Futurist · Speaker · Founder · Human
HE LIVES IN THE FUTURE SO YOU DON’T HAVE TO.
Matt Maher has spent over a decade at the absolute frontier of technology — not reading about it, not forecasting it, but building it with the world’s most ambitious brands.
Vogue Top 100 Innovators 2024
MIT Media Lab Partner
CHANEL Advisory Board
Founder, M7 Innovations
Webby Award Winner
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Who He Is
THREE WORDS. ONE PERSON.
Ask Matt to describe himself and he’ll give you three things. Not a job title. Three truths about how he operates.
01
Curious Futurist
Matt doesn’t predict the future from a distance; he goes and lives in it. He buys the hardware everyone else dismisses, uses the platforms that aren’t mainstream yet, and builds with tools that will be obvious in three years. He lives in the future so he can report back on the present. It’s not a methodology. It’s just how he’s wired.
02
Tech Translator
Matt speaks brand. He speaks code. He speaks creative. He speaks C-suite. Most people can do one or two of these. Matt does all of them simultaneously, translating freely between every one. The result is that everyone in a room with him, from the CEO to the team lead, understands what’s being said and leaves knowing exactly what to do about it.
03
Ignition
Matt doesn’t just inform rooms — he lights them up. Everyone in the org, from your highest level to your most junior person, comes out of a session with Matt and feels like they just got handed ideas they can actually act on. Not abstract inspiration. Real ignition. The kind that sends people back to their desks with something to build.
The Origin Story
FROM
THE MOUND
TO THE BOARDROOM.
Matt Maher didn’t plan to become the futurist that Fortune 500 CEOs call before they make their most consequential technology decisions. He planned to play professional baseball. What happened instead is one of the great origin stories in the innovation world.
Early
2000s
Division I Baseball and a Plan That Didn’t Work Out
Matt came out of college as a D1 baseball player with one plan: go pro. He was good enough to play at the highest amateur level. Not quite good enough for what came next. He retired at 21 — and in retrospect, that’s where everything started.
2008–
2010
Coming Out of the Recession and Discovering YouTube
Matt’s first job out of college was at an athletic training center, at the height of the recession. YouTube was new and nobody at his level was paying attention. He built a baseball tips series from scratch — no budget, no distribution deal. Eight to ten million organic views later, a holding company media group came calling. He’d accidentally built a career.
2010–
2016
The Agency Years, Always the Innovation Person in the Room
Initiative, then Stagwell — two of the most prominent media agencies in the industry. Officially, Matt was doing content and media strategy. In practice, he was always the one asking what weird thing nobody had tried yet. He built a Vine game for Hyundai. He ran social experiments that didn’t have names yet. An innovator inside organizations paying him to be something else.
2016–
2018
The E*Trade Moment, “Who the Hell Are You?”
Working on E*Trade, Matt had an idea: a personalized Alexa flash briefing tied to a user’s investment portfolio — something that would tell you exactly what was happening with your money before you got out of bed. He pitched it up the chain. The head of media loved it. The CMO loved it. They took it to CEO Karl Rosner. The room went quiet. Then: ‘We love it. Who the hell are you? Do you actually work for us?’ That moment changed everything.
Late
2018
The Phone Calls That Started M7
The CMO of E*Trade and the head of media at Panera left their companies in the same week. Both called Matt within days with the same message: ‘If you go solo, we’re in. Let’s roll.’ Matt launched M7 at the end of 2018. Assembly, his former agency, became one of his first clients. The people who pushed him out the door became his first contracts.
2019–
2023
Building M7, Narrow by Design
Where full-service agencies chase every dollar, Matt made the opposite bet: go narrow. M7 would only work in AI, AR/VR, voice, IoT, gaming, Web3, and emerging media. Nothing else. The bet paid off in a way nobody expected. CHANEL retained M7 across four divisions. The MIT Media Lab came calling. The awards followed.
2024–
Now
The Futurist the World’s Most Powerful Brands Call First
Vogue named Matt one of its Top 100 Innovators of 2024. In February 2025, M7 became the 36th Official Partner of the MIT Media Lab Consortium. CHANEL doesn’t make a major technology decision without consulting Matt first. Cox Automotive made him the face of their forward-looking initiatives. The Innovation Brief has run every week for six years. It’s not stopping.
“
We show brands who they really are, as opposed to what they believe they are. And then we’re convex. We can see around the corner to where they need to go.
The M7 Philosophy
THE CONVEX MIRROR.
Matt uses an unusual metaphor to describe what M7 actually does for clients: a convex mirror. The kind you find at the corner of a parking garage that shows you the full picture, not just the narrow view directly in front of you.
Most companies are looking at themselves through a flat mirror. They see what they’re already doing, read the same trades as their competitors, and hire advisors who confirm what they already believe. They’re insular by design.
Matt’s firm, M7, works across industries — from luxury fashion to enterprise construction to QSR to automotive — and that cross-pollination is a feature, not an accident. What augmented reality means for CHANEL and what it means for a construction site are completely different problems. But because M7 has solved both, they bring something to each client that the client can never get from inside their own walls.
How He Thinks
THE OPERATING
SYSTEM BEHIND
EVERY KEYNOTE.
Every Matt Maher keynote is built on a specific way of seeing the world. These aren’t frameworks he invented for a slide deck — they’re the principles that have driven every right call he’s made over the past decade.
LIVE IN THE FUTURE. REPORT ON THE PRESENT.
By the time emerging technology makes the cover of Fast Company, Matt has already been deploying it with real clients for a year.
IT’S NOT THE STRONGEST OR THE SMARTEST. IT’S THE MOST ADAPTABLE.
In technological disruption, the winners aren’t the strongest or smartest — they’re the ones who adapt before anyone else realizes it’s necessary.
CROSS-INDUSTRY IS A FEATURE, NOT A BUG.
M7 works across luxury, construction, QSR, and automotive — because the insight that solved CHANEL’s AR challenge came from a construction site.
INSPIRING IS EASY. ACTIONABLE IS RARE.
Every Matt Maher keynote ends the same way: a concrete crawl-walk-run action plan, because inspiration without a roadmap is just entertainment.
KNOWN UNKNOWNS OVER ASSUMED CERTAINTIES.
Matt is unusually comfortable saying ‘I don’t know’ — the organizations that get into trouble are the ones that mistake confidence for certainty.
THE SIGNAL IS IN THE VENN DIAGRAM.
Matt’s foresight is a function of sitting inside four simultaneous data streams: MIT research, AI startup roadmaps, Fortune 500 signals, and live hardware testing.
THE INTELLIGENCE ENGINE
SPEAK
BRAND.
SPEAK CODE.
SPEAK
HUMAN.
Matt describes himself as a ‘tech translator at heart’ — someone who speaks brand, creative, and code fluently enough to move between them without losing the thread. The most advanced technology in the world means nothing if the room can’t act on it. Every Matt Maher keynote is designed so that the CEO and the person closest to the customer walk out with the same clarity and the same conviction: they know exactly what to do on Monday morning.
THE RECORD
CREDENTIALS THAT
Credentials That Speak For
Themselves.
ADVISORY & INSTITUTIONAL
| MIT | 36th Official Partner of the MIT Media Lab Consortium, named February 2025. One of only 36 organizations globally. |
| CHANEL | Advisory Board Member. Retained across four divisions. 200+ CHANEL employees receive Matt’s briefings weekly. |
| GLIMPSE GROUP | Advisory Board, Glimpse Group (NASDAQ: VRAR), the public holding company for AR/VR companies. |
| COX AUTOMOTIVE | Brand Ambassador, the face of Cox Automotive’s forward-looking innovation initiatives. |
RECOGNITION & AWARDS
| VOGUE 2024 | Top 100 Innovators of 2024, named by Vogue in their definitive annual list of the most influential innovation voices. |
| WEBBY AWARD | Best Use of Filter & Lenses, won for the Bollé Nevada AR virtual try-on experience. |
| PREVIOUS ROLE | VP of Innovation, Assembly, AdAge’s 2018 Agency of the Year. |
MEDIA & APPEARANCES
| TELEVISION | i24 Primetime Television — featured technology and innovation commentary on live international broadcast. |
| PIVOT PODCAST | Guest on Pivot with Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway — one of the world’s most influential technology and business podcasts. |
| PRESS | Featured in Forbes, Barron’s, Vogue, Adweek, Digiday, Quartz, Men’s Journal and more. |
| THE BRIEF | 350+ episodes of the M7 Innovation Brief — six years running, every Thursday. |
KEYNOTE STAGES
| MAJOR STAGES | CES, SXSW, MIT, Brand Innovators, AdClubNY and more. |
| PRIVATE EVENTS | Executive keynotes and MC engagements for CHANEL, Cox Automotive, and Fortune 500 companies globally. |
WHAT MATT BELIEVES RIGHT NOW
THE TAKES
NOBODY
WANTS TO HEAR.
UNTIL THEY’RE RIGHT.
→
“The invisible consumer journey is already here. AI agents are buying products, browsing websites, and evaluating your brand right now, and they look exactly like humans to your analytics stack.”
(On Agentic AI, 2025)
→
“If you’re seeing 1% of traffic from AI-driven search and thinking about cutting your GEO strategy — that’s a false positive. It means the AI looked at your brand and decided not to send you the click. That’s the problem.”
(On AI-First Search, delivered to a Cox Automotive CMO)
→
“There is no AI wearable that will ever work until it is fashionable, functional, and feasible on price simultaneously. Watch out for the company that solves all three at once. Meta is currently winning that race.”
(On Spatial Computing, 2024, before Meta Ray-Bans sold 8 million units)
→
“Technological parity is here. The model you use matters less than the fact that you’re using something. The organizations that are still in horse-picking mode are going to lose.”
(On the AI Landscape, 2024)
→
“Zuckerberg is going to sell friendship. Attention is already a commodity. Genuine connection — even synthetic connection — is the next one. Subscription-model human relationships are closer than anyone wants to admit.”
(On the Future of Social, 2025)
SEEN & HEARD
ON THE WORLD’S
MOST IMPORTANT STAGES.
TELEVISION
I24 PRIMETIME
Live primetime television commentary on artificial intelligence, emerging technology, and the implications for global business, reaching millions of viewers across the i24 News international broadcast network.
Podcast
PIVOT WITH KARA SWISHER & SCOTT GALLOWAY
Featured guest on Pivot, Vox Media’s flagship technology and business podcast hosted by two of the most influential voices in media. A conversation about the next wave of emerging technology and what it means for brands and consumers.
Podcast
CAMPAIGN MODE
Deep dive on why gaming has become the new living room, mall, and arena, and what that means for every brand trying to reach the next generation of consumers on their terms.
Podcast
CONSTRUCTED FUTURES
Voice technology, augmented reality, and the transformation of the built environment and how the construction industry is being fundamentally reshaped by the same technologies reshaping luxury and retail.
Podcast
RETAIL REMIX
Hacking the social algorithm: a breakdown of how different platform algorithms work, what brands need to know about contextual commerce, and the dark patterns hiding inside every major social network.
Weekly Series
THE M7 INNOVATION BRIEF
Six years. 350+ episodes. Every Thursday, Matt distills thousands of signals into the sharpest 90 seconds in business: the three stories that matter most in media, technology, and innovation. Trusted by Fortune 500 CMOs who can’t afford to be wrong about what’s next.
What Happens Next
READY TO BRING MATT TO YOUR STAGE?
Every great keynote starts with a conversation. Whether you’re booking for a corporate offsite, an industry conference, or an executive leadership summit — Matt’s team responds within one business day.
Or reach Matt directly: Matt@m7innovations.co