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Richard Lui

Keynote Speaker

Network Breaking News Anchor, CNN Worldwide and NBC News Group; Citibank Fintech and AI Founder; Care Economy Thought Leader

Richard Lui’s rare and eclectic career mix offers the trust, expertise, and context executive leaders need across boardrooms, technology and AI, public policy, media, culture, and health and care sectors.

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Richard Lui Profile Photo

RARE VOICE: Where Oil and Water Mix

A Peabody- and Murrow-winning Breaking News Anchor, Richard Lui made history as the first Asian American male to anchor a daily national news program, securing major interviews with newsmakers from U.S. Presidents to Nvidia’s Jensen Huang over a two-decade career on CNN Worldwide and NBC News Group. What brings him credibility with executive audiences is the extensive operating career behind that global platform: banking, strategy, fintech, AI, board service, public communications, policy, and global journalism. His business career spans four economic cycles and six company launches, including a Citibank-incubated payment backbone, strategy consulting at Oliver Wyman/Marsh, a deep-learning ABM exit, and CAREGenome’s AI data infrastructure. Lui brings leaders an operator’s lens on trust, capital, culture, technology, and public decision-making when those pressures collide.

RECOGNIZED PLATFORM—Global Brands, Institutions, and Executive Convenings

Lui brings a platform programmers can place in front of senior audiences. He has appeared in mainstage programming at the World Economic Forum/Davos, SXSW, Milken Institute Global Conference, CES, Cannes Lions, and United Nations General Assembly events. Across 500+ business events worldwide, he has worked across sectors, regions, generations, and politics; served as an ambassador for national and global institutions; earned Peabody and Murrow awards; and delivered work carried in every major U.S. city and more than 200 countries and territories.

NONPARTISAN TRUST—Mixed Rooms and Sensitive Stakeholder Issues

Lui built his public profile outside opinion programming, as a straight-news broadcaster trained to hold facts, tone, and context under pressure. He gives mixed rooms a balanced voice with public credibility and private-sector context, which matters for companies, funds, family offices, universities, associations, and institutions that need substance without partisan drift. His work includes nearly two decades of U.S. State Department speaking, German Marshall Fund and UN Women roles, and coverage of five U.S. presidential elections, five international elections, EU policy, civil unrest, and institutional pressure across political lines. 

EXECUTIVE ROOM COMMAND—Structure, Pace, Humor, and Human Connection

Across two decades of live national breaking-news coverage, Lui has anchored unscripted for up to six continuous hours, making editorial and operational decisions in real time before millions of viewers. That pressure trained him to manage time, tone, incomplete facts, and public scrutiny at once. On stage, the same discipline shows up as structure, pace, room awareness, and human connection. Humor serves the room; it never replaces the work.

PRACTICAL ACUMEN—Tools for Crisis, Culture, and Narrative

Lui gives audiences tools for decisions under scrutiny. His crisis work covers fact control, figure validation, visual framing, sensitive language, VVIP exposure, legal preparation, scenario planning, and crisis-team design. His narrative work helps leaders test what stakeholders will hear before they speak. His care work began with a decade traveling cross-country to care for his father and mother, then grew into films, a HarperCollins book, ambassador roles with AARP and the Alzheimer’s Association, Startup Health’s Caregiving Moonshot, and CAREGenome. He connects that lived experience to employee reality: benefits, ERGs, veterans, women, disability groups, managers, and family demands. The through line is action: clearer language, better decisions, and next steps the organization can use.

Featured Videos

Richard Lui Profile Photo
Richard Lui

Richard Lui On His Father’s Alzheimers Diagnosis – The Power Of Selflessness

Richard Lui Profile Photo
Richard Lui

Richard Lui Speaking Reel

Richard Lui Profile Photo
Richard Lui

Getting to Know Richard Lui

Richard Lui Profile Photo
Richard Lui

Richard Lui at the Aspen Institute Keynote State of Race Symposium

Richard Lui Profile Photo
Richard Lui

Richard Lui at the German Marshall Fund Brussels Forum

Richard Lui Profile Photo
Richard Lui

Richard Lui at the United Nations: State of the World’s Fathers

Richard Lui Profile Photo
Richard Lui

Richard Lui Commencement Speech at the Illinois College of Optometry

Richard Lui Profile Photo
Richard Lui

Richard Lui Commencement Speech at the Illinois College of Optometry

Richard Lui On His Father’s Alzheimers Diagnosis – The Power Of Selflessness

Richard Lui Speaking Reel

Getting to Know Richard Lui

Richard Lui at the Aspen Institute Keynote State of Race Symposium

Richard Lui at the German Marshall Fund Brussels Forum

Richard Lui at the United Nations: State of the World’s Fathers

Richard Lui Commencement Speech at the Illinois College of Optometry

Richard Lui’s Speech Topics

  • EXECUTIVE PRESENCE: Media-Informed Trust and Stakeholder Capital

    Family offices, founders, funds, and boards protect value by protecting trust. Richard Lui shows leaders how to navigate reputation risk, succession moments, public scrutiny, employee pressure, political divides, and media attention before they harden into enterprise or family-enterprise risk. He draws from board service, fintech and AI operating roles, Republican and Democratic relationship capital, U.S. State Department speaker work, and closed-door briefings across the White House, U.S. Congress, UN, and EU. As a 20-year breaking-news anchor across CNN Worldwide, NBC News Group, and Channel NewsAsia, Lui has not only led live coverage of elections, conflicts, and cultural flashpoints, but has also gathered best practices from over a dozen leading network anchor coaches and shares these inside methods in detail with participants. He gives executives a practical framework to frame decisions, convene stakeholders, sharpen presence, and move the narrative before others define it.

  • CRISIS LEADERSHIP: A Breaking News Anchor’s 10 Steps to Decisions and Productive Outcomes

    Richard Lui shows leaders the inside practices for handling crises he learned as the longest-serving Breaking News Anchor in network news (CNN Worldwide, NBC News Group), then translates them into business-sector applications from the other half of his career. Drawing on board service, fintech and AI operating roles, and narrative strategy, Lui’s 10-step method helps executives lock the fact base, validate figures, frame visuals, structure the crisis story, govern sensitive terms, map VVIP exposure, choose words under legal and market scrutiny, run scenarios, build layered legal strategies, and design crisis teams. In this training, participants will learn the insider methods and techniques that Lui has learned from over a dozen leading network anchor coaches over the years. For two decades, Lui has turned live uncertainty across elections, wars, terror attacks, disasters, market shocks, unrest, and cultural flashpoints into ordered decisions and usable action.

  • CARE AT WORK: A New Kind of Leadership Employees Want

    Every company has caregivers, and most of them are carrying it quietly. This program gives leaders a different way to bring care into the room: through shared language, visible manager actions, and practical steps that strengthen trust, retention, and productivity. Richard Lui did not set out to become a caregiving authority when he began traveling from New York to California three times a month to care for his father and mother. That decade reshaped his work: two Oscar-qualifying films on caregiving and mental health, a HarperCollins book, ambassador roles with AARP and the Alzheimer’s Association, and CAREGenome, a University of Michigan spatial AI initiative focused on the care economy. After bringing this conversation to Silicon Valley, Wall Street, WEF/Davos, and Milken Global Conference, Lui gives organizations a different business conversation, connecting veterans, women, disability groups, caregivers, managers, and employees, carrying what work does not always see.

  • STRATEGIC MODERATOR: Executive Conversations to Defining Personal Moments

    Richard Lui helps hosts turn high-stakes programs into business assets: increasing commercial value, expanding influence, offsetting gaps, underlining strengths, and moving the room toward practical outcomes. A globally sought moderator with nearly two decades as a U.S. State Department international speaker, he has led more than 1,000 events, firesides, panels, workshops, and executive forums for Fortune 500 companies, multinationals, think tanks, institutions, and sector leaders. His work spans WEF/Davos, Milken, CES, SXSW, Cannes Lions, the White House, U.S. Congress, the UN, and the European Parliament. A leading financial services executive described his advantage as “connecting one-on-one with each person in the room,” making small rooms feel consequential and large rooms feel personal.

  • WHY AI: Methods for Balancing Hype, Hope, and Humans

    Many audiences know Richard Lui as network television’s longest-serving Breaking News Anchor. Fewer know his fluency in AI comes from the operating side: leading marketing and business development at Mariana, a first-generation deep-learning ABM company that exited in 2018; building CAREGenome, a University of Michigan spatial AI dataset for the care economy; and developing NewsAINet, a governed news-industry data model for AI. That arc builds on three technology cycles he has worked through: pre-web enterprise systems, the dot-com boom and bust, and today’s AI/data infrastructure wave. As a media expert with access to senior political, business, and cultural decision-makers, Lui gives leaders a practical view of AI as promise and disruption, not a trend: three ways to ready workforces, methods for explaining urgency without panic, language that inspires without overpromising, and a map of untapped human-centered AI applications that build trust, strengthen culture, and support business strategy.

Works by Richard Lui

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