Mo Gawdat
Bestselling author and former Chief Business Officer of Google X
Mo Gawdat is the former Chief Business Officer at Google X, a five-time international bestselling author, founder of the One Billion Happy movement, and co-founder of Emma.love. With a career spanning 27 years at IBM, NCR, Microsoft, and Google, Mo helped launch close to half of Google’s global operations, and later led business strategy at Google X, home of projects like self-driving cars, Project Loon, and Makani. Driven by a passion for solving humanity’s biggest challenges, Mo has co-founded more than 20 companies and mentored countless startups.
Following the loss of his son Ali, he developed the happiness model at the heart of his bestselling book Solve for Happy (2017), sparking his global mission to make one billion people happy. He went on to launch Slo Mo: A Podcast with Mo Gawdat (2020), now a leading mental health podcast. His book Scary Smart (2021) predicted the rise of AI, gaining renewed recognition with the release of ChatGPT in 2022 and establishing him as one of the world’s most respected AI experts. He followed this with That Little Voice in Your Head (2022), Unstressable (2024), and Alive (2025), all international bestsellers.
His latest project is Emma.love, a group of advanced AI systems designed to address one of the modern world’s greatest challenges – finding and keeping genuine love – while at the same time teaching AI about what makes us most deeply human: the way we love.