Giles Crouch

Giles Crouch PhD-c, MSc., MM | Digital Anthropologist

We keep asking what technology will do to us. Giles Crouch asks the more interesting question: what will we do to it?

Giles is a digital anthropologist who studies the oldest human force on Earth, culture, and how it shapes, tames, and ultimately decides the fate of our newest technologies.

He works in private practice advising businesses, governments and non-profits, helping them navigate these interesting times. His central idea is deceptively simple: culture eats technology for breakfast. From the first stone tools to smartphones and artificial intelligence, humans don't bend to our machines so much as bend our machines to fit who we already are and who we want to become. It's a hopeful message, and a useful one, for anyone trying to make sense of a world changing faster than it feels comfortable.

Over the past decade, Giles has delivered more than 90 talks to audiences across business, government, and the non-profit sector, turning big, intimidating ideas about AI, culture, and the future into stories people actually remember. He's a lively, warm speaker with a gift for making the complex feel obvious, and occasionally funny.

A sought-after technology and culture commentator, Giles has been interviewed more than 200 times by media around the world, including CBC National, CBC Radio One, National Geographic, CTV News, BBC Channel 4, Arab News, Forbes, and WIRED. He writes for a readership of over 55,000 on Medium and Substack on what it means to be human in the digital age.

His talks leave audiences with something rare in conversations about technology today: optimism, grounded in a deeper understanding of themselves. Because the future isn't something that happens to us, it's something culture, which is to say all of us, gets to shape.

Signature Speaking Topics:

- Culture Eats Technology for Breakfast: From stone axes to ChatGPT. Every generation panics that the new tool will remake them: and every time, culture quietly remakes the tool instead. A surprising, upbeat tour of why humanity always wins, and what that means for the age of AI and the future of us.

- Still Human: Finding Ourselves in the Age of AI: AI can write, paint, create music and code. So what's left that's uniquely ours? You might be surprised. A warm, clarifying look at the human capacities no algorithm can reach, and why they matter more, not less, in an automated world.

- Culture First: Leading Change When the Ground Keeps Shifting. Most change efforts fail not on technology but on culture. This talk gives mission-driven leaders a practical, anthropological lens for guiding their people through technological and social change.