Jacob Ward

Jacob Ward is a dynamic, grounded, vulnerable, and in-demand speaker on AI, technology, and our shared future. Audiences in his keynotes don’t just learn about AI. They feel something shift. Educators leave his talks with a renewed sense of purpose about defending critical thinking and creativity in their students. Business leaders leave understanding why replacing entry-level workers with AI today means losing institutional knowledge, relationship skills, and leadership capacity in two or three years. Parents leave with language for talking to their kids about the difference between what they want in life and what their brain’s instincts are pulling them toward.

His presentations are high-energy, story-driven, and grounded in real reporting—not abstractions. Audiences consistently describe him as warm, vulnerable, funny, and deeply moving. He doesn’t pretend to have all the answers. He’s figuring this out alongside everyone else. And that honesty is exactly what makes his message land.

Jacob is a veteran journalist covering the intersection of technology, human behavior, and social change. He’s currently reporter-in-residence at The Omidyar Network, writing about cutting-edge innovation and pioneering forms of restraint, and a strategic advisor on the deployment of AI for companies large and small. From 2018 to 2024 he was technology correspondent for NBC News, reporting for Nightly News, The TODAY Show, and MSNBC. He is the former editor-in-chief of Popular Science magazine, and was Al Jazeera’s science and technology correspondent from 2013 to 2018.

He is a lecturer at the Stanford d.school, and was a 2018-2019 Berggruen Fellow at Stanford University’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, where he began writing The Loop: How AI is Creating a World without Choices and How to Fight Back (Hachette Book Group). The book explores how artificial intelligence and other decision-shaping technologies will amplify good and bad human instincts, and predicted the AI psychosis in which society is currently mired.

Jacob has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Wired, and many other publications. In addition to hosting documentaries for Nat Geo and Discovery, he’s the host and co-writer of the landmark four-hour PBS television series, “Hacking Your Mind,” about human decision-making, behavioral economics, and political manipulation. His weekly podcast The Rip Current covers the big, hidden forces at work in our lives, and he speaks to an audience of more than 250,000 viewers on TikTok, on podcast appearances, and on This Week in Tech, where he’s a regular co-host.