About Alexandra

Alexandra Samuel is a leading expert on AI and the digital workplace, inspiring people with a joyful, actionable approach to AI that keeps human creativity and collaboration front and center. In her speeches and in her frequent AI stories for The Wall Street Journal and The Harvard Business Review, Alex shows people how to tap the productivity and innovation-boosting potential of AI,  while managing its very real risks.  A speaker and data journalist, she is the co-author (with Robert Pozen) of Remote, Inc: How To Thrive at Work….Wherever You Are (Harper Business, 2021) and the author of Work Smarter with Social Media: A Guide to Managing Evernote, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Your Email (Harvard Business Review Press, 2015).

 

Alex’s work on the technology and the new workplace has appeared in media outlets around the world, including Oprah.com, The Atlantic.com, JSTOR Daily, Macworld, The Toronto Star and CBC Radio.  Her work is grounded in more than two decades of experience as a technology researcher and strategist. As Vice President of Social Media at Vision Critical, a customer intelligence software provider, Alex worked with the company’s F1000 customers to develop innovative approaches to social media research and to deliver groundbreaking reports like Sharing is the New Buying and What Social Media Analytics Can’t Tell You About Your Customers.

 

Alex was the founding Director of the Social + Interactive Media Centre at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, where she led applied research projects with companies like Mozilla and Paperny Films.  And as the founder and principal with Social Signal, one of the world’s first social media agencies, she shaped the online strategy for a wide range of online community projects, including Tyze, Change Everything and NetSquared.

 

Alexandra holds a B.A. from Oberlin College and a Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard University, where her dissertation examined the phenomenon of hacktivism — politically motivated computer hacking — as a window on online political participation. While working on her Ph.D., Alex researched online social capital for Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone, which charted the decline (and future potential) of American social capital. She also joined with Don Tapscott to launch Governance in the Digital Economy, an investigation into the future of government and democracy for a consortium of twenty governments and businesses from around the world.

 

Alex works remotely from Vancouver, Canada. She is married to speechwriter and cartoonist Rob Cottingham. They have two grown-ish children and a pandemic puppy.

 

Find Alexandra on Linkedin or reach her via email at alex@alexandrasamuel.com.

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