Digital Anthropologist • Futurist • Head of Global Innovation, ServiceNow
"The man who read the future by studying people - and wrote the manual before anyone knew they needed one."
He started it all with a stack of paper and a phone book. Brian Solis, then 23 and still in college, launched Reality Magazine from his house in Los Angeles - selling ad space to Wet Seal and Clothestime, writing every word himself, designing every page, distributing across the San Fernando Valley. No team. No investors. No plan B. Just the unshakeable conviction that if you paid close enough attention to how people actually lived - what they wanted, what they ignored, what made them feel something - you'd always know what was coming next.
That conviction has not wavered in three decades. What has changed is the scale. Today, Brian Solis is Head of Global Innovation at ServiceNow, running strategic advisory programs out of innovation centers in Silicon Valley, New York, London, Paris, Sydney, and Singapore. He is a nine-time bestselling author, an official LinkedIn Influencer with over 700,000 followers across platforms, and the man who coined "Digital Darwinism" - a phrase now taught in business schools on six continents.
But none of that explains him. To understand Brian Solis, you have to understand what he actually does for a living: he watches people. Specifically, he watches how people change when technology shows up in their lives - how behavior shifts, how expectations reset, how the gap opens between what customers actually want and what most businesses still think they want. He called this field "digital anthropology" before the field had a name. He has spent his career making that gap legible to the people with the power to close it.
In 2008, Solis and a small design agency called JESS3 sat down to map the social media landscape. The result was The Conversation Prism - a radial infographic plotting over 100 platforms across 28 categories, color-coded and printed in full. It went viral in a way that things went viral in 2008: downloaded hundreds of thousands of times, translated into Polish, Chinese, French, and Russian, cited in books and classroom presentations worldwide. More importantly, it prompted developers to ask: if all these platforms exist, shouldn't there be software to manage them? The Conversation Prism is credited by multiple industry historians as a direct catalyst for the first social media management platforms. Solis and JESS3 made a diagram and accidentally invented a software category.
The phrase "Digital Darwinism" arrived around the same time. It named something real - the specific anxiety of a company watching its customers evolve faster than its own processes could track. By giving it a name, Solis gave leaders something they desperately needed: a way to talk about the problem. From that moment, he was less a consultant and more a translator - converting the signal from the culture into something the boardroom could act on.
Around 2009, his firm FutureWorks partnered with Ashton Kutcher's media company Katalyst. The client list that came with it tells you something about where culture was moving: Oprah Winfrey, the United Nations, Pepsi, and The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas. Solis helped map digital strategies for all of them. He coached Shaquille O'Neal on social media presence. He advised early-stage companies that would go on to become Uber, Airbnb, and TripIt - more than 1,000 startups in total, by his count.
At some point in that same period, Solis and a collaborator built a piece of technology that, when held over a supermarket barcode with an early iPhone, pulled up enhanced product information in augmented reality. This was years before the term "AR commerce" existed in mainstream conversation. The app never went wide. But it illustrates something consistent about how Solis operates: he sees the technology and immediately asks what it means for how a person actually shops, thinks, or decides. The human behavior is always the question. The technology is just the new variable.
The career has moved in concentric circles, each one larger than the last. After FutureWorks, Solis joined Altimeter Group as a Principal Analyst and Futurist - writing 60-plus industry research reports on digital transformation in retail, healthcare, financial services, and enterprise. He also published five books in that period, including the landmark X: The Experience When Business Meets Design (2015), which BookAuthority would later name to its "Best Customer Experience Books of All Time" list.
He moved to Salesforce as VP and Global Innovation Evangelist. Then to ServiceNow, where he now leads the Global Innovation practice - designing and running high-stakes advisory engagements with major enterprise customers across the company's worldwide innovation centers. The job is partly strategic, partly theatrical: bring the right executive into a room in Singapore or London, map their assumptions, then show them what their industry looks like through an AI-first lens. Make the invisible visible. Force the question.
His 2024 book Mindshift: Transform Leadership, Drive Innovation, and Reshape the Future is his most direct statement yet. The argument is precise: most organizations approach AI looking for efficiency gains - ways to automate what they already do. That's the wrong frame. The real question is what becomes possible when you stop trying to do the old things faster and start asking what was previously impossible. Solis calls this moving from a scarcity mindset to an abundance mindset. The book is addressed to leaders who know something needs to change but keep optimizing around the edges of a system that's already obsolete.
At SXSW 2026, Solis delivered the keynote that crystalized his current thinking: "Augmented IQ: Scaling Human + AI Potential." The core message was deceptively simple. Most people use AI to do what they already know how to do. The opportunity is to use it to do what they couldn't do before. He introduced the thought experiment "WWAID" - What Would AI Do? - as a leadership practice: before making a strategic decision, ask the machine to challenge your assumptions. Not to replace judgment. To sharpen it.
Worth Magazine covered the keynote under the headline "Augmentation Is the New Productivity." The phrase landed. It usually does.
What's unusual about Brian Solis isn't the volume of books or the number of platforms he's mapped or the roster of clients he's advised. It's the consistency of the underlying method. For thirty years, in every role and every medium, he has done the same thing: found the place where human behavior and emerging technology collide, stood there long enough to understand what was actually happening, then told whoever needed to know. He didn't become a futurist by predicting the future. He became one by paying better attention to the present than almost anyone else in the room.
He has keynoted on every inhabited continent. He contributes to Forbes, Wired, and Ad Age. He runs a video interview series called (r)evolution. He is, per Forbes, "one of the more creative and brilliant business minds of our time." Per The Conference Board, "the futurist we all need now."
The magazine he published alone from his house in Los Angeles in 1993 is long gone. But the instinct behind it - close observation, direct communication, zero intermediary between the idea and the audience - runs through everything that followed. Solis has spent thirty years building an audience by telling people what he actually sees. Most of the time, he's been right about what comes next. The trick, it turns out, is simply watching more carefully than everyone else.
In August 2008, Solis sat down with design agency JESS3 and mapped every social media platform they could find - 100-plus apps, organized into 28 categories, radiating outward like a prism splitting light. They published it. It went everywhere.
Downloaded hundreds of thousands of times. Translated into Polish, Chinese, French, Russian. Cited in books, classrooms, and conference decks for years. But the real consequence was unplanned: developers looked at the Conversation Prism and asked themselves why there wasn't software to manage all of those platforms from one place. Historians of the social media management industry trace the category's origins, at least in part, to that one diagram.
Solis and JESS3 made a beautiful infographic. And accidentally invented a software category.