About Benoît Vancauwenberghe
Generational Expert & Keynote Speaker
Benoît Vancauwenberghe has spent much of his career trying to understand younger generations, not from a distance, but by finding ways to get closer to how they actually live, think, work, and see the world.
In 2009, he co-founded 20something, a pioneering agency built around a simple reversal: instead of asking young people to intern at an agency and learn how the industry worked, the agency would learn from them. Client briefs were handed directly to teams of young people, who developed their own responses alongside senior professionals. The point wasn’t to observe youth through a focus group or a research report, but to give them responsibility, listen to how they approached a problem, and see what happened when established ways of thinking met a different perspective. More than 500 young people eventually passed through the program, marking the beginning of Benoît’s fascination with the gap between how generations are described and how they actually behave.
After COVID-19 made that model difficult to reproduce, he searched for another way to stay close to the generation he was trying to understand, a search that eventually brought him to Barcelona. Today, Benoît divides his time between Brussels and Barcelona, where he live in a co-living house shared largely with students and young professionals from across Europe. Every few months, new residents arrive, bringing different backgrounds, languages, ambitions, anxieties, habits, and expectations. Benoît cooks with them, shares breakfast, listens to their conversations, and watches them leave for their first jobs and return from difficult days. It offers something surveys alone cannot: proximity. That proximity doesn’t replace research; it gives it context.
As a generational strategist and international keynote speaker, Benoît travels across Europe and beyond, challenging leaders to structurally rethink the generations entering their organizations and markets. He works with executive teams, HR leaders, marketers, and educators to decode the cultural shifts happening beneath the surface and what those shifts mean for staying relevant in the decade ahead. Across keynotes, workshops, strategy sessions, and countless conversations with young people along the way, his role has increasingly become one of translation: between the boardroom and the kitchen table; between what leaders think they are communicating and what younger people actually hear; between behaviors that look irrational from one side of a generational divide and entirely logical from the other.
In 2026, he published his book “The Gen Z Shift,” along with its French counterpart, “Le Choc de la Gen Z.” The Spanish edition is set to follow in the spring of 2027.
