Brian Solis: From Digital Anthropologist to ServiceNow's AI Futurist

Originally published December 2015. Updated June 2026.

The decade-long call

When Solis was profiled on Everything-PR in 2015, he was Principal Analyst at Altimeter Group writing about “disruptive technologies” and “accidental narcissists” — his term for what social media was doing to consumer behavior. The forecast read as provocative at the time. In retrospect it reads as restrained.

Solis spent the Altimeter years building a framework around what he called Generation C — connected consumers whose expectations were being rewritten faster than companies could keep up. That framework expanded across nine books, most notably X: The Experience When Business Meets Design (2015), Lifescale (2019), and Mindshift (2024). He has now published over 60 research reports on business transformation, digital disruption, and AI.

The Salesforce years — then ServiceNow

Solis moved from Altimeter to Salesforce as Global Innovation Evangelist, then to ServiceNow as Head of Global Innovation — the role he holds today. In that position he sets strategic direction for ServiceNow’s Innovation and Executive Briefing Centers in Silicon Valley, New York, London, Paris, Sydney, and Singapore. He leads a global network of innovation officers and futurists who study emerging technologies, business transformation trends, and customer insights.

The platform — a public-facing strategist embedded inside the operating company — has become the model many of his peers (Jeremiah Owyang, Charlene Li, R “Ray” Wang) have either followed or competed against. The independent analyst class he came out of has been absorbed into the enterprise.

Mindshift — the AI-first thesis

Mindshift, published in 2024, is Solis’s most direct statement of what the AI era requires of leaders. The argument: AI works best when treated as a forcing function for rethinking the operating philosophy of the organization — what gets measured, who gets heard, how decisions get made — rather than as a productivity tool bolted onto existing process.

Companies that treat AI as a technology layer to bolt onto existing process, Solis argues, will lose to companies that treat it as a reason to redesign the organization. The disruption, in his framing, is philosophical first and technical second.

“AI’s greatest disruption is philosophical,” he told Corex Corp in November 2025. “The winners of this new era will be those who have the courage to rethink what work means, who it serves, and how it evolves.”

The UN advisory role

Solis serves as a special adviser to the UN global innovation team — a role that places his framework into multilateral conversations about AI, digital divides, and economic development. The work extends his reach beyond enterprise software into policy and governance contexts where most enterprise-tech futurists do not operate.

Why this matters for communications

Solis’s framework is now central to how the communications industry is thinking about AI Communications. The discipline of building brand visibility inside answer engines has its philosophical underpinning in exactly the shift Solis has spent a decade describing: the audience has changed, the platform has changed, and the rules of attention have changed.

Communications teams that still operate on the press-release-plus-pitch model are running the playbook Solis predicted would stop working. The teams that have restructured around earned, owned, and AI-engine visibility are operating closer to the model his work points to. (See EPR’s coverage on AI Communications and the broader digital communications shift.)

What he’s saying now

In keynotes through 2025 and 2026 — AI Week Milan, ServiceNow Knowledge 2026, dozens of corporate-board engagements — Solis has converged on a small number of core themes.

The AI productivity argument is incomplete on its own. Productivity gains accrue to companies that have already restructured. Companies that have not will see AI deliver the same returns it would deliver to a poorly-designed factory: more output of work nobody wanted.

Leadership is the variable. The companies that fall behind in this cycle will not fall behind because of technology gaps. They will fall behind because of leadership gaps — specifically the gap between executives who think AI is a tool and executives who think AI is a restructuring opportunity.

And the customer experience built on AI differs in kind, not degree. Solis’s 2015 framing of “blurring brand and experience” was directionally correct. The 2026 version is sharper: in an AI-mediated economy, the answer engine is the brand experience. What ChatGPT says about a company when a buyer asks is, increasingly, what the company is.