Fabrizio Gramuglio

Catch Fabrizio on DO Radio: Where To Next? with Mike Warwick from 16th - 22nd November 2026.

Fabrizio Gramuglio is an Italian AI strategist, educator and systems designer whose work asks whether businesses truly benefit the people they serve. For fifteen years he has validated business models for investors, founders, institutes and the European Commission - including six years as an expert evaluator of AI, VR and XR projects for Horizon Europe - and somewhere after the first hundred, he stopped listening to what the plans promised and started asking whether a company's revenue rises or falls with the wellbeing of its users. Too often, he found, the customer sat in the far corner of the business model, a cog that made the money possible - like the gym whose best member is the one who pays in January and never shows up.

The Compassion Economy was born from what he calls "a very enlightened failure": a design sprint at a Buddhist temple with Jun Suto that didn't produce the business model he'd hoped for. Unable to let it go, Fabrizio went back to first principles, drawing on game theory, system dynamics and the Nobel Prize-winning work of Elinor Ostrom to build a framework that shifts a business's focus from delivery, to outcome, to genuine personal utility. At its heart are eight "inconvenient questions" - seven distilled from Ostrom's study of more than eight hundred self-governing commons, the eighth his own: does a system grow by federating communities, or by bloating a single one? He tested them on his own idea first, and it failed too. The resulting book, developed with the One Earth group, runs to 160 pages, a quarter of them references - because, as a self-confessed "boring guy" from science, he believes everything he says should be validated.

Alongside it, Fabrizio sits on the steering committee of the UN's AI for Good Skill Coalition, working to democratise AI education, and co-founded Exponential Coaching International, teaching AI to C-suite leaders and government ministries. He advises Abacus, a start-up bringing identity and banking to sub-Saharan Africa - "feeding two pigeons with one fava bean," as he puts it - and is piloting a karma-based giving economy in which volunteering pays your bills and hoarded karma slowly loses value. "I'm not asking you to be good," he says. "I'm building a system that kindly forces you to be good."

In conversation with Mike, Fabrizio unpicks B Corp purpose-washing, social media's slot machines for children and the hollow promise of the creator economy - and tells the story of a holographic alien who arrived in classrooms in Italy, Switzerland and the US asking for help, only for the children to start teaching it history, maths and human emotion, and then bring it food and clothes. Along the way he makes the case that the most radical thing a company can do is write compassion into the one line of its business plan nobody is allowed to change.