Founder & CEO, Virtue · Author of Ethical Machines (HBR Press)
Reid Blackman came to AI from academic philosophy — he was a professor at Colgate and UNC Chapel Hill before founding Virtue, a consultancy focused specifically on ethical risk in digital and AI systems. That background shows: his work is about identifying where a system can cause harm and what governance actually prevents it, not about values statements.
He is the author of Ethical Machines (Harvard Business Review Press) and hosts the podcast of the same name. He has advised the Canadian government on federal AI regulation, was a founding member of EY’s AI Advisory Board, and served as a senior adviser to the Deloitte AI Institute (his own about page; Thinkers50). His writing appears in Harvard Business Review and The New York Times.
Blackman is the person to read if your AI question has become a legal or reputational question. He is consistently sceptical of ethics-as-marketing and argues that most corporate AI ethics programmes fail because they are owned by nobody with authority to stop a launch. That is a pointed opinion, and one that tends to be unpopular with the teams being described — which is roughly the sign that it is worth hearing.
Everything above is drawn from these public sources. Last reviewed 8 August 2026. Links open on the publisher's own site.
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