Amanda Slavin

Business adviser, Business leader, Connector, Consultant, Educator/Teacher, Entrepreneur, Idea generator, Inventor, Philanthropist, Social entrepreneur, Startup, World traveler

Amanda Slavin is the Founder of SOFIA Lab, developed in collaboration with Oxford Saïd Business School, where she explores how human experience shapes the future of artificial intelligence. Her work builds on over twenty years across education, media, and technology, studying how people engage, learn, and make meaning. She holds a Master’s in Curriculum and Instruction and is the author of the best selling book The Seventh Level, where she introduced a proprietary engagement methodology used across learning and organizational environments. That methodology has evolved into open source technology and systems that translate human behavior, attention, and motivation into how intelligent systems are designed and applied in the real world. She is also the cohost of the podcast From the Culture, with Fast Company where she explores how internal culture shapes the way people build, lead, and relate to one another, reflecting the same questions she brings into her work with intelligence. Amanda has worked with organizations including Google, Coca Cola, American Express, and Zappos, and is a Cannes Lion award winning community designer and a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree. She has spoken at the United Nations, TEDx, and stages around the world.

I care about how people experience themselves inside the systems around them. Through SOFIA Lab, that shows up as work across education, media, and technology, exploring how intelligence can better understand attention, behavior, and lived experience.

We are building intelligence at the same time we are still learning what it means to be human. For a long time, the systems around us rewarded clarity, speed, and right answers. Many of us learned how to perform those things well. Fewer of us learned how to stay connected to ourselves while doing it. Now we are designing systems that learn from us. They absorb how we think, what we value, how we make decisions. So the question becomes very simple. What parts of being human are we teaching them to understand. There are ways of knowing that come from lived experience. From listening. From paying attention to what is felt and what is unsaid. From being in relationship with other people and with the world around us. Those ways of knowing have often been overlooked because they are harder to measure. And yet they are the ones that guide how we navigate uncertainty, how we care for each other, and how we make decisions that shape real lives.

Education, Education in Gaming, Engagement, Engagement Success, Future of Learning, Learning Success, Masters in Curriculum and Instruction

I notice small shifts. I can feel when someone disconnects. When they lean in. When something lands. That comes from years of working directly with children and learners and in marketing. It’s what my entire life’s work is based on. It is still how I work now.