The AI Partner Play | AI Keynote Speaker Dr. Joses Ngugi
Keynote Speaker · Summits, AI conferences and business masterminds

The AIPartnerPlay

I'm not even an AI expert.That's exactly why this works.

As the visionary running your company, you don't need to become the AI expert. In fact, that is a waste of your time. You need to find the one who already is, and learn how to leverage each other.

Dr. Joses Ngugi · Co-Founder, CloseSignal AI
The Whole Idea

Every entrepreneurial room has two kinds of people who need each other.

Group One

The Visionary

You are the visionary or CEO of an existing business, that is generating consistent revenue and serving an existing pool of clients with a team depending on the success of your company. You see gaps and know that AI resources leveraged well could potentially be a fix. But you're already stretched, tools keep changing by the hour, and learning all of it feels overwhelming. And in truth you don't know what is true leverage vs. a waste of your time. So it sits on the back burner untouched, getting louder each month. Learning and keeping up with all of it is not your job.

Group Two

The AI Builder

You are the AI builder. You have put in the hours, you keep up with what changes, and you can build things most people cannot. You see problems everywhere that what you know could fix. But how much of it has actually made money? Most builds never earn a dollar, and it is usually not because the build was bad. It is because it was never pointed at a real problem, inside a real business, where revenue is already moving. And in truth, picking the problem worth solving is a different skill than building it. So the work keeps stacking up and never reaches the people who would have paid for it. Finding that problem was never meant to be your job alone.

Each one is missing exactly what the other one has.

One has the business, the customers and the problem worth solving. The other has the skill to build the fix. That is why this works better as a partnership than as one person hiring the other.

95%
of companies put money into AI and got nothing they could measure.
MIT, 2025 · 300+ AI projects · 52 companies · 153 senior leaders
BCG ran its own study and got the same number. 1,250 executives, 68 countries, five percent.

The technology worked. The people with the vision could not build. The people who could build were sitting somewhere else, and almost nobody put those two in the same room.

So which one are you in, the five or the ninety five?

From The Host

"It was like he took the veil off of everyone's eyes."

"The belief that we have to learn AI and all the software alone. Realistically, we just have to learn who's in the room and who has what skill sets."

Michael Sheridan · Event Host
The Difference

What the five percent did differently.

The studies looked at how each group went about it. The same five differences kept showing up.

95%Tried something
  • Started with software, then went looking for a use
  • Gave the build to their own team to figure out
  • Aimed it where every other company was aiming
  • Launched something that never got any smarter
  • Called it a win because the demo looked good
5%Got a result
  • Started with one problem they could put a price on
  • Brought in someone from outside who had built it before
  • Aimed it at the part of the business nobody talks about
  • Built something that kept learning as it ran
  • Called it a win when it was measurably profitable
66 percent of the builds done with an outside partner actually made it into the business. Only 33 percent of the ones built in-house did. One reason killed more builds than any other. They never remembered anything. They never got better. MIT, 2025 and BCG, 2025.
What that bought them, against the companies at the bottom
the revenue increase
the cost reduction
3.6×
the return to shareholders
BCG, 2025, measuring the five percent against the sixty percent who got little or nothing.

Every line on that list is a judgment call. Who they picked. What they aimed at. How they set up the deal. BCG put a number on it. Ten percent of the work is the algorithm. Twenty percent is the tech and the data. Seventy percent is people and process.

The part you are worried about is ten percent of the job. The seventy percent that decides it? You already do that for a living. Point it at the right person.

Why Me

Everything I have built since 2024 came out of one AI partnership.

I am not the builder in any of it. Jenn is. Jennifer Eastmond, who most people know as AI Tech Boss Jenn, founded The AI Edge Network and wrote The AI Edge for Entrepreneurs.

I bring the problem. And a picture of the outcome clear enough to build from. Three times now, that has been enough.

01
The book

Unlock Your Hidden Income

This is how Jenn and I met. First thing we ever made together. I had a book in me and no real path to getting it out. Every idea in it is mine. AI, in her hands, got it out of my head and onto the page. Nearly 200 pages, in a fraction of the time it should have taken.

Signing copies of Unlock Your Hidden Income
02
My IP

An AI business builder, made from my own playbook

Clients in my business coaching program paid us to walk them from nothing to their first offer. We did every step of it by hand. It worked. It did not scale. It was wearing us out.

So I asked Jenn one question. Could something learn our whole process and walk a client through it? We took everything behind that program and built it into a system. Start to finish. Clients used it to launch and grow inside the year they worked with us.

03
Happening now

A copilot that sits inside a live sales call

This one we are in the middle of. Eight years of closing high-ticket offers taught me one pattern. The objection forms in their head long before they say it. By the time you hear “let me think about it,” you are already behind. Or “I need to talk to someone else first.” The call ends polite. Then they go quiet and never come back.

CloseSignal AI listens to a sales call while it is happening. Knows who is speaking. Hears an objection forming before the words come out. Hands the closer the next question while the call is still live.

It runs on the framework I used to close for eight years. My own playbook again, the same way the business builder was.

I described it to Jenn in plain English, because plain English is all I have. She took it from there. Seven days later she had the first working version.

Earlier this year it was a conversation. Months of building together turned that first version into a complete sales copilot, start to finish. Built for online coaching, consulting and service-based offers. It is the main thing Jenn and I do now.

It stops the bleeding on the calls they should have closed. Live, while the call is still happening.

A book. A business builder. A sales copilot running on live calls. I did not write a line of code for any of them. If I had waited until I understood AI well enough to build it myself, all three would still be ideas.

I knew where we were going. She knew how to build the road.

The Framework

Five steps, start to finish.

Here is the outline. You get the whole thing live. Everyone there takes home a six-page guide.

01
Know when you are ready

Three signals. Get this one wrong and nothing after it matters.

02
Know who you are looking for

Beginner, tool expert, builder strategist. Three different people. Three different price tags.

03
Judge them like an owner

You are never going to read their code. So you judge how they think. Four questions do it.

04
Set the deal up so it holds

Scope. Timeline. Rounds of fixing. Who owns it when it is done.

05
Where to find this person

Three places, in order. The first one is closer than anybody expects.

The first time I gave this talk, at a business event, six partnerships started within 24 hours. CEOs and AI experts who had been in the same space all along. You could walk out with your next AI partnership.

Two Talks

Two talks. One about AI. One about the person running the company.

Signature Keynote

The AI Partner Play

Most audiences hold two groups who need each other and do not know it. This talk names both, then shows them how to find each other.

You walk out knowing
  • I. Three signals that say you are ready
  • II. Which kind of AI person you need
  • III. How to judge that person without being technical
Built forEntrepreneur summits · AI and tech conferences · business masterminds · founder and operator communities · virtual summits
60 min keynote · 90 min extended · half-day workshop
Second Keynote

CEO Energy

For the founder whose business has outgrown the identity of the person running it. Built from the years that went badly, including the one where I watched a business do $350,000 in a single afternoon and still not survive.

You walk out knowing
  • I. Identity. Why chasing more without becoming someone different is what breaks people
  • II. Leverage. Its three faces, and which one you have been avoiding
  • III. Pivots. The ones you choose, the ones the world hands you, and how to survive both

“Palm trees bend hard in a hurricane. They do not snap. The difference is not that the storm does not come. It is who you are when it does.”

Built forLeadership retreats and offsites · professional associations · founder communities · company kickoffs
45 to 60 min keynote · workshop on request

Keynote, workshop, panel, fireside or virtual summit · Based in Tampa, Florida · Travels for events · Six to eight weeks lead time preferred · Shorter notice? Ask me and I will tell you honestly

Dr. Joses Ngugi
About

He thinks in frameworks, leads with story, and has a rare ability to make any room feel like he already knows their life.

Dr. Joses Ngugi has spoken to rooms of 500 and more in person, delivered keynotes at AI and business summits, and facilitated workshops across multiple industries.

He is a retired Doctor of Physical Therapy who left practice for entrepreneurship. He is an operator and speaker, and the co-founder of CloseSignal AI.

He has built companies, lost one, and built again, and both of his talks come directly out of that. One from the partnership that made an AI company possible, the other from what it took to keep going after a business he had just seen do $350,000 in a single afternoon did not survive the year.

Co-Founder, CloseSignal AI Retired Doctor of Physical Therapy Entrepreneur and Operator Author, Unlock Your Hidden Income AI and business summit keynotes
For Event Hosts

Questions I get before every booking.

You are not an AI expert. So why book you?

Because I'm one half of it, right now. I'm the visionary side. My business partner Jenn is the AI expert side. Everything I've built came out of that, so when I talk about the play I'm talking about my own week.

For the CEOs in your audience, me being non-technical lands fast. They've felt the overwhelm. Most of them have tried an AI solution that never panned out. Hearing it from somebody who runs a business gives them permission to put it down. Their job is to stay the visionary. To be the one who can see the problem inside their business that has to get solved.

For the technical people in your audience, I hand them the other lens. Most of them have never seen this from a CEO's chair. Once they do, they see the gap they could fill, and that partnering with a visionary is how their skill turns into something profitable for both sides.

Two halves. I can speak for one of them honestly, because it's mine.

Who is this not for?

Rooms where nobody can act on it. If your audience has to go ask permission, they'll enjoy it and then nothing happens.

Events that want a futurist. I'm not going to tell anyone what AI looks like in 2035. I'll tell them what to do in the next ninety days.

And anyone hoping for a list of tools. There's no software list in this talk, on purpose. If that's what your event needs, I'll tell you on the first call instead of taking the booking.

Virtual or in person?

Both, and I've done plenty of both. I gave this talk to a room on the other side of the world while I was sitting in Tampa.

Virtual is a different build though. There's no energy in the room to read, so I earn attention another way. More back and forth early. Shorter beats all the way through.

I'll tell you what I need from your platform before we confirm, and I'll test it myself. I don't assume it works.

Will this be old news in six months?

The tools will be. They're changing faster than anyone can teach them, and that's part of my point.

The talk is about decisions. What's worth building. How you tell whether somebody can actually build it. How you set the deal up and keep what gets made. None of that moves when the models do.

I refresh the data every quarter. The framework hasn't needed changing yet.

Do you sell from the stage?

No pitch. The talk stands on its own and I say so in the first few minutes, so people stop bracing for an offer and actually listen.

It does make people curious. Some of them find me afterward wanting to talk about their own situation, and some of those go somewhere. That happens after I'm off your stage. Your stage stays yours.

We want CEO Energy. Is that a different conversation?

Same conversation, different talk. Tell me about your audience and I'll tell you which one fits, even if it turns out to be the one you didn't ask about.

CEO Energy is for founders whose business has outgrown who they have been. It came out of the years that went badly for me, including the one where I watched a business do $350,000 in a single afternoon and still not survive.

Some events take both. Keynote one day, workshop the next. If you are not sure which one your audience needs, say so in the form and we will work it out on the first call.

Where do the numbers come from?

MIT, BCG, Gartner, Veracode and Eurostat. All public. Every one is named on the slide while I'm saying it, so anyone in the room can check me later.

Where two studies agree, I show both. One number on its own is easy to wave off.

And when a figure is a rough guide, I say so. I'd rather lose a little punch than have somebody leave repeating something they can't defend.

Can you shape it around our audience?

Yes, and I'd want to. Tell me what they sell and roughly what size their businesses are. Tell me what they've already been told about AI, especially if they sat through something on it recently.

The frame stays the same. The stories, the examples, how far I go on the technical side, all of that changes.

Agency owners and course creators are facing the same decision. They need to hear it completely differently.

The visionary and the AI builder are already at the same events. Same conferences. Same masterminds. Same hallway between sessions.

They have not found each other yet.

Booking

Tell me about your audience.

Neither talk quite fits your event, and you still think I could serve your audience? Reach out anyway. Tell me what you are working with.

Both of these talks came out of a conversation exactly like that. The AI Partner Play started on a call with Michael Sheridan, when I asked him about his people and what they were stuck on. CEO Energy started the same way, before an event in Miami.

So tell me about your audience. If there is something here, we will both see it fast. And if there is not, you will know just as fast.

This form comes straight to me and I answer these myself. Or email [email protected] directly.

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© Dr. Joses Ngugi. All rights reserved.
Data from MIT, BCG, Gartner, Veracode and Eurostat. I name every source on the slide as I say it.