Keynote unfolds in parallel timelines. Onstage, a charismatic CEO addresses an eager crowd, praising innovation, culture, and teamwork during a high-stakes product launch. Meanwhile, offstage and unseen, we follow a mix of employees whose lives are the foundation that keeps the company alive. 

An office worker survives on takeout and late nights, a commuter head-bangs to metal in gridlocked traffic, a parent struggles to get their kids out the door while replying to emails, a new hire spills coffee orders in an elevator, and another employee sleeps in their car between meetings. Each vignette captures the mundane, frustrating, and occasionally comedic reality of modern work life.

 As the CEO’s speech grows more grand and abstract, the film cuts rhythmically between polished rhetoric and lived experience, between applause and silence, spectacle and exhaustion. Though the characters never meet directly, their labor is interconnected; each role quietly supports the next. Keynote ultimately reframes success not as a singular vision delivered from a stage, but as a fragile ecosystem held together by unseen human effort.