About NextChapter

Only 5% of companies extract real value from AI. The blocker isn’t the technology. It’s the strategic and human transformation needed to make the technology work. NextChapter delivers the insights that bridge this gap for leaders and enterprises. NextChapter’s research, frameworks, and systems emerge from three decades leading transformation at some of the world’s largest organizations.

FOUNDER · CEO

Faisal Hoque

Faisal is on a mission to humanize organizational transformation by bridging the worlds of business, technology, and philosophy. Recognized as one of the world’s leading management thinkers and technologists, Faisal is committed to making the most sophisticated transformational approaches available to businesses of all sizes.

Faisal has spent three decades guiding leadership teams at Fortune 500 companies and government agencies. He is an Executive Fellow at leading Swiss business school IMD and the author of 12 bestselling and award-winning books. Faisal is a regular columnist at Fast Company, Psychology Today, and I by IMD, and his work has been published in Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, and Harvard Data Science Review, among many other outlets.

Faisal is a three-time winner of the Deloitte Technology Fast 50™ and Fast 500™ awards and has been named among Ziff Davis’s Top 100 Most Influential People in Technology. He approaches transformation as a personal practice as much as an organizational one – an inheritance of the Eastern philosophical tradition in which he was raised.

Team

Paul is a researcher, systems designer, and writer whose work sits at the intersection of organizational transformation, philosophy, and technology. An Honorary Fellow at the University of Liverpool, his research has been published by Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press, and his applied work on AI transformation has appeared in Harvard Business Review and Harvard Data Science Review.

Paul brings a decade of experience translating complex strategic frameworks into structured, actionable processes for leadership teams. He is the co-author of Reimagining Government and a collaborator on more than twenty books, including multiple national bestsellers. Paul regularly collaborates with Faisal as a contributing author for the journal I by IMD.

Pranay is a philosopher and ethicist whose work focuses on how technological and societal change alters what it means to be human. A former academic philosopher, he is the author of an edited volume on justice and climate change for Cambridge University Press and a contributor to the UN IPCC’s 5th Assessment Report. He previously served as Head Tutor for The Economist‘s Critical Thinking course.

Pranay designs NextChapter’s ethical frameworks for responsible AI, drawing on his expertise in business learning and development to shape how the program’s modules translate principle into practice. He is the co-author of Reimagining Government and regularly collaborates with Faisal as a contributing author for the journal I by IMD.

Tom Davenport is one of the world’s foremost authorities on AI, analytics, and digital transformation. He is the President’s Distinguished Professor of Information Technology and Management and Faculty Director of the Metropoulos Institute for Technology and Entrepreneurship at Babson College, and a Fellow at both the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy and the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI. He has been named as one of the top 25 consultants in the world, one of the 100 most important people in the tech industry, and one of the top 50 business school professors. He has written 27 books, more than 300 articles for Harvard Business Review, and hundreds of other articles and blog posts. His 181,000+ Google Scholar citations make him one of the world’s most-cited scholars. His most recent co-authored books are The New Science of Customer Relationships and Agentic Artificial Intelligence. Tom is the co-author of Reimagining Government.

Erik spent more than a decade as Senior Vice President at CACI International, where he led the $2B+ Enterprise IT operating group serving the Department of Defense, intelligence agencies, and civilian government. Before CACI, he held executive roles at Northrop Grumman – progressing from program manager through Chief Technology Officer to Operating Unit Director – and served as General Manager for Federal Financial Agencies at CSC. Earlier in his career, Erik held leadership positions at the United States Senate and the Department of the Army. He is the co-author of Reimagining Government and of “Why AI Demands a New Breed of Leaders,” one of MIT Sloan Management Review‘s most-read articles of 2025.

Lauren is the Chief Operating Officer at Squirro, the enterprise-grade generative AI and knowledge graph company building semantic search, insights, and automation for global enterprises. She believes the value of enterprise AI is gated by how well people understand it and that the companies winning this category will be the ones that close the comprehension gap, not just the capability gap. That conviction has shaped every move in her career. Hawker Zafer joined Squirro as a learning executive and built The Squirro Academy from the ground up: the company’s educational infrastructure, technical documentation, and course program, turning education from a support function into a commercial and brand engine.

She founded the multi-award-winning Redefining AI podcast (2024 New York Digital Award; 2025 Silver Stevie® for Most Innovative Business Podcast by or for Women) and co-hosts Convergence with bestselling author and thought leader Faisal Hoque. A LinkedIn Top AI Voice and Women in Tech Council member, she is one of the most visible female operators evangelizing enterprise generative AI, with a stated commitment to making the field accessible to women and underrepresented groups. Hawker Zafer studied at the University of Birmingham and is based in Switzerland.

Faisal Hoque

Dr. Paul Scade

Dr. Pranay Sanklecha

Prof. Thomas H. Davenport

Erik Nelson

Lauren Hawker Zafer