Cathy Hackl

Cathy Hackl is a globally recognized technology futurist, executive, and author widely known as the "Godmother of the Metaverse." Over two decades she has moved between the newsroom, the boardroom, and the frontier of immersive technology — an unusually operator-grounded futurist whose predictions come from having helped build the products she talks about.

She began in broadcast media, with an Emmy-nominated career spanning CNN, Discovery, and ABC News, before moving into technology. There she held senior and leadership roles at HTC VIVE, Magic Leap, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) — three of the most important companies in extended reality and cloud — giving her a rare inside view of how immersive and spatial technologies actually get built and adopted. She went on to found her own spatial-computing and AI consultancy and co-found the metaverse strategy firm Journey, and today advises global brands — among them Nike, Ralph Lauren, Walmart, Louis Vuitton, and Clinique — as an external partner at Boston Consulting Group.

Hackl is the author of five books, most recently _Spatial Computing: An AI-Driven Business Revolution_ (Wiley, 2024), a definitive business guide to the spatial-computing era ushered in by devices like the Apple Vision Pro. Her earlier titles include Into the Metaverse, Navigating the Metaverse, The Augmented Workforce, and Marketing New Realities.

Named to the Thinkers50 Radar, Big Think's "top 10 most influential women in technology," Forbes' most-powerful-women coverage, and Vogue Business' 100 Innovators, she is a World Economic Forum agenda contributor and one of the most-booked technology keynoters in the world — hosting the inaugural AI House at CES and speaking everywhere from Harvard Business School and MIT to SXSW and Davos. She presents fluently in both English and Spanish.