for Humanity | Virtual Keynote | TechfestNW Conference | December 4, 2020
Tom shares his insights into the power and potential of big data and AI, with examples of how things can go wrong — and the potential for doing things right.
Navigating the Startup Ecosystem | Virtual Keynote | December 2020
This talk describes the factors that contributed to the success of Siri the startup, and how those same strategies can be applied to successful innovative developments today.
Articles + Interviews
Booking
To book Tom as a speaker for your conference or event, reach out to the fine
folks at CAA and they’ll get back to you right away.
