David delivers enrichment TED-style talks to international audiences across cruise programs and live events.
“David Bunney is an enrichment speaker and storyteller for luxury and premium cruise lines — Celebrity, Royal Caribbean, Princess and soon Silversea — with story-led talks on living smarter, staying safe online, and understanding AI and change.”
Speaking Experience
Experience includes major cruise lines such as Celebrity Cruises, Royal Caribbean International, and Princess Cruises.
- Cruise ship enrichment programs
- International and multi-national audiences
- Theatre-style and lecture hall delivery
- Topics spanning AI, digital trust, lifestyle, and change
Trusted By
Enrichment TED-syle Talks 2027 Season
The following talks are currently available and can be adapted to suit audience and program requirements.
1. I Built a Woman Who Doesn’t Exist
The honest AI briefing
In 1972, David stood in a room with forty typists. Fifty years later he built a colleague who doesn’t exist — Leigh, an AI persona now followed by thousands of people. This is the true story of what artificial intelligence really is, from someone who uses it every day at his kitchen table: no hype, no jargon, and one revelation you’ll be talking about at dinner. AI, it turns out, is a power tool — made by humans, for humans. Not magic, and not a monster.
2. Who’s Actually Trying to Rob You?
Cyber-safety for travellers
The most practically useful hour of the voyage. David reveals how the people most targeted by online crime — successful, trusting travellers — actually get taken, and the small set of habits that turns you from an easy mark into a hard target. Told through real stories rather than warnings, it’s cyber-safety you’ll actually remember, because the idea underneath it is simple: trust is not a feeling, it’s a procedure.
3. Freer, Not Younger
Technology and a richer later life
A 92-year-old who mislays his car keys but FaceTimes his family every Sunday. This is a warm, personal talk about what technology genuinely gives back to people who have already earned their time — smarter travel, better health, more connection — and what to happily ignore. The rule David lives by: a tool earns its place only if it buys back time, health, connection or independence. Everything else is just a toy.
4. The Tow Truck and the Four-Year-Old
Change and reinvention
In 1994, a tow truck came for the family car while David’s four-year-old son watched it go. This is the story of what happened next — losing everything, and building it back — and what forty-five years of falling and getting up teaches about landing on your feet. Drawing on the psychology of change and a life that proves it, it’s an honest, hopeful talk built on a single idea: you can’t choose the wave, you can only choose your footing. And reinvention has no age limit.
5. The Week the Music Stopped
Real revolutions vs bubbles
In March 2000, David was chairing the due-diligence committee for a technology IPO — in the very week the market crashed. This is the inside story of a boom and a bust, and a clear-eyed guide to telling a genuine revolution from a bubble, from a man who has read a prospectus from inside one. The lesson that reframes everything, including today’s AI boom: the technology and the bubble can both be real at once — the skill is telling the shovel-sellers from the dream-sellers.
6. Why Is the Robot Late?
What the future really holds
Everyone was promised a driverless, robot-run future that never quite arrives on schedule. Why? David answers through the story of an inventor whose 1880s engine was proven right by modern materials — and still isn’t in production, because physics and patience don’t read press releases. A grounded, optimistic look at what is genuinely coming in AI and what is just noise, with one idea to carry off the ship: the future arrives twice — first as a headline, then as a habit. Wait for the habit.
7. Everything She Cannot Do
What keeps us human
David built a convincing artificial person (Leigh Roams) and explains what the machines will never touch. Leigh can generate warmth, but she cannot mean it; she cannot keep a forty-year promise, sit with a dying friend, or risk anything at all. A moving, human talk about wisdom, loyalty, judgement and meaning in the age of intelligent machines — and why they matter more, not less, as the technology improves. The closing thought: AI raises the price of everything it cannot do.
About David Bunney
David Bunney is an enrichment speaker, author and storyteller who helps audiences live smarter and stay human in a fast-changing world. He tells true stories about people, technology and change — calm, clear and free of jargon — drawn from a life of building, losing and rebuilding: from a room of forty typists in 1972, to chairing a technology IPO, to building AI personas in his sixties from a small town in Vietnam. An Australian who has delivered enrichment talks across Celebrity, Royal Caribbean and Princess, and who joins Silversea’s Silver Muse in January 2027, David’s sessions are informative, reassuring, and impossible to copy from a slide deck — because the life is the demonstration.
Speaking enquiries & availability:
speaking@davidbunney.com
Dates or itinerary (if known)