Flexible Futures 2026

Greg Jackson CBE is the founder and CEO of Octopus Energy Group, the UK's largest energy supplier and a global energy and technology company that's driving the affordable, green energy system of the future.

Octopus is innovating relentlessly to make energy better for consumers and the planet. It now serves 11 million customers globally, including 7.8 million in the UK, and runs rapidly expanding retail operations across France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Japan, further fuelling international growth.

Operating across 27 countries, the Group manages a £7 billion renewables portfolio and leads thriving businesses in EV leasing, heat pumps, and solar. It has attracted over $3 billion worth of funding from international energy companies, large pension funds and global investors.

Greg is a thought leader on innovation and energy and a serial tech unicorn founder – a rare feat among British entrepreneurs. He has built two tech giants – Octopus Energy and Kraken – which are both valued at billions of dollars. He built and sold a number of successful businesses before starting Octopus and is an angel investor in a wide range of start-ups.

In 2024, Greg was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) and named one of TIME magazine's 100 Most Influential Climate Leaders. He was appointed a Non-Executive Member of the Cabinet Office Board in 2025.

Ms Anna Carolina Tortora, an Italian/Colombian/Canadian MIT alumna in Aerospace Engineering, is the Head of AI, Innovation and Sector Digitalisation for NESO (National Energy System Operator).

Her mission is to accelerate the UK's system decarbonisation to meet Net Zero targets through new digital solutions and grid technologies. She also leads the Virtual Energy System, NESO’s programme to develop the energy system’s data sharing infrastructure.

Before NESO, Carolina led the deployment of Europe's largest high voltage connected storage plants at Terna Spa in Rome, earning worldwide recognition.

Carolina is a senior advisor to promising battery start-ups and a recipient of numerous honours, including being a 2017 TEDxRome speaker and one of Italy’s Top 40 under forty managers in 2016.

Carolina splits her time between NESO, her peloton bike, running, family and friends.

Tim Harford is a world-renowned behavioural economist, award-winning Financial Times columnist, data detective and BBC broadcaster. Described as ‘Britain’s Malcolm Gladwell’ (and as "a genius at telling stories that illuminate our world" by Gladwell himself), and by the New Statesman as ‘perhaps the best popular economics writer in the world’, Tim brings storytelling, humour, insight and intelligence to the world of data, work and statistics.

His long-running Radio 4 show and podcast More or Less looks at the truth behind the dubious statistics and manipulated figures making the news, whilst his Cautionary Tales podcast is a journey through stories of human error and its unexpected impact, with guests including Russell Tovey and Alan Cumming. He’s also presented the popular Fifty Things That Made The Modern Economy series (and wrote the accompanying books) and, in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, he hosted How To Vaccinate The World. On television, he wrote and fronted Channel 4’s examination of the nation’s financial challenges in Skint: The Truth Behind Britain's Broken Economy.