'You are sharing your idea with the world'

It’s an opportunity to shine. Do a TEDx talk and you gain a confidence boost, a glow of satisfaction and a neat digital demonstration of your talents. Telling a potential employer you can land a message is one thing, but showing them a YouTube clip where you are doing it under pressure in front of a live crowd is quite another.

But the benefits go much further. TEDx has always been big in ambition and impact – it’s about sharing vital knowledge with a potentially vast number of people. The original concept (TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design) was “ideas worth spreading”, and the most popular TED talks of all time reach huge audiences worldwide.

Sir Ken Robinson’s “Do schools kill creativity?” has 80.3 million views (spoiler: yes!). Kelly McDonigal’s How to make stress your friend has 36.5 million; 70.7 million people have watched Simon Sinek’s How great leaders inspire action. No wonder London Business School’s MBA students jump at the chance to audition each year for one of a coveted few spots at the School’s own event.

There are now more than 3000 licensed, independently organised local TEDx events across the globe. The highest standards are maintained, as Audrey Mandela, Entrepreneur Mentor-in-Residence at LBS, explains: “We have a very strict process with our speakers. It’s an intellectual challenge, to boil a piece of research down into something very digestible in no more than 15 minutes.”

The event, which is open to the public, balances internal and external speakers and is uniquely exciting and nervewracking. Corporate presentations and academic lectures alike often rely on slides; this is something else. “It’s a different way of presenting and storytelling,” says Audrey. Even seasoned LBS professors have been known to find it hard.

At TEDx London Business School 2026, Sir Andrew Likierman, Professor of Management Practice and Accounting and a former Dean, insisted we all need to sharpen our thinking in “Good judgement: here’s how” – with a picture of the sinking Titanic as a backdrop. Selin Kesebir, Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour at LBS, spoke about how words describing the natural world are alarmingly disappearing from our culture and society, in Nature is in retreat from our narratives.

For Lily Crawford MBA, Project Leader at BCG in the Healthcare and Technology Practice Areas, TEDx was a way of warning people that AI will widen the gender gap in healthcare unless we consciously guard against it. In her talk, “The cost of being invisible in medical research”, she explained how historic and continuing biases in favour of men risk being amplified. “If medicine never studied it, how can we expect AI to learn from it?”

Preparations for each TEDx talk are extensive. Each speaker is assigned two members of the LBS TEDx student committee who coach and support in the months leading up to the event (and that’s after 10 or 12 rounds of auditioning). It’s not just about crafting a perfect story, it’s how you tell it: the intonation, voice, body language. Every last detail has to be spot on.

Lily says her talk went through “hundreds” of iterations, over several months. We learnt that the answer to ensuring equitable health solutions lies in data: collecting more and asking better questions of it. Her advice for TEDx wannabes is to think hard about what you want the audience to take away, and pick a topic you’re genuinely passionate about. “You are sharing your idea with the world, so choose something that everybody in the world needs to know.”

AI loomed large on the 2026 TEDx stage, with MBA students Denira Coleman and Aritra Sutradhar asking Will AI replace human creativity? Around 50,000 AI-generated songs are uploaded to YouTube every day now, and in one study, 97% of participants couldn’t tell the difference between AI- and human-generated tunes. After playing some AI-generated “music”, the pair sang live, Aritra in traditional Hindustani improvisation and Denira from a Bellini opera. They concluded: “Human creativity will not be diminished by AI, it will be expanded. It will push us to new choices.”

Sam Stockwell, Senior Research Associate at the Centre for Emerging Technology and Security (CeTaS) within the Alan Turing Institute, challenged the audience to spot AI-generated vs real photographs, in his talk AI & information integrity: seeing is no longer believing. AI is great at reproducing inaccuracies in convincing-looking packages, he stressed. “Cross-check the links, verify the facts with other sources. And if something looks too good to be real, it’s probably AI-generated.”

Ahmed Khan, founder of CellAGri, explored the future of food in The winter before spring: the cultivated meat story. After the first lab-grown meat showcased in 2013 (one burger for 300,000 dollars), the cellular agriculture field exploded globally, but it’s now suffering an “investment winter.” Drawing from his research, Ahmed explored the role of strategic partnerships in building long-term impact.

If any idea is worth sharing, it’s surely How we tackle the climate crisis. Chris Caldwell MBA2011, CEO of United Renewables, asked the audience: “Are we doing the right things, so we can look the next generation in the eye and hand over the planet to them with pride?”

Chris and his teams have delivered more than 40 clean energy projects across wind, solar, hydro, and anaerobic digestion. “We have the tech to sort out 80% of the issue,” he says. We have already baked in decades of overheating, but we are not yet at the tipping point beyond which the systems that support human life start to break down. China, India, Japan and the EU are making progress on renewable energy; it makes economic and social sense. Now others need to align. Chris’s message: “We are not powerless. We are powerful. We can create change.”

Chris “thoroughly enjoyed” the LBS TEDx experience, and urges students to audition next time around. “It’s a great leadership skill, to hold an audience, the best way of learning is doing and you’re given a lot of support.” Mastering the art of storytelling means you will be able to have influence and impact, whatever your career, he says: “Every business decision is made one part on the numbers, and the other part on the story.”