Who Is Margot Duek Kalach? The Bilingual AI Keynote Speaker Executives Book to Hear What They Are Doing Wrong

 
Margot Duek Kalach is an AI keynote speaker and corporate trainer based in Mexico City who works in both English and Spanish. Over the past eighteen months she has spoken at Stripe Sessions in San Francisco, delivered the artificial intelligence keynote at the 30th Encuentro Empresarial of the Valparaíso Regional Chamber of Commerce in Chile, led leadership sessions at companies including Siemens, and hosted a SheBuilds experience with Lovable in Mexico City. She is a computer engineer from Tecnológico de Monterrey with an MBA, the founder of TRiAGE Business Health, and she still teaches at Tec de Monterrey.

She is also, by design, the AI speaker who tells the room not to buy AI yet.

"AI does not fix broken processes," she says. "It just makes broken processes happen faster."

Why Organizers Book Her

The AI speaking market is crowded with two kinds of talks. There is the futurist, who describes what is coming and leaves the room excited and unequipped. There is the vendor, whose keynote is a product demo wearing a keynote's clothes. Duek built her practice in the space between them, on the argument that the useful question is not which tool to adopt but which problem is actually costing the company money.

That position is unusual enough that event organizers tend to book her for the same reason: they want an artificial intelligence keynote that survives contact with a skeptical audience.

It has been tested. Presenting to Siemens leadership, Duek was citing the MIT finding that 95% of corporate AI pilots show no measurable return when an executive challenged her from the floor. The study, he argued, measures whether companies could prove ROI, not whether the projects worked. Some of those initiatives improved real operations and were simply never measured.

He was right, and she said so, on stage, in front of his colleagues.

"When someone attacks your data, they are finding out whether they can trust you," she says. "Conceding a point with judgment buys you more of a room than defending one without it."

Minutes later a second Siemens executive volunteered that his own team had used AI to cut a three day task to a day and a half and could not demonstrate the return. By the study's definition, a project that worked would be filed as one that failed.

The line that opened that room was not a statistic. It was this: "Most of your processes live inside one person's head." The executives laughed, then looked at each other.

The Stages

Duek's calendar is deliberately mixed, and she treats the range as a technical skill rather than a credential.

At Stripe Sessions 2026 in San Francisco, Stripe's flagship event, she hosted a workshop on AI implementation for an audience of founders and operators. She also leads Stripe Community Builders in Mexico City.

At the 30th Encuentro Empresarial of the Valparaíso Regional Chamber of Commerce in Viña del Mar, Chile, she delivered the artificial intelligence keynote to a two day gathering of roughly 1,500 business owners and executives, at an event opened by the President of Chile.

At Siemens, she worked with leadership teams. At SheBuilds with Lovable in Mexico City, hosted on International Women's Day, she worked with builders. At Platzi and at Lazos Internacional, she has spoken to technologists, students and business audiences respectively. At Tecnológico de Monterrey she is not a guest, she is faculty.

She has held a national marketing chapter presidency at CANACINTRA, Mexico's national chamber of industry, and co founded two Google Developer Groups communities in the country.

"Most speakers are good in one room," she says. "You can be excellent with founders and useless with a plant manager. The content is not what transfers. The examples are."

What The Talks Actually Contain

Duek's keynotes run on cases from her own consulting practice, which is the reason the examples land differently than borrowed ones.

A construction company had bought the best construction CRM on the market. The administrative staff loved it. Not one site supervisor used it, because using it required a specific Windows laptop, an internet connection, and time to sit down, on an industrial site due for delivery in under a month. The fix was not a better CRM. It was a WhatsApp style interface where supervisors message an agent in plain language, the agent validates the request against history, and the CRM fills itself. The owner discovered he had been running roughly a 30% deviation on spend that his margins had been quietly absorbing.

A uniform manufacturer with five salespeople asked her to bring in more leads. She looked at what happened to the leads they already had: three people would pile onto the same customer who was never going to buy, while the customer who was ready got nobody.

"You are pouring water into a bucket full of holes," she told them. "It is very satisfying to pour. Why do you want a fuller bucket?"

A third company was certain it had already built an AI ecosystem. What it had was a custom GPT wired to several disconnected platforms, breaking on every update, with exactly one employee who knew how to repair it.

"Ten disconnected systems are not an ecosystem," Duek says. "They are ten islands."

Who Her Audiences Are

Duek speaks to mid sized and large companies rather than to technology conferences alone, and the industries recur: manufacturing, construction, retail and ecommerce, lending and financial services, professional services, and chambers of commerce and business associations. She also works with universities and leadership programs.

Her framing for executive audiences avoids the subject most AI keynotes lead with. She does not sell headcount reduction.

"I want to help you do considerably more with the same payroll," she says. "Nobody needs another talk about who becomes unnecessary."

That framing is what makes her bookable for internal company events, where the audience is the workforce that would otherwise spend the hour wondering whether the speaker is there to justify a layoff.

The Practice Behind The Talks

Duek founded Al Chile Media in 2019, which went on to deliver more than 300 digital projects across Mexico and the United States as a certified Shopify, Google, and Replo partner. Her career includes roles at Twist Bioscience, PayPal, and Google. After generative AI emerged in 2022, she shifted toward automation and strategy, eventually founding TRiAGE Business Health.

TRiAGE applies medical triage principles to business, identifying the problems with the greatest financial impact before recommending technology. For a lending client, this meant moving intake to WhatsApp with automated document validation and follow-up, reducing a 30–60 day process to roughly three days.

“I am an AI strategist, not an AI expert,” Duek says. “I am extremely pro AI. I am against installing AI stupidly.”

Training, Not Just Speaking

Roughly half of Duek’s engagements are corporate training, including executive workshops and multi-session programs focused on real business operations. Her teaching philosophy is simple: “Use it well. If you hand me something generic, you fail.” She brings the same principle to leadership teams, emphasizing that access to new technology does not guarantee better results.

Forbes México profiled her in April 2026 for her argument that 95% of companies waste their AI investment. She also writes the Sin Anestesia newsletter, sharing insights from real company diagnostics, and reaches more than 50,000 people across YouTube, Instagram, and LinkedIn.

Booking Margot Duek Kalach as an AI speaker

Languages: English and Spanish, both at native level. She is one of relatively few AI keynote speakers who can deliver the same technical content to a Latin American and a United States audience without a translator.

Formats: 45 to 60 minute keynote, half day executive workshop, multi session corporate training program, panel and fireside conversation.

Delivery: in person and remote. Based in Mexico City, travels internationally.

Speaking topics: why most AI investments fail and how to sequence them correctly; diagnosis before deployment, the TRiAGE method; growing output without growing payroll; AI and human judgment at work; what the AI window of opportunity means for mid sized companies; building AI systems that employees actually use.

Best suited for: business conferences, chambers of commerce and industry associations, internal leadership summits, corporate training programs, university and executive education audiences.

Selected stages: Stripe Sessions 2026, San Francisco. 30th Encuentro Empresarial, Valparaíso Regional Chamber of Commerce, Chile. Siemens leadership sessions. SheBuilds with Lovable, Mexico City. Púrpura Summit. Platzi. Lazos Internacional. Tecnológico de Monterrey.

Margot Duek Kalach is the founder of TRiAGE Business Health, Al Chile Media and Converging Works. To book her as an AI keynote speaker or for corporate training, contact contacto@margotduek.com or visit margotduek.com. Also at triagebh.com, convergingworks.com, LinkedIn, Instagram and YouTube.