João Rocha e Melo is an electrical engineer from Instituto Superior Técnico, best known for moving naturally between intense technical focus and human connection, able to spend hours coding and just as easily explain AI in a way that feels clear, relevant, and grounded in real life.

Curious by nature, João is constantly exploring new AI tools, and one moment that stayed with him was helping a 90 year old use ChatGPT, a powerful reminder of the scale of transformation we are living through. Today he helps organisations move beyond simply buying AI tools and actually integrate them into how they work, with a simple goal: make AI part of the workflow, not just another subscription.

In an era where AI is often used to improve the past instead of reinventing the future, the question is what is impossible to do in your business today that, if it were possible, would fundamentally disrupt it. Applied only to optimise existing systems, AI creates incremental progress rather than transformation, yet its real value is indirect and often unimaginable until it ceases to be so.

As a facilitator, João helps organisations apply AI where it changes everything, not where it is comfortable.

On the AI frontier, João challenges organisations to question their systems rather than simply optimise them, and to aim AI at what would genuinely transform the business.