Juan Luis Suárez

Juan Luis Suárez works at the point where technology meets the people who live with it. A Professor at Western University, where he has been cross-appointed to the Department of Computer Science since 2015, he has spent more than two decades studying how new technologies change the way people think, decide, and create. He also shows organizations how to keep human judgment at the centre of that change.

Suárez holds two doctorates: a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Salamanca, awarded Cum Laude, and a PhD in Hispanic Studies from McGill University. He also holds a Global Executive MBA from IE Business School and a Master's in Management of Information Systems. That mix of humanist depth and business and technical fluency sets him apart in today's AI conversation. He can explain what the technology does, and he can also explain what it means for the people and institutions using it.

In 2009 he founded the CulturePlex Lab at Western with a grant from the Canada Foundation for Innovation, a pioneering centre for computational cultural analysis. The lab built network-analysis and agent-based-modelling tools years before "big data" became a boardroom term, and it has trained 55 researchers. Across his career he has secured more than $5.6 million in research funding and published over 112 works. From 2017 to 2019 he served as Western's Associate Vice-President (Research), leading research strategy at the institutional level. He currently works on TRACE, a €3.1 million Horizon Europe project that uses technology to address gender-based violence in conflict and displacement.

His work reaches well beyond academia. He has partnered with Bancolombia on trust and trustworthiness in banking, and with Libro Credit Union on a customer-engagement tool. He has also collaborated with technology firms on threat detection, data infrastructure, and multilingual knowledge graphs. He has advised the Board of Governors of the Central Bank of Colombia on the dimensions of the digital age. He co-founded a language-learning startup and mentored founders through Western's incubator and accelerator. His research on entrepreneurship and the mass media, co-authored with Ivey Business School faculty, appeared in Academy of Management Discoveries.

His book La condición digital (Trotta, 2023) argues that digital tools should serve human beings rather than become ends in themselves. It drew wide media attention in Spain, and two Spanish regional governments have adopted it as an educational program. His forthcoming book, The Computational Civilization examines what it means to remain human in a world organized around the premise that everything can be computed.

For business leaders, Suárez offers a clear message: AI's greatest risk is not technical failure but the quiet surrender of human judgment and values. AI does not yet have the capacity for criterio, the discernment that good decisions require. He defines creativity as "the crafting of the self." In his view, organizations that invest in their people's judgment, imagination, and moral clarity will get the most from AI rather than being reshaped by it. In a moment of rapid automation, he makes the case that humanism is not a luxury. It is a competitive advantage.

Juan Luis Suárez is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and a recipient of the Hellmuth Prize for Achievement in Research.