Nikki May
Chief Creative OfficerNikki May is a creative strategist, disruptive thinker, and marketing and communications leader working at the intersection of how stories and systems can shape a better future. She is the Global Communications Advisor to the International Women’s Forum, headquartered in Washington D.C., and was the founding Communications Director for International Women’s Forum Australia. Through her company Invisible Inc, Nikki works pro bono as a ghostwriter for emerging leaders, and mentors entrepreneurs through the annual Leadership Fellows Program run in partnership with Harvard and INSEAD.
Having completed the Oxford Artificial Intelligence Programme (2024), Nikki brings a deeply practical and human‑centred approach to AI. She leads Future Leadership’s hands‑on agent builds and is the UX and insights lead for the Future Leadership Insights (FLI) technology platform, ensuring AI systems are designed around real human behaviour, ethical judgement, and explainable AI (XAI). She is responsible for establishing the guardrails, governance frameworks, and ethical boundaries that underpin AI use across the firm, with a clear focus on trust, accountability, and bias mitigation.
Before joining Future Leadership, Nikki led creative and brand strategy for luxury and global organisations including C2 headquartered in Montreal, Abercrombie & Kent, Yering Station, and Rathbone Wine Group, alongside delivering campaigns for several United Nations agencies and Al Jazeera while living and working across South‑East Asia, headquartered in Myanmar. During this time, she founded Myanmar’s first all‑female pop group to advocate for free speech, a campaign that landed the group in Hollywood and contributed to the lifting of national censorship laws.
At Future Leadership, Nikki oversees brand, marketing, communications, product design, and firm‑wide AI implementation. She is deeply committed to improving diversity at leadership tables globally and to ensuring that, in an age of accelerating automation, organisations invest just as deliberately in human judgement, courage, and care.
Nikki has freshly returned from a year sailing around the world with her two children, large dog, and sea-captain husband, and now lives by the beach in Australia.
