The Chief AI Officer at The Guardian will be the main keynote speaker at Media Party Buenos Aires 2026, running from October 29 to 31 at Ciudad Cultural Konex. Six years after his first appearance, he arrives to share how one of the world’s most influential newsrooms is integrating artificial intelligence.
For years, the media’s main concern was relying on search engines and social media to reach their audience. Today, the problem has changed shape: AI assistants answer, summarize, and explain the news without the reader having to visit the site that produced the information. At Media Party Barcelona, Nic Newman from the Reuters Institute presented data showing that search traffic to publishers dropped by a third in the last year. For newsrooms, the question is no longer whether using AI is convenient, but how to do it without surrendering control over their work or their connection with the public.
That question runs through Media Party Buenos Aires 2026, organized under the theme “Storytelling in the Age of Agents.” It centers on cognitive sovereignty: the ability of journalists and editors to think, prioritize, and decide without delegating judgment to a machine. To open that conversation, the main keynote will be Caspar Llewellyn Smith, Chief AI Officer of Guardian News & Media.
Who is Caspar Llewellyn Smith?
Llewellyn Smith leads the rollout of artificial intelligence across Guardian News & Media (GNM), the publisher of The Guardian. His job is to define how and why AI is incorporated throughout the organization, at a time when these decisions weigh as heavily in the newsroom as they do on the business model.
His reading of the landscape is straightforward. At a Globe and Mail Foundation panel in Toronto this past April, he warned that the media have already handed over a large chunk of their journalism’s distribution to Big Tech, and that AI could deepen this dependence. That same month, he took part in the International Journalism Festival in Perugia across two panels: one on how to negotiate with Big Tech to build a healthier information ecosystem, and another on what happens when chatbots take over delivering the news.
From culture journalism to product and AI
What makes his profile stand out is that he didn’t come to AI from tech, but from journalism. He joined GNM in 2003 to launch a monthly music magazine for The Observer and later became The Guardian’s first Head of Culture. He subsequently served as editor of theguardian.com and the outlet’s other digital platforms, eventually becoming director of digital strategy, overseeing digital transformation, new product development, and editorial innovation. He has been on the company’s executive committee since 2015.
Before taking on his current role, he was Chief Product Officer, leading the teams that built The Guardian’s website and apps, as well as the investigative tools used by the newsroom.
It was in that role that he first came to Media Party for the 2020 virtual edition, where he spoke about the lessons The Guardian was still learning from its reader-revenue model. Six years later, he returns in a different role and at a different moment for the industry, but with a similar underlying concern: how a news organization sustains its journalism and protects its direct relationship with the audience.
What he brings to Buenos Aires
In his keynote, Llewellyn Smith will show how The Guardian integrates artificial intelligence into its editorial strategy and technological infrastructure. For those working in newsrooms, product teams, or development, it’s a chance to see from the inside how a global publisher makes decisions about AI: what to adopt, where to draw the line, and how to do it without losing editorial control.
His presentation picks up the debates sparked in Barcelona regarding content independence in the era of AI search, bringing them to the largest edition of the year, which will gather more than 2,000 journalists, developers, designers, and media entrepreneurs.
The conversation around AI and journalism continues at Media Party Buenos Aires 2026.
From October 29 to 31 at Ciudad Cultural Konex. Register here to join us.
