Penny Locaso
Behavioural Scientist, Provisional Psychologist & Speaker
Penny Locaso is one of Australia’s most influential female entrepreneurs, a behavioural scientist and women’s impact advocate. She empowers women to own their expertise, amplify their influence and create meaningful change. Penny is a sought-after speaker for organisations committed to inclusive leadership and impact.
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Penny studies what AI is doing to the brains and behaviour of the leaders running organisations. She works with companies where pace and urgency leave little room for error in leadership decisions.
As AI accelerates the speed and volume of work, the conditions that support sound judgement come under strain, placing trust and long-term consequences at risk. What organisations experience as a productivity gain is also reshaping how leaders think, decide, and relate.
The deeper risk shows up in rushed decisions, narrowed trade-offs, and leadership choices that carry more weight than systems are designed to hold. Most leaders adopted AI without fully realising what it was doing to their cognition, their behaviour, and the way their teams work together. By the time the cost surfaces, the pattern has been forming for months.
A Provisional Psychologist specialising in the Psychology of AI, Penny brings over two decades of commercial leadership experience together with evidence-led insight into how AI use is reshaping the human capability organisations depend on most: critical thinking and decision quality.
The human edge AI cannot replicate is what her work protects.
Her original qualitative research, published as The Compassion Advantage, sits inside this broader body of work, reframing compassion as leadership capability infrastructure and a scientifically proven edge that strengthens judgement, trust, and integrity as pace and responsibility increase.
Penny supports leaders who have unconsciously adopted AI and are now seeing consequences they did not intend in their own thinking, in their teams, and in the quality of the decisions being made. She shows leaders what AI is doing to their thinking and behaviour, then works with them on practical interventions that restore cognitive capacity, behavioural agency, and sound judgement under pressure.
Her focus stays on simple, usable practices leaders can apply immediately, helping them slow the right decisions while sustaining performance.
She has worked with organisations, government and universities, including Deloitte, Microsoft, SingularityU, NAB, Google, and Booking.com. Her work has been featured in the Harvard Business Review, the Australian Financial Review, and on the TEDx stage.
Penny is based in Australia and works with corporate and conference audiences seeking serious, evidence-backed insight and practical ways to strengthen the human capabilities AI is eroding and put leaders back in command of their own judgement.
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Flagship Keynote
The Intentional AI Advantage
The busy will adopt AI. The intentionally adaptable will use it to shape what’s next.
AI is not the risk. Unintentional AI is. Right now, leaders are buried. The pace of work has created a busyness that has moved beyond uncomfortable into structurally dangerous, where everything feels urgent and the ability to identify what actually matters breaks down. Leaders stop making deliberate choices and start reacting. AI lands on top of that crack and widens it. When leaders use AI reactively, the production of AI slop elevates: outputs look polished, move quickly, and feed straight into decisions without the scrutiny those decisions deserve. The downstream cost shows up in rework, eroded trust, and leadership choices that carry more consequence than the system was designed to hold.
Underneath all of it, something more fundamental is happening. The research is early, but the direction is clear. When leaders consistently offload their thinking to AI, cognitive capacity starts to erode, degrading problem-solving ability, memory and sound judgement. This is the brain rot risk. A measurable pattern in how human cognition responds to sustained cognitive offloading. Neuroscience is showing measurable atrophy in the regions handling critical thinking and memory, in as little as six months of daily AI use. Leaders who outsource their thinking are, over time, becoming less capable of the kind of judgement their roles demand. This keynote names what is happening, connects the threads, and gives leaders a practical way through.
This is a leadership keynote about what it means to think well, decide well, and lead with integrity in a world that is systematically eroding the conditions that make that possible.
Your leaders will be taken on a journey through the evidence connecting AI adoption, organisational pace, and decision quality, drawing on The Compassion Advantage research and the emerging science on AI cognitive offloading. We name the three risks directly: the busyness that kills prioritisation, the AI slop that corrupts decisions, and the brain rot that nobody is talking about yet. And then we get practical. What intentional AI use actually looks like. How to identify which decisions need more space. What each leader can do differently starting the next day.
Nobody leaves inspired and unchanged. They leave with one concrete commitment and the language to talk about this with their teams.
