Mo Gawdat

Bestselling Author at Former Chief Business Officer, Google X

Keynote

Mo Gawdat is the former Chief Business Officer for Google [X]; Chief AI Officer at Flight Story; international bestselling author of Solve for Happy, Scary Smart, That Little Voice in Your Head, Unstressable, and Alive; founder of the One Billion Happy movement; and co-founder of Emma.love.

Mo has an impressive combined career of 27 years, starting at IBM Egypt as a Systems Engineer before moving to a sales role in the government sector. Venturing into the UAE, Mo joined NCR Abu Dhabi to cover the non-finance sector. At Microsoft, he assumed various roles over a span of seven and a half years, eventually heading the Communications Sector across Emerging Markets worldwide.

Mo joined Google in 2007 to kick-start its business in Emerging Markets. He is fascinated by the role that technology plays in empowering people in emerging communities and has dedicated years of his career towards that passion. Over a period of 6 years, Mo started close to half of Google's operations worldwide.

In 2013, Mo moved to Google's infamous innovation arm, Google [X], as Chief Business Officer, where he led the business strategy, planning, sales, business development and partnerships.

Google [X] does not attempt to achieve incremental improvements in the way the world works, but instead, it tries to develop new technologies that will reinvent the way things are and deliver a radical, tenfold—10X—improvement. This leads to seemingly SciFi ideas such as: Project Loon, which aims to use high-altitude balloons to provide affordable internet access to the 5 billion people on every square inch of our planet; Project Makani, aiming to revolutionise wind energy generation using autonomous carbon fibre kites; as well as self-driving cars, Google Life Sciences, and many more. The business team under Mo's leadership designed innovative business models analogous to the disruptive technologies [X] creates and created deep partnerships and global deals that enabled [X] to thrive and build products fit for the real world.

Alongside his career, Mo remained a serial entrepreneur who has cofounded more than 20 businesses in fields such as health and fitness, food and beverage, and real estate. He has served as a board member in several technology, health and fitness, and consumer goods companies as well as several government technology and innovation boards across the globe. He mentors tens of start-ups at any point in time.

Through his 12 years of research on the topic of happiness, Mo and his son Ali created an algorithm and a repeatable, well-engineered model to reach a state of uninterrupted happiness, regardless of the circumstances of life. In 2014, this model was put to the ultimate test when Mo lost his son Ali to preventable medical error during a simple surgical procedure.

In his attempt to honour what Ali taught him and deal with his tragic loss, Mo wrote Solve for Happy: Engineer Your Path to Joy, which was published in 2017 and went on to become an international bestseller. The book's happiness equation and its dedication to Ali serve as the pillar for Mo's personal moonshot: a mission to deliver his happiness message to one billion people around the world (#onebillionhappy).

In 2020, Mo launched his successful podcast, Slo Mo: A Podcast with Mo Gawdat, in which he and some of his wisest friends explore the profound questions and obstacles we all face in life. It was frequently the #1 Mental Health podcast in the UK and several other countries around the world and remains popular to this day even after concluding production in late-2024.

In 2021, Mo published Scary Smart: The Future of Artificial Intelligence and How You Can Save Our World, a guide to navigating the future of ethics in light of the rise of machines and AI. It was named one of The Times and Sunday Times top business books of the year. The book received a major renewal of interest at the end of 2022 with the consumer release of ChatGPT and the start of the modern AI boom, validating many of Mo's predictions and cementing his position as one of the most respected AI experts in the world.

In 2022, Mo released That Little Voice in Your Head: Adjust the Code That Runs Your Brain, a user manual for using the human brain optimally to thrive and prevent suffering, which also went on to become an international bestseller.

In 2024, he published Unstressable: A Practical Guide to Stress-Free Living with co-author Alice Law, which shows how chronic stress is not an unavoidable part of modern life, but rather a predictable and preventable pandemic. The book was the #1 bestselling book on Amazon UK on launch.

In 2025, Mo began writing and publishing Alive: Conversations About Life When Technology Becomes Sentient in real-time in collaboration with his Substack community. The book delves into the far-reaching impact of artificial intelligence on human life and challenges our understanding of what it truly means to be alive.

His latest project is Emma.love, a group of advanced AIs designed to foster human connection and strengthen romantic relationships. Emma begins with a deep empathy and understanding of each individual, guiding them to better know themselves and prioritise their needs. With intelligence and compassion, she matches people with the most suitable partner for who they truly are—anywhere in the world. Once love begins, Emma continues to support relationships with reminders, scheduling, expert guidance, and even couples counselling. Emma.love is Mo's latest moonshot: an ambitious attempt to address one of the modern world's greatest challenges—finding and keeping genuine love—while at the same time teaching AI about what makes us most deeply human: the way we love.

Mo has received countless honours and has appeared on nearly every major podcast in the world, including The Diary of a CEO a record five times. Host Steven Bartlett credited Mo's 2023 episode on AI as the turning point of the podcast's success, noting that it was the most shared podcast episode overall in Europe that year.