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Best-selling author and independent adviser to international firms and national governments, Richard is a leading expert in two fields – on the future of professional services and on the impact of AI. His thinking on the future of the professions is covered in The Future of the Professions (2015, 2022, co-authored with his son Daniel) and has generated a global conversation. On AI, Richard has drawn on 40 years of experience of artificial intelligence in writing his upcoming book How To Think About AI: A Guide for the Perplexed offers a non-technical guide on the social and economic effects of future technologies. For Richard, balancing the benefits and threats of AI is the defining challenge of our age – for business, government, and humanity.
Professor Richard Susskind OBE KC (Hon) is Special Envoy for Justice and AI to the Secretary-General of the Commonwealth, and is also President of the Society for Computers and Law. Previously, he served for 25 years as Technology Adviser to the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales. He is an independent adviser to international firms and national governments and the author of 11 books and more than 150 columns for The Times of London. His work has been translated into 18 languages.
Richard is a leading expert in two fields – on the future of professional services and on the impact of AI.
On the professions, in collaboration with his son Daniel, Richard is also the co-author of The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts (2015, 2022). This was a Financial Times Book of the Year and sets out two futures for the professions. Both rest of technology. One is reassuringly familiar – it is a more efficient version of what we have today. The second is transformational – a gradual replacement of professionals by increasingly capable systems. Richard is the world’s most cited author on the future of legal services, best known in this area for his books Tomorrow’s Lawyers (2013, 2017, 2023) and The End of Lawyers? (2008).
His work on AI dates back to the 1980s when he wrote his PhD at Oxford University on AI and law, and went on to co-develop the world’s first commercial AI system for lawyers. His focus on AI has partly been on the use of AI in professional work. More recently, he has widened his interest and worked on the impact more generally of AI on society and the economy. He demystifies AI by focusing on what AI systems do rather than how they do it, and by addressing some of the big issues – the business, risk, legal, ethical, management, and philosophical implications. This approach is captured in his upcoming book How To Think About AI: A Guide for the Perplexed which is appearing in early 2025.
Richard holds professorships at Oxford University, Gresham College London, and the University of Strathclyde. He is Fellow of the British Computer Society and of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
