Kerri O'Neill - Chief People Officer
Kerri O'Neill is a global expert in optimizing organizations through culture, talent, and large-scale technology-driven transformation. Over more than two decades she has built a reputation for being first into the territory others were still mapping — and for translating what comes next into change inside organizations at pace.
Kerri is Chief People Officer at Ipsos UK & Ireland and its Global AI Workforce Transformation Lead. Ipsos is an over $2bn revenue global leader in market research and insight operating in over 90 countries. She sits on the UK CIPD AI Advisory Board and is named one of HR's 30 Most Influential leaders.
Her career has been built in the rooms where culture has to hold under real pressure. At Ofcom she stood up the UK's online safety regulatory capability from scratch - hiring 450 people into a category of work no one had done before, framing the build around Bletchley Park as the model of urgent, radically diverse, never-been-done-before work. At House of Fraser she led the people and communications side of one of the most high-profile corporate takeovers in Retail of the last decade, transferring 12,000 colleagues into Sports Direct under intense public scrutiny. At Aviva she built one of the FTSE 100's earliest People Analytics functions, the first global Diversity and Inclusion role, and led the Corporate Social Responsibility brief across Asia while managing a variety of mergers, acquisitions and joint venture start ups.
Kerri's method is evidence-based, commercially fluent, and consistently ahead of the curve. She uses research at the leading edge of her field, holds a global network that surfaces trends before they reach the mainstream, and reads a P&L as fluently as she reads a culture. As a member of the CIPD AI Advisory Board, she champions ethical innovation — proving that technology and humanity can, and must, coexist.
She is a Trustee and Honorary Officer of Oxfam GB, where she chairs the Remuneration Committee, fighting inequality with a vision for a radically kinder and fairer world. She is a Fellow of the CIPD, a qualified Executive Coach and Mentor, and a member of the Institute of Leadership.
Rapid Reculturing — co-written with Alex Bailey and published by Wiley in July 2026 across New York, London and Singapore — is the book Kerri wishes she had had at the start of every transformation she has led. It argues that culture is strategic infrastructure, not a soft function, and that leaders can shift it deliberately and at pace.
Kerri lives in Surrey, England.
