Showreel
Showreel.
From boardrooms to conference halls of thousands, Kate brings the same fieldwork discipline to every room, on AI, retail, hospitality and what’s coming next.
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Kate Ancketill spends her time doing one thing: telling retail, hospitality and consumer brands what’s actually going to matter to their customers next — and what to do about it.
Then
For over 25 years, she built and ran GDR Creative Intelligence, the London-based research consultancy that became the innovation partner to more than 100 of the world’s largest brands — P&G, Costa Coffee, Kingfisher, Tesco, Sephora, Google, Microsoft, Moët Hennessy, Richemont, Royal Caribbean Cruises, Lego and the BBC among them. That work took her into stores, hotels and boardrooms on every continent, tracking the ideas quietly reshaping global retail and hospitality before they became obvious.
Now
GDR’s consulting work is now behind her. Today, Kate speaks and advises full-time — drawing on that same fieldwork discipline, but focused entirely on getting in front of audiences and leadership teams and telling them, plainly, what’s coming and what it means for them.
She continuously tracks the headwinds and innovations shaping retail, hospitality, brands and consumer experience, then translates trends into specific commercial implications for planning three to five years ahead — the horizon where the economy’s adaptation to AI and automation, changing Gen Z behaviour, geopolitics, demographics and economic pressure actually bite.
How Kate Ancketill inspires and motivates audiences
Kate Ancketill is a London-based business futurist, delivering optimistic, pragmatic answers to the toughest questions retail, hospitality and consumer brands face.
Her content is constantly fresh, current and appropriate to your audience — built on the 25 years she spent running GDR, the research consultancy she founded, before turning her full attention to speaking and advisory work with the world’s top brands.
Kate has delivered the headline trends keynote at the NRF Big Show in New York for ten consecutive years — the retail industry’s most closely watched stage for identifying what’s next. In 2025 she won Best AI & Future Technology Speaker at the Speaker Awards, and was named one of BizTech Magazine’s Top 30 IT Influencers in 2024.
Like what you see? Book Kate to speak
Watch Kate turn AI, retail and hospitality’s toughest questions into a talk a room of thousands still remembers months later.