Kelly Smith

Kelly co-owns Neo, one of the world’s first truly purpose-driven communications agencies. She’s dedicated to helping social and environmental pioneers increase their impact through sharper, more strategic and purposeful storytelling.

Kelly has a special interest in language, visual as well as verbal. And she particularly relishes the challenge of taking complex ideas and finding the simplest, most truthful yet urgent way of making them matter to people.

Quick credentials

• Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts
• Former trustee of experimental social arts charity with whom she co-produced Hidden Stories, a research-based programme and graphic novel moving people to think differently about mental health
• Tuff Leadership ‘graduate’: co-organisational leadership training and facilitation
• Degree in English literature, Warwick University
• Post-grad training in journalism and communications

In my own words… 

At a time when we face multiple global crises, we need every ounce of innovation to enable society and its evolution toward a healthier future on this planet, not to erode it.

I’ve feared that artificial intelligence will inhibit human intuition, ingenuity and creativity, and seed doubt in our ability to draw on our emotional and cognitive abilities to judge what’s before us. But as an AI-cynic-turned-optimist, I would like to see how data science, fused with social innovation, can empower the best of humanity in a radical redressing of the status quo.