Picture Prosecutor (Thomas Palmer) @HonestPix

On Monday, I argued in Forbes that we've been handing AI's most consequential decisions to the wrong department — treating adoption as an engineering problem when it has always been a leadership one. On Wednesday, The Economist reported that the AI labs agree. They're now hiring philosophers, not engineers, to teach their models deontology and consequentialism — the old, hard distinction between rules that must never be broken and outcomes that must be weighed. Here's what neither piece says outright: you can train a machine in every moral philosophy ever written, and it will still be a machine calculating a 98 percent certainty. What it cannot calculate is the Moral Anomaly — the hesitation, the detail a human notices that the algorithm classifies as noise. That hesitation has a name. I call it the Human Veto. It isn't a feature you install. It's the reason you stay in the room. The engineers built the instrument. The judgment was always going to have to come from somewhere else. #TheVirtuosoMachine #AI #HumanJudgment #Leadership #FutureOfWork

The 2026 Forbes Global 2000 is out — and the scoreboard confirms it: AI is now the single biggest driver of corporate value creation. AI-linked firms are 10% of the list but account for 57% of its market-value gains this year. But the real signal isn't Nvidia or CoreWeave — it's who else made the climb: Rio Tinto (copper), Nucor (steel), Comfort Systems and Vertiv (cooling and power for data centers). None of them write code. All of them are now AI infrastructure. AI is often described as "everywhere" — ambient, in the cloud, untethered. But it's actually one of the most physically demanding technologies humans have ever built. It doesn't levitate. It needs a place. Someone has to find the land, secure the water rights for cooling, negotiate the power contract, pour the foundation. The lesson for leaders: AI strategy isn't just a software decision. It's land, water rights, power contracts, concrete — and the companies that understand that are the ones moving up the list.

@DrMarioRGarcia Bravo, Mario! Superb and timely essay!

am honored to have my essay, "Stop Giving AI to the Engineers," published today on Forbes.com. The argument is simple, and I believe it's urgent: artificial intelligence is not, at its core, a technology problem. It's a humanities problem. We keep handing AI to IT departments and engineering faculties as if intelligence were only a matter of computation. But the hardest questions in AI — how to interpret ambiguous intent, how to recognize grief or irony, how to decide what a system should value and protect — have always belonged to anthropologists, philosophers, journalists, and storytellers. The engineers built the instrument. Only the humanists understand what it must play. This piece grew out of conversations in newsrooms, boardrooms, and classrooms across four continents — and out of the thinking behind my forthcoming book, The Virtuoso Machine: Finding the Scent of the Human at the Controls of AI (Forbes Books, 2027). Link: forbes.com/sites/forbesbo…

When the grandparents of Artificial intelligence created that fabulous tool that we use today, they were thinking to give us a machine that thinks with you, the human, NOT at all a machine that thought for you. Their ambition: one day the ideal situation would be a machine that would handle everything mechanical about thinking—the retrieval, the calculation, the sorting—so that the human partnership could concentrate entirely on what machines couldn’t touch: insight, ethics, the willingness to be wrong in interesting ways and matters of taste. That ambition has now arrived at our doorstep. The machine and the human speaking to each other—in real time, in natural language, in the full complexity of human intent—creates an urgent demand for what may be the most consequential new literacy of our age. We are all now practicing the gymnastics of the mind. The ability to think with the machine, to lead it, to push back against it, and to know—with the authority of a conductor raising a baton—precisely when to say yes, and when to say no. And, above all, to scent our prompts—to ensure that every word we type carries the full weight of our humanity, the authority of our senses, and the unmistakable signature of a mind that no algorithm can replicate. The future is about machine/human collaboration, with the humans at the control of AI.

Sunday morning. Coffee hot. Shoes off. Phone face-down. That's the only way to read what The New York Times delivered this week — a breathtaking special section inviting you to slow down and truly look at works of art spread across magnificent broadsheet pages. Many think printed newspapers are a thing of the past. I disagree. And this section is my evidence. Large photos. Meditative pace. Zero interruptions. The lean-back experience at its finest — and something your mobile phone, for all its brilliance, simply cannot give you. My Sunday blog is up. Come slow down with me. 🔗garciamedia.com/blog/when-nobo…

I try to teach the younger generation maturing in the age of AI that their value doesn't lie in being a walking database—AI won that round. Their value lies in the things that cannot be coded: The scars: AI has never failed, it never had a broken heart, never had to rebuild itself from scratch. The lived experience: AI can describe a bustling newsroom in Buenos Aires or Singapore, but it has never witnessed or smelled the scent of human collaboration under a midnight deadline. The biography: No algorithm can replicate the specific lens through which you view a page, a screen, or a story. You have been a witness to life. AI is just reading the script.

The New York Times did something radical last Sunday. They published a section with no page numbers, no push notifications, no algorithm deciding what you see next. Just art. Just space. Just you. In my next book, The Virtuoso Machine, I argue that AI's greatest challenge isn't technical — it's human. The real question isn't what AI can do. It's what we choose to protect. The Times section — inspired by a Harvard professor who assigns students to stare at a single painting for three hours — is a quiet act of resistance. It says: your attention belongs to you. Not to the feed. Not to the ding. Not to the endless scroll. That is the Scent of the Human. It is the deliberate, unhurried, embodied gaze that no algorithm can optimize for. The lean-back moment when you take your shoes off, put the phone face-down, and let a two-foot broadsheet spread wash over you like a painting in a museum. AI can curate. AI can recommend. AI can even generate art. But AI cannot look. Not the way Jennifer Roberts's students look. Not the way you look on a Sunday morning, coffee in hand, surrendered to the page. That capacity — to choose slowness in a fast world — is your last great superpower. Read the blog. Then practice it. ☕ 🔗 garciamedia.com/blog/when-nobo…

Nobody does it like print. 🗞️✨ The @nytimes dropped a special section Sunday that stopped me cold — giant works of art sprawling across broadsheet pages. No page numbers. No notifications. Just: look. Your phone can do a lot. It cannot do THIS. New blog post on the lean-back experience only print delivers 👇 🔗 garciamedia.com/blog/when-nobo…]

Alan Hunter called the future of AI journalism "foggy" — and admitted I left him more confused, not less, when I talked about "the scent of the human." Fair enough, Alan. So I wrote him a proper answer. What does that phrase actually mean? It's not nostalgia. It's not sentiment. It's the reporter who noticed, on day seven in the courtroom, that the defendant's hands stopped shaking. It's the editor who knew the headline was technically accurate but emotionally false. In an age when AI can produce a thousand competent versions of any story, the one that carries a human being's presence will be the one worth paying for. New post — link in comments. In my weekend blog: garciamedia.com/blog/what-the-…

You spent three hours learning to prompt AI. How much time did you spend learning to reject it? Zero. That's the problem. The machine is not the threat. Your passivity is. Be honest. How many times this week did AI give you something flat, safe, or wrong — and you used it anyway? That is not collaboration. That is surrender. Read my latest blog post before you open that chat window again. garciamedia.com/blog/hit-no-an…

I spent today teaching an AI workshop for the communications team of Hapag-Lloyd, the global shipping company. We worked on better prompting — the art of communicating with bots. But the deeper conversation was about what humans bring that no robot can replicate: empathy, authenticity, and the irreplaceable advantage of having been there. Then I came home and read a New York Times piece about Tilly Norwood — billed as the world's first AI-created actress — interviewed by a seasoned celebrity journalist who has shared cigarettes with Gwyneth Paltrow and walked Hampstead Heath with Tom Hiddleston. The reporter held her own. But at the end, she wrote something that stopped me: "It was the people I've interviewed whom I was thinking about during my time with Tilly. The people who said wild things, who laughed inappropriately, who dodged my questions, who charmed me, who burst into tears, who dragged my name through the mud later. As I made my way through this story, I longed for each of them." From shipping logistics to Hollywood — the question is the same: What do we actually lose when we remove the human from the room? Turns out, everything that makes it worth remembering. nytimes.com/2026/05/31/mag…

Enjoying my day at DPG Media in Amsterdam, conducting AI and mobile storytelling workshops for the teams in that group. Workshop topics: Artificial Intelligence in 5 Acts; Two Revolutions in the Newsroom-Mobile Storytelling & Artificial Intelligence. Engaged, enthusiastic audience.

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I'm sitting in Amsterdam, putting the final touches on my new book about AI and humanity, when I see that the Pope just published his landmark encyclical on AI. The Pope calls it Magnifica Humanitas — Magnificent Humanity. I call it the Scent of the Human. Different words. Identical conviction. The machine is magnificent. But you are the muse. Here's what that means for every leader navigating the AI age right now. In my blog: garciamedia.com/blog/the-pope-…

Today, Pope Leo XIV released Magnifica Humanitas — a 42,000-word encyclical on AI and humanity. TechCrunch says it's really about inequality and power. Big Tech. Regulation. The arms race. I read it differently. The Pope and I agree on something more fundamental: the machine is magnificent. But the human is the muse. Creativity. Empathy. The Blue Note. The scent of the human that no algorithm can synthesize. That's what this document defends — and it's exactly what I've been writing about in my new book, The Virtuoso Machine (Forbes, 2027). Read my take — and tell me: do you see the encyclical as a regulatory manifesto, or a defense of human creativity? 👉 garciamedia.com/blog/the-pope-…

Graduation season always makes me reflective. But this year, watching my grandson Frank walk across that stage, I wasn't thinking about the past — I was thinking about 2040. By then, every graduate in that auditorium will have spent their entire lives alongside an AI Bestie. Not as a tool. As a companion. In my new blog post, I explore what that means for human creativity, the art of the "Blue Note," and why a senior Wall Street executive is now hiring fewer STEM graduates and more humanists — because the market is already grading on soul. These ideas are at the heart of my forthcoming book, The Virtuoso Machine (Forbes Books, 2027) — but today, they live in a blog post. The machine brings the archive. You bring the surprise. Read "The Bestie Essay" and tell me: are we teaching the next generation the most important skill of all — the Veto Power? ✍️ This essay draws from my forthcoming book, The Virtuoso Machine, to be published by Forbes Books in 2027. Read my blog post here: garciamedia.com/blog/thomas-st… 🔗 [link] #AI #Journalism #HumanCreativity #TheVirtuosoMachine

There is a bigger, smarter and more robust AI Super Crane coming to us according to a new McKinsey Report which confirms it: 2026 is the year quantum computing stops being a laboratory promise and becomes a strategic management question.The super crane is arriving. More than ever AI still needs you in the conductor's chair. In my new weekend blog post: garciamedia.com/blog/the-super…

McKinsey's new quantum computing report stopped me cold. It confirms what few of us have fully absorbed yet: quantum computing and AI are already merging — deliberately, strategically, right now. So if today's AI checks each door one by one until it finds the open one — quantum computing checks all 10 doors at the same time. The super crane is arriving. It still needs you in the conductor's chair. In my new weekend blog post: garciamedia.com/blog/the-super…

After consulting with media companies nearly every week, I've noticed a pattern in how they adopt AI — it's a four-phase journey: 🔵 Phase 1: Curiosity Without Protocol — staff experiment solo, leadership barely notices 🟡 Phase 2: Strategic Awareness — "we should do something about AI" energy 🟠 Phase 3: Full Integration — AI embedded across every department, with real guardrails 🟢 Phase 4: AI as Competitive Differentiator — proprietary tools, AI-native storytelling, true innovation Here's the irony: when I ask a media CEO which phase their company is in, the answer is almost always one or two phases ahead of reality. Self-awareness is Phase 0

Getting ready for my Artificial Intelligence workshop with the team of Tagesspiegel in Berlin. Emphasis on the Scent of the Human at the controls of AI---and prompt engineering.