Paqui Lizana is a global corporate innovator, visionary leader, and advocate for human centric innovation, best known for leadership roles at HP Inc., SEAT/VW Group, and currently Global Technology Strategy at IKEA. Trained as an aerospace engineer with an MBA, she has been recognised as a Future Maker by Singularity University and featured at MIT’s Imagination in Action, and her journey even includes being selected for a mission to Mars at the European Space Agency.

Often embracing the role of the outsider, Paqui has navigated transitions across automotive, retail, and biotech, guided by resilience rooted in her grandmother’s legacy of creating possibility from almost nothing. At the heart of her philosophy is a simple belief: innovation starts with who, not just what, because technology, humanity, and nature must evolve together to build a sustainable future.

In an era where everything is starting to sound the same, where every post and every strategy deck echoes the last, the question is whether we will use AI to scale copies of the past or to turn the world upside down. She calls this sameness parrotism, a world where we are not creating the future but scaling the ordinary.

As a speaker, Paqui reconnects with what AI cannot replicate, texture, memory, and struggle, and asks the harder question of whether friction is actually the point.

On the AI frontier, Paqui challenges organisations to use their most powerful imagination tool to create something new, rather than to scale the ordinary.