Episode 100 And The Big Question

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome back to Inspire AI, the podcast where we help leaders, builders, and communities navigate an AI-accelerated world with curiosity, clarity, and confidence. And today is a special episode. This is episode 100. When I started Inspire AI, artificial intelligence was already moving quickly, but I don't think any of us could have fully anticipated just how rapidly this technology would begin changing the way we work, how we learn, how businesses operate, and increasingly how we think about the future. Over the course of the first 99 episodes, I've explored a lot of that change. We've talked about new models, emerging technologies, I've talked with researchers, business leaders, educators, innovators, people actually putting AI to work. But underneath all of those conversations has been a bigger question. How do we prepare people for what's coming? Because ultimately, AI readiness isn't about knowing every new model and chasing the new tools. It's about developing the knowledge and the judgment and the confidence to adapt as the technology continues to change. And for episode 100, I wanted to bring that conversation home to RVA because something interesting is happening here. Across the Greater Richmond region, businesses are experimenting with AI. Universities and educators are wrestling with what AI means for learning. Entrepreneurs are building new products and companies, and organizations are thinking about how their workforce needs to evolve. And the community leaders are continuing to ask a question that's much larger than the technology. What would it take for an entire region to become AI ready? Not just in the largest companies, and definitely not just for technologists, but for the teachers, students, small businesses, nonprofits, government leaders, and entrepreneurs and executives, all alike. And especially for the workers of those organizations, how it might look very different five or ten years from now. And that leads us to the question at the center of today's 100th episode. Could the Greater Richmond region become the most AI ready region in America? And more importantly, what would we have to do today to make that future possible? And I couldn't think of two better people to have that conversation with. Joining me today is Will Willis, the Executive Director of AI Ready RBA, an organization working across businesses, education, government, and the nonprofit community to build AI readiness and workforce readiness throughout Greater Richmond. Willis also brings his perspective of someone who has worked on AI adoption inside a major enterprise, leading programs across 144 AI and machine learning use cases during his time at Capital One. Also joining us is Will Melton, chair of the board of AI Ready RBA, an entrepreneur, community builder, and CEO of Exponent 21, as well as an instructor at the University of Richmond, where he teaches how AI is changing the way organizations are discovered, evaluated, and trusted. So this isn't going to be a conversation about the latest AI features. We're going to zoom out. We're going to talk about Richmond and the region surrounding. We're going to talk about our workforce, our schools, our opportunities. Because those are the people who could benefit from this transformation. And the people we risk leaving behind. And ultimately the choices we need to make if we want Richmond to lead, rather than simply reacting to what's coming. Will Willis and Will Melton, welcome to Inspire AI 100th episode. How are y'all doing today? Fantastic. It's a bit surreal. A couple of things that to note here. I've never done a two-person interview. I think this one is gonna be a showcase for the opportunities of the future, launching into the next 100 episodes of Inspire AI. But I think that the audience here is really gonna be happy to hear from your strategic minds and in one room, which is not always often that they get to hear about that. So putting your heads together and answering some questions for our audience today, the Greater Richmond region community around AI literacy, it's gonna, I think, shake foundations. So y'all ready to get into it? Yes, sir. Awesome.

What “AI Ready” Really Means

SPEAKER_01 4:29

So, real quick, whoever wants to answer this one. When you imagine Greater Richmond Region as the most AI ready region in America, what does that actually look like? And how can you measure success? Yeah, I can take that.

SPEAKER_02 4:43

Really, it's not that we're the fastest and most cutting edge. It's the fact that our community from the single mom trying to figure out how to use AI to make a grocery list to the executive CEO trying to create an AI roadmap. So it's not really the adoption, it's more of the true able to use it responsibly and ethically, knowing to see how biased in the system, how to validate the outputs, and use it to its most effective capabilities is really what we look at for the most AI region in the world is looking through that and looking through the main key point indicators will be companies coming to Richmond looking for a hobby, the workforce and a drastically lower unemployment rate than the national average.

SPEAKER_01 5:24

This is some great success factors. Lower employment rate, totally capable of using AI in an intelligent way, not keeping the responses as they are, but really using your judgment and capabilities, your skills around them. What about you, Milton? Anything else jump out at you?

SPEAKER_03 5:41

I work backwards from a more macro perspective of what Richmond needs. Richmond has been a long history, and I won't get into that, but it has been left behind in in some ways. And it's in a it's an opportunity right now to research. It's in a revival moment. We see cranes all over the city. We know that people desire to live here. We're on top 10 lists, we're on the top of the 10 lists sometimes. And so I think it's an opportunity to really capitalize on that excitement and the people who are moving here, the companies that want to move here, and marrying all of that together, telling the good story of Richmond to have a competitive foothold that allows Virginia to rise back to the best state to do business. And then we've got some real competitive factors in some of the states to our south that that we've got to compete with. So I see it as an opportunity for Richmond to compete. I see it as an opportunity for us to bring people along where they've been left behind. And collectively, I think that we can breathe a new life into Richmond that makes quality of life better for everybody, not just the people who have historically led this city.

SPEAKER_01 6:47

Yeah. Okay.

Why Richmond Can Compete

SPEAKER_01 6:48

You're pushing on the next layer of questioning that I think is important to consider in the overall strategy here of AI ready. Why Richmond? What makes Richmond a legitimate opportunity for AI readiness? Why bring like why as a company would you come to Richmond in service of growing your business? And because there are so many other bigger cities out there. You can throw a rock and hit five bigger cities than Richmond. So what's the strategic advantage for Richmond? Cheap. I think it's cost of living is low here.

SPEAKER_03 7:22

That's always a competitive factor for us. And we're essentially located. And you cannot deny the fact that we are the data center capital of the world. The state is, and Richmond itself is slated to become an even bigger data center center, if you will, than Northern Virginia. And there's a lot of people that hope that doesn't happen. And I think that there's a lot of conversations around that right now that are need to happen. But I think we have a lot of the center of technology here across community. Very old school stuff, some of the baked-in natural benefits of the river that remains still a tremendous asset for us and the water resources that that is. So I think that there's just some baked in things you can get to the people side of it, and I'll probably let Will do that because my doctor worked.

SPEAKER_02 8:09

Yeah, one is is the community. I've talked to several other organizations throughout the United States and even now international. And there's not a more active and connected community than the Richmond region. When you look at our different organizations throughout the city, from meetup groups to RVA Tech Council to Women That Code, there's just so many people trying to move the city forward together. And I think Chamber RBA and Great Richmond Partnership and a lot of EDAs in the area have done a great job working together on that. And we're just icing on a cake with that because with like the stars aligning all at the same time with the tech infrastructure we have, the engaged community, and now with such a transformative technology of AI, and it's allowing us to galvanize and rally the troops around what does it look like if we do this right? And how can we make sure we lead with the proper voice of the community as we start developing those? So that's one of the big things. And it's our infrastructure. We have advanced manufacturing, we have huge fintech hubs, huge medical hub. We have a little bit of everything. So we're actually really well almost a model city for the rest of the nation because we're not so massive like a New York City where we feel like we're this big behemoth ship that has to move very slowly, but we're not this little small town that doesn't have the resources. We're right there in the center. We can be very agile, we can rapidly prototype events, we can rapidly prototype solutions and try and fail and adjust quicker than bigger organizations or bigger cities, but also have the resources to sustain the try and fail and then keep driving. So I think we're literally a model city for the entire nation as we start maturing, and I think we've matured very well over the past two years, is other cities are now starting to copy what we're doing.

SPEAKER_01 9:50

Okay. Those are big reaching ideas. And I think you've sold me on why Richmond being a central factor in the region, the hub for technology data centers across the United States and access to all of these companies that already exist here. So those are really convincing factors. Now,

Equity Gaps And Coordination Risks

SPEAKER_01 10:10

what would you say are the biggest gaps for Richmond? I I really want to note your thoughts on the gaps necessarily, but also if you could touch on like the opportunities where we have seven, eight different competing technology services across meetups and RVA tech and nonprofits like ours, like galvanizing all of that, making it better. Like, what would you say the biggest risks in this approach are and gaps and how do we solve for those? I think it really comes down to equity.

SPEAKER_02 10:41

I think we have it where even we're probably even guilty of it a little bit, where we go towards the low-hanging fruit as we're starting to try to figure out what we're. And the low-hanging fruit tends to be the people who are the most influent inside of those technology stacks, where we now need to, we're now mature enough, we now are starting to get the resources in place where we now need to make more conscious efforts to make sure that we stay equitable. We are reaching the people that are not being served by this technology, that they're getting the skills that they need. If we don't exasperate the equity gap here, is we were we're already a city that has a fairly large equity gap, and we need to make sure that we're good stewards of the community, that we're going into those areas, starting creating those relationships, finding resources to make sure we're doing that. And then as far as the other meetups and kind of RVA Tech Council, we got data enthusiasts, we got the Java, was it the Java meetup groups? There's so many meetup groups in Richmond because of the engaged community. It's just making sure that we keep the relationships with them. We know who's working in what lanes, so we're not wasting resources doing the same thing. And then coming together when there's an actual natural connection. But also, I take RBA Tech Council for example. RBA Tech Council is very tech heavy. They're the data scientists, they're the engineers, they're the DevOps team, where we're more of the frontline business user, the actual user of the tools, where they're more of the creator tools. So we actually book in the tech stack and AI very complementary. And it's just making sure we stay in communications as we start getting closer and closer to that midpoint, that we know who's doing what so we don't waste resources and we make sure the community knows who to go to when they're looking for certain things.

SPEAKER_01 12:12

Yeah, no, that's a great answer. I want to push a little bit more from Melton's perspective, being a community organizer and catalyst for change in Richmond. I'd like to hear from you. How do we uplift those that aren't fully accessing it today and don't have it at their fingertips? What are we doing for that?

SPEAKER_03 12:32

My answer is gonna be a little bit different because uh while I agree with Will, and I think he answered it in the starting point of what I was gonna say is the equity gap. If you go back to what I said earlier about the fact that the cost of living is lower here than there's a lot of other places, that's a benefit for people who are moving here. But when those people move here, they create demand and demand causes prices to go up. And that is a negative benefit or negative on the people who live here already. And so when you talk about a poverty level of it's probably about excuse me, about 10 or 15 percent. It was about 20% before. It's I'm not really sure where that is now, but it's high. If we think about this through the lens of let's make sure that those people get AI, we're doing it wrong. We need to be thinking about how do we ensure that the financial equity occurs and that we're giving people skills, but we're also giving them jobs that pay the bills, that move them out of the projects, that get them to own a house. We have to empower our economy of labor, not just give people tools. And that takes a lot of coordination, I think, above and beyond what AI Ready RVA is individually responsible for. It's something that our entire community needs to rally around, and the sooner we do it, the more we're gonna see a benefit down the road, and the more we'll be able to be that competitive model city. But I think the other reason why Richmond is because this is a place where people come to make things happen, and it is a place where people work collectively to ensure success where ideas are good. And I think that we have the right mix of things. I think we need more leadership, not necessarily better leadership, but just more leadership. But that's the biggest gap that I see, and I think if we don't grapple with that, it's gonna exacerbate the problem for those who are on the bottom. So that's what I would say a loose sleep about. This change is momentous, it's huge for the world, not just for Richmond. And that is an opportunity to get it right if we work hard.

SPEAKER_02 14:26

Okay. I want to add to that too. So some of the cool things, innovation in Richmond is kind of our DNA. You look at the innovations throughout the history of Richmond, from the first canned beer was actually built, was in Richmond. The very first electric streak car was in Richmond, Virginia. The first minority-owned woman black-owned bank was here in Richmond, Virginia. The bulletproof Teflon for Bulletproof Vests, that was invented here in Richmond. So many things have been invented in Richmond, so much technology, so much innovation has happened in Richmond. It's part of our DNA, and that's our superpower. We're very innovative, not only on the technology side, but also on the artistic side. And we have so much art, so much, so much culture in Richmond. It's not like that anywhere else. Everyone else has that one lane that they live in. We kind of live across the breadth of so many different industries that Richmond has that superpower.

SPEAKER_01 15:18

Yeah. Indeed. Yeah, no, that's great. Thank you for the history. I'm from Richmond, and sadly, I didn't know half of those inventions or startup concepts coming out of Richmond. That's great.

SPEAKER_03 15:32

That's actually a really good thing. And it goes back hundreds of years. It's a that's a cool story. Yeah. We have a lot of history here.

SPEAKER_01 15:40

All right, so let's look at some practical means companies are discovering these days, and hopefully we can talk a little bit about the nature of how organizations are changing their thinking here.

AI Maturity Inside Local Businesses

SPEAKER_01 15:51

So every company, every knowledge worker, everybody hopefully is adopting AI, whether or not they're doing it super intentionally, building new workflows for themselves, or they're just having a different conversation with the internet than they used to. And it's helping, right? So but the but the companies, they're on a spectrum of learning. And the spectrum starts with being able to prompt these systems, give back a response, judge the response, make good out of that response. That's the ultimate goal, versus like fundamentally changing how work, how things operate internally. So you've had a lot of conversations with Richmond business owners, large enterprise employers. Where are they on the spectrum of being 101 prompters and judgment decision makers versus really examining their workflows and redefining how AI shapes what they do every day? Where do you say?

SPEAKER_03 16:49

I would say that the most of the people we interact with, they're probably on the latter end of the maturity spectrum because they're curious and we create space for curious people. But I would also say that my involvement with businesses are not isolated at AI ready RVA, so I get to talk to a lot of other businesses. I think when you zoom out to the larger spectrum of businesses in respect, you'll see a bigger spread. Or later on the adoption curve rather, and not as mature with it. But what I would say, and I think you you hit it right, like the the big difference is are you a company that uses AI to do the things that you did before faster? Or are you recognizing that this is your moment to leverage this amazing tool to completely innovate individual units of your business or your entire business, how you go to market, how you partner with other people, how you create tools to enable connectivity. That's what maturity looks like. Again, it's not necessarily an AI story, it's an innovation story. And AI is just the tool that gets us there. And I so I think we we there's a lot of anxiety about AI because of the jobs, displacement, and shift and skills need. But I think it's because we see it as this I call it the apex predator, right? Like it's this thing that's opposite us, that's opposing us, as opposed to being something that we get to wield in the pursuit of our dreams. And and so I just caution against focusing too much on the technology itself because it's ultimately what we do with the technology that's gonna really shape the future. And there's some awesome potential in it. A lot of things to be concerned about, but it's it's gonna make a lot of things a lot better, but we're not used to change. We have a tendency to be reactive and proactive, and so it's gonna have a ripple effect for sure. It's not necessarily gonna be easy. I don't know if it's gonna be good or bad, but it's not gonna be easy.

SPEAKER_02 18:44

You want to jump in there, Willis? Yeah, a lot of the conversations I've been having too the spectrum's all over the place just because it depends on what industry you're in and with the diverse economy we have enrichment. We're seeing some of the more mature companies, they're finally getting past the phase of where they're just testing AI to be testing AI and they're just throwing AI at everything. It's they're getting back to the system design thinking where, hey, let me find a business problem I need to solve, and does AI solve that problem the most effective way? So we're starting to see that at the more mature level. At the the smaller levels, like the solarpreneurs, they're just going like gangbusters. So I'm my only employee, I have no other overhead, let me just figure out what I can do with AI. And then they're just creating content, creating products, creating stuff like that. So that I think the startup ecosystem you're starting to see accelerate with AI. Some of the middle companies we're having some issues with because one is it's either they've expanded so fast with salary that they don't have enough resources to invest in AI the way they want to, or they don't have a roadmap, like you see a mature company that has a product manager that has a CTO that has a roadmap to it. So they're trying and failing a lot there, and they are they're just not getting the clarity that they want based on resource constraints. But you're starting to see it mature a lot more now. We have one company who I talked to, they're building a foundation model. It's like, why are you building a foundation model? Because that's a huge undertaking. Where I talked to another company, they're like, hey, I don't even have an AI use policy. Let us help you build an AI use policy. So we've actually helped two nonprofits now build an AI use policy so they can start their journey with AI. And here it is, it's 2026. It's now four years since ChatGPT hit the mainstream. And we still have companies that don't even have an AI use policy in place. But we also have companies that are building products, going to pitch days, winning pitch competitions because of the AI tool that they built that they could not have done two, three years ago because they were not the technical experts. They didn't have to go buy a dev operations team or outsource a dev operation team. They were able to rapidly prototype it and take it to market to VC and then buy the dev team to harden it and create a enterprise product data. So it's been really cool seeing the different spectrums, but it is not like a single moving down the pipeline. It's all over the place, depending on industry, business size, and even the owner itself.

SPEAKER_01 20:54

Yeah. No, that's great. A lot of that resonated with me personally because I I'm experimenting a lot for AI Ready RVA in terms of product development and or automation in general. And without a roadmap, I think we tend to get lost in the weeds of trying to identify how to leverage these technologies before really sinking our teeth into the problem at hand. And I talk with our tech team at nauseum about these things. And I feel like we are in the middle as well, where we're experimenting like at breakneck speed with these technologies and building these little prototypes and looking to surface value out of them. But we also don't have a strong roadmap and we don't have our feet under us with the nature of our operations well enough to be able to say, this is where the roadmap is leading us. This is what our operations should look like in six months. And I think honestly, I'd like to bend your ear a little bit, right? Bring it home on this question, is like, how do we do that? Y'all are hearing from companies that are really fortunate enough to have the funds, unlike us. We're a completely volunteer organization. And they have this roadmap, they have all their how do we use it responsibly, et cetera, built into their DNA. And we're a scrappy organization. 501c3, we don't have a lot of money. We have a great community. We have ambition, right? So what do we do? How do we get there?

Nonprofit Roadmaps And Better Metrics

SPEAKER_03 22:33

What I can say is from a nonprofit perspective specifically, um, one of the challenges that we face as a two-year-old nonprofit is organizational maturity, but not necessarily technological maturity. We're probably the most technologically advanced nonprofit in Richmond, just based on skills and even the technology that we've built to empower what we're doing. So that's a bit of a clash. If you go to a nonprofit that's established that has clarity of their mission, and it's not something that in this world wavers a little bit with AI and what it's doing to jobs and everything else, they get to say, here's our operating model and here are our problems. And we can define where we can unleash the technology to be able to create solutions to those problems that yield mission impact and drive more funding or more services or whatever. But with us, we have the ability to create anything we want. And we've got a million problems. So the the challenge is in identifying the biggest problems that we have. And because we are an I wouldn't say immature nonprofit, but because we're a young nonprofit, the opportunities that are before us are changing on an almost weekly basis. And so to be able to identify the big thing to work on is I think it's going to be funding driven ultimately. It's going to be whoever gives us the money to work on a thing and not necessarily our own ambitions around what we think we can solve for. Because if you look at it, we've already solved most of the problems that a lot of nonprofits have out of the gate with our technological maturity.

SPEAKER_02 24:04

Yep. And add to that too, I think a lot of it too is getting to the point where we're making data-driven decisions rather than just trying to say, oh, this is a cool thing to build. Let's go build it. We think this is a this we think this solves a problem, but we haven't validated the problem. So some of the things that we've done is we have an AI readiness index that's trying to capture data on what the actual AI readiness for an individual is. Today I just launched an actual at-work AI survey trying to capture at the company level what is companies doing. So early iteration of that. We're capturing NPS scores or GMEX scores and voice customer scores at the end of every event. But then we're also going back and also validating during checkout and during registration, we're actually asking for demographical information. So now we can who's in our community being able to report out. That will be the mechanism that will help us one is identify problems or not problems, but identify opportunities for us to challenge and build something around. But also allow us to say, hey, I can now go to a funder who's asking for a certain demographic or a certain whatever they're looking for to fund. And I can now say, hey, here's a solution. Here's our numbers. Let's work together as a partnership, whether it's funding resources or whatever it is. So I think now that we're maturing a lot faster, we're starting to create that more data-driven approach, we're now able to create mechanisms that allow us to quantify and justify organizations to invest more heavily in us. They will give us the resources to do more slows down the road.

unknown 25:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 25:26

Can I add something before you ask another question? I think that there are some opportunities for our organization that don't necessarily revolve around technology, but will leverage technology to solve them. One of the things that I think is happening right now is because of speed, we remove some of the clarity that exists. Now, we historically are bad at sharing information. And I'll give you an example my wife complains about all the time, which is scientists don't publish their null results. And so what ends up happening is you have other scientists that end up going and studying the exact same thing, getting a null result and wasting resources to make that null result happen again and again. And so the idea that she had was to create a null results journal that scientists would publish in. There's a whole complexity to that and why it might not work. But we have a lack of clarity about what's happening, not necessarily AI ready RBA, but just in general in society, who's doing what and why. And there's a lot of duplication happening. And so I think that there's an opportunity for us to create a space for clarity where we can kind of share information and as businesses, as leaders, as creatives, to say, this is what I'm working on, and invite other people to either work on it with them or they recognize that there is possibly duplication going on because we could have a more cooperative society that uses less compute or less resources in general to be able to see and to get faster innovations and faster interventions for some of the problems that we face.

SPEAKER_02 26:48

I love that because I've been doing all exact kind of that legwork on the workforce development side of our organization as we start to prop up and start to build out that that pillar of workforce development is before building anything, is I'm trying to currently create relationships with the different workforce development organizations, whether it's universities and trade schools, as well as things like Virginia Works or the Capitol Region, or even E days from Bristol, Virginia, or Hampton Roads, and I think of Wooden County, is trying to figure out who is doing what. So we can categorize this. And two is make sure that we're staying in our lane where hey, I don't need to reinvent the wheel. If they're already doing it, it's not being serviced here. We can repeat it. But if it is being serviced here, I don't have to waste resources on it. I can go do something else and fill another gap. So we're doing that really uh slowly right now with the workforce development arm. But yeah, I think there's more opportunities to be able to do that where we can fill the. I always go back to my old I love cartoon quotes is the from iRobots is seeing me fill a need, is trying to identify that need and how can we fill it. Are we the ones to fill it?

SPEAKER_03 27:49

The lanes are fuzzy though these days.

unknown 27:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 27:52

With that, stay in your lane, but people might not like that too much.

SPEAKER_01 27:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 27:55

We very rarely stay in our lane.

SPEAKER_01 27:57

I appreciate the pushback when it's obvious we're not in our lane and we need to think about what we're actually trying to accomplish and whether or not we should be doing what we're attempting. Like you said, we can do whatever we want and leverage the technology however we wish to accomplish those goals. And there's so much opportunity out there. Thinking of the opportunity out there, and back to why Richmond, I want to ask an open-ended question, probably more for Melton.

Owning The Narrative In AI Search

SPEAKER_01 28:25

But the other day you put a LinkedIn post on the fact that you are the premier speaker on AI. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And Chat GPT called you out specifically. Yeah. And I think about however you accomplish that. Can we do that same thing for Richmond? Take it out of the perspective of we have all these concepts and Richmond is a great place, and people will naturally figure that out. What stops us from making Richmond the answer that Google provides or ChatGPT provides for, hey, I want to start my own business. Where should I do it in the United States? And Richmond is the answer that it gives it. Like, why shouldn't we do that?

SPEAKER_03 29:07

So the answer to that is we are in in maybe less strategic ways, but if I have anything to do with it, we are. And I'll give you a couple of examples. So one, if you go to Google today and search for healthiest city in America, the AI overview at the top will not mention Richmond, I promise. But if you scroll down to the results at the blue links, the fourth site there is a website called America's Healthiest City. And that is the name of my podcast, but it's also a grassroots movement to make Richmond the healthiest city in America by 2033. Now, being fourth on Google doesn't make us the healthiest city in America. But I think what we have today with the technology is the ability to have an idea and manifest it through communication. And that is exactly what I've done with my brand, with my personal speaking brand, with America's Healthiest City. It's how do we show up at the top so that we're found when people are looking? And that is that's something that's very possible. Now I'll tell you something that is a bit of a secret weapon that didn't have a D on it. I have built something called Story Tracks, and it hasn't been sold yet to anybody. But I'm hopeful that our region will come up with the dollars to back this because it is a we'll say that it is a technology designed to help a region jump ahead of the information game and to ensure that you show up in AI for the things that you want to show up in, and also controlling the narrative that AI speaks about you. Now, there needs to be a fundamental truth at the foundation of what we uh get AI to repeat back. We can't wholesale fabricate things, but we can wholesale manifest things by having an idea and injecting it into the ether and nurturing it with communication with other people and media. And that is how you make something that that is not real, but real. It takes time, it takes a long time. You shouldn't plan to do this in a year, but I think I'll continue to work on this because I believe that I know it's possible, but I've seen it work, not necessarily for community, but for for myself, and I've seen countries, nation states do this very effectively. Yeah, Richmond should be doing it, and it's a matter of convincing the people with money that they should invest in it, and that I need to convince them that my technology is actually gonna do the job.

SPEAKER_01 31:26

Well, Willis, how does that resonate with you for AI ready RVA?

SPEAKER_02 31:30

Yeah, when we look at the micro level of AI ready RVA, when you search us on Google in Claude, we actually should come up pretty high on that listing. But also outside of AI tools, we are now being seen in in the at a national level now. It's been interesting for the past couple of weeks. I've had the chancellor for the Mecklenburg College in Tennessee reach out to me because they want to figure out what we're doing. We've had we've actually are helping and we signed up a letter of support for AI Ready Bristol that they're starting, the EDA in Bristol is starting up their own AI workforce organization. We spoke at the Germany Rotary Club. They found out about Richmond. They have a city in northern Germany called Hanover, which is like a sister city to Richmond. If you look at like macroeconomics of them, or almost like mirroring of data centers, hobby tech, met with them. We're now meeting with the French consulate, but we just had a reach out from Poland. Poland's asking us to become a partner with them, and how can and Poland's considered the actually the Silicon Valley of Europe. But and then even in the Richmond region, is we are part of the Virginia AI assessment as ranked as the model city for AI adoption. The Great Richmond Partnership has shown us as one of the reasons why Richmond's been ranked as one of the most AI ready regions. So we're getting a lot of accolades and a lot of not only local visit visibility, but we're getting statewide, regional wide, and now even worldwide visibility where people are asking, what are we doing and how can they replicate what we're doing? That's insane.

SPEAKER_01 32:51

What are some of the factors that are driving that awareness?

SPEAKER_02 32:55

I think a lot of it is the connected community in Richmond. Richmond has a lot of immigrants that have come to Richmond. So Germany is we have one of our good friends from VC. Dr. Metzer is actually a German, lived in Germany, came over to VC professor now. He's actually assistant dean at the School of Humanities and Science. He introduced us to the Germany Rivery Club. Poland, we actually have several companies that are here in Richmond that are from Poland that we've been introduced to. They come here now, and whenever they talk to the Great Richmond Partnership or the Chamber RVA, and anything about AI comes up, the Chamber RVA, Great Richmond Partnership, these organizations are now main dropping us, saying, Hey, you got to talk to this organization. So we're starting to get to the point where we be we're now becoming the hook for these technology companies within our area. So we're becoming an economic impact engine, that data set and that hook for these technology companies to come into our city. And these organizations promoting the city are using us as part of their pro forma of the reason to come to Richmond.

SPEAKER_03 33:55

So I actually have something for us if you guys want to play. We could actually trial story tracks on AI Ready RVA. It would be an AI focus as opposed to a Richmond. It would still be Richmond, but it would be it would not be as broad as what I had envisioned for it when I built it to begin with. But just to give you a quick sense of how it works, and probably not too many people are listening to this, but essentially what you do is you have a network and the network is all in agreement, and the network all has respective brand kits, and the network has a master brand kit. And essentially you're pushing stories through it to ensure that they get to the other constituents of the network, but with their brand story and their constituent audience concerns addressed so that it can be published quickly community-wide. And that starts to shape the information ecosystem. That's something that we could actually affect. And I would say, think about this a little bit, that we probably don't do a good enough job at telling our own story of success. We talk about it in person, on stage, on meetings, but we don't publish written stories that say we are by size the X number, this prominent group that we have, you know, the comparatives are important, and that's how humans operate in the world. So we have some work that we can do to accelerate our progress. But I also think that part of the reason why we've been successful is because we've been really good at communicating. You have a 100-episode podcast here, it's focused entirely on what we're doing. That does get picked up by AI. There's a good information ecosystem already, but it can be more strategic.

SPEAKER_01 35:26

Did you see my content studio by chance? I did not. Yeah, it's an Inspire AI content studio that I built. It has 19 agents that manage the content from these episodes. It ingests it through an RSS feed, and then the agents get to work. And it's all running in the background every single time, and all I have to do is review the output, and then I publish it and it becomes a new episode on the site. It pulls in guest speakers like you, their portfolios, backgrounds. It takes the content from the episode and it drops it in the learning modules. So if you want to learn about trans transformational leadership in the age of AI, it'll pull five episodes that are related to that topic. And obviously there's other experimental things in there that I don't need to get into the details of, but it feels like something in that same like class of content management that you're speaking of with your storyteller. What was it called? Story tracks. Yeah. So I'm interested. I'd love to hear more offline. We don't need to share the details here, even for the 40 people that listen to this. They probably shouldn't know.

SPEAKER_03 36:32

But there's something that I think is important about this conversation, though, because we don't have to reveal anything. We can reveal something very important, which is your team of agents and my story tracks or Carl Wright's or whatever workflows that we've built to be able to optimize and to improve quality, that is the same story, just repackaged for a different purpose. And I'll remind people, we are in a fundamentally different time because our entire world was based on math for the longest time. And we invested so many resources in understanding math and how ones and zeros can turn into all this amazing technology and it has. But now we're in the world of language models and people don't understand that. It is fundamentally different than ones and zeros. The way that it behaves, the way that it works, how it is a tool for us. And because we are social species and because we are wired to communicate with one another, it's our it's for our survival. This is the I don't want to call it a paradox, but it is a it's an interesting time to be alive because we have these tools that are that have a more profound impact on how we are a society, how we interact with one another. But what we're talking about is ultimately getting to the destination of a thing, in your case, it's communication, and doing it faster with more quality and to be able to focus on, I think this, right? Do more of these. And you wouldn't be able to do as many of these as you do if you didn't have that.

SPEAKER_01 38:02

Exactly. There's so much AI built into my workflows. It's it makes the job very straightforward, easy, and reproducible. Even when I want to go on vacation, I can have this stuff working for me.

A 2030 Vision For Community Life

SPEAKER_01 38:14

So let's zoom out a little bit, have a fun thought exercise, imagining what 2030 looks like for Richmond and specific to making Richmond the most AI ready region. Tell me, what does it look like to you?

SPEAKER_02 38:31

A funny question because of a slide I did on my last talk that says if anybody tries to tell you what's happening in 2030 with AI, then they're stupid because it's moving so fast. No one could tell what's going to happen in six months, then let alone a few years. But if for a vision of where, at least on the micro level of how the city would react and where AI ready RVA would be, is having a world-class innovation center where we're bringing the public together, having a sustainable model where we're impacting not only the community, but we're sharing our combined learnings from the city throughout the rest of the nation so that others know how we're doing it and how they can replicate it. But also creating a network nationally where we're not the only ones creating these, but we're also learning from others and bringing those learnings back to our community that we can learn from. So I think it's an expanded national network, if not a worldwide network, a flagship location that allows us to be the nexus for this, the entire region, if not the entire state, of where AI training goes through. And then just a sustainable model where we're learning, we're growing together, and we're working with not only organizations, but we're working with foundations as well as institutions like universities and community colleges to make sure that we keep the true North Star of what our mission is, and that is to empower our community, to make sure our community is the most prepared for the future and wherever that future brings us, that we're leading the way responsibly, ethically, and human-centered.

SPEAKER_03 39:54

Anything to add to that, Will Melton? Yeah, yeah, I think that's right. It's really hard to predict where technology is going to go. But I think that it's important to say that it is information technology at the end of the day. So there's a lot of things that we can predict about it. We can predict that it's going to continue to be a tool for human progress. And that's where my answer shifts a little bit because when you think about what do you really want to know about 2030? Is it how we use technology or is it how we have formed our city to live better lives? And so I think that Richmond looks like a place that's more intentional, a place that has recognized that it's a growing place and that it that needs to be managed, and that it recognizes that there are shortfalls that we have neglected historically. I call it deferred maintenance and infrastructure, but you can apply that same term to people. And so I think that AI is bringing people together in ways that we've never seen before. And we know that the internet did that, but it also social media drove us apart. I think AI is causing some anxiety, it's causing people to look inward toward their social groups where they can find safety. And I think people will ultimately spend more time together because of this technology. And I think that what that will cause us to do is to find the opportunities to be more connected. As we build the Fall Line Trail through nine different localities, we don't just build a trail that takes you a linear direction. There will be many different pathways that connect to that trail. And as people begin to use those things, they will bump into each other quite literally on this trail. And that will create new connections and new ideas and solutions to problems, and we will have problems as a result of all that growth. But I think that if you do it potentially and if you take the technology and you put it to work for us and recognizing that we have this power to manifest a future, I think that's something that I can see happening by 2030. And the resultant outcome is what others would describe as a blue zone where people are healthy and thriving and have access to the resources that they need to be healthy and thriving.

SPEAKER_01 41:55

Okay, that's great. You both incited a deeper question I want to dig into

Playbooks That Scale Without Faking Community

SPEAKER_01 42:01

here. And that is about the knowledge base, Will Willis, you just spoke of, and being able to replicate the knowledge across other regions in the US, maybe even the world, and bringing all that together and making sure that they can find each other and replicate the goodness that we're building here. So how do we start at our home base? I've spoken to the board about the capability engine. There's a strategy that I laid out many months ago. Its underlying data set is a vectorized store of knowledge for our organization and accessible to all of our entities, our cohorts, our committees, and our board, and et cetera. That was my idea, but what is your take me through your brain child there? And you just said we got to have all this knowledge and we got to make it accessible. We got to be able to repeat it and show the rest of the world how good it operates. What does that mean to you? How do we get there? Yep.

SPEAKER_02 42:59

In my mind, it's not really the technology, it's the community, is how we're forming the community around there. And technology can support that, but it's more of the face-to-face interaction, creating the playbook on how we created the cohorts, how the cohorts operate, how we interact with schools, interact with teachers, interact with administrators, then interact with the students. And then how do we interact with our community? And a lot of those are more of the tangible face-to-face, sit-down conversations, the way the organizations work and scale from there. And then technology helps support those. So it's really on that is how do we engage that? How do we set the precedence where when you talk to another city is calculating how a cohort comes to be and how a cohort operates effectively. And a lot of that is going to be based on not only finding the right industries, finding the right people to bring together to create that cohort leadership team. So I think a lot of our success. Has been that we've found very highly engaged individuals on different cohort teams that have picked up the torch and led that cohort. And then some cohorts have ebbed and flowed. They've risen or died on the vine. And that's an indicator, too, is if that's not that means you've either they haven't found the right person, or that industry is just not having enough traction where they're in the point where they want to have the community conversations yet. And there, that's where you just keep looking for the next leader to help lead those cohorts. We have 15 cohorts up and running. We have, I would say 10 of them are like gangbusters, they are very stable. Then we have about five that we have to nurse made up. And we have there's been a cohort that we've had that has only had one meeting in a year. It's how do we intentionally try to find new leaderships there, but also how do we then replicate that to other locations to say, hey, here's where documenting our failures as much as documenting our successes and being able to articulate. I was speaking to somebody in the South Virginia that worked for like the manufacturing innovation center in southern Virginia. And the most beneficial information to them is where we failed. It's like, let me tell you where we messed up at so you don't do the same thing that we did and saves yourselves a whole bunch of time. So I think that's been a lot of where the scalability is going to come from is those relationships and the repeatability of those programs. And how do we create the playbook that shows them how to do that effectively?

SPEAKER_01 45:20

When you say playbook, I meant I immediately think of technology, man. I'll be honest. You say the one-on-one FaceTime connectivity is what is gonna make it scalable, but coming from a technology background like myself, I think of one-on-ones. You want to connect with somebody in Tennessee and talk about their organization and help them build it out. That doesn't scale. Will Willis is a one-person operation. So meet me in the middle here. What do you think?

SPEAKER_02 45:47

Yeah. So it's the documents, it's literally like the process. It doesn't now, yes, I think technology can be it, but the technology should not be the centerpiece of it. We shouldn't have something that pushes it to happen because then you create something that is that's ingenuine and it's more of a system that's trying to force a community rather than a community trying to find a system to support itself. Yeah. So processes. So, like when I think of playbook, I think of like specs, a project book. Here's a roadmap on how to create a cohort. Yeah. That's what I think of. Like, here's your kind of playbook. Let me hand you, like you do for plays at a uh uh football. Here's your playbook, here's how you start a cohort, here's how you maintain a cohort, here's how you do that. And then on part of that is how technology supports that.

SPEAKER_03 46:30

A warm handoff of the playbook. Yeah, I feel you. So there's a piece to this that I want to hit on because you talk about technology and you talk about process, but there's still the missing piece of communication. And so if you go back to the piece about how do we get Richmond to be on the map, I was a pretty big proponent of just really focusing on Richmond. But as these opportunities have emerged to work with others, and they've sought us out, I recognize that's a reputational signal that is an indicator that we're maturing and that others are and so the more we have that experience, the more the expectation is on us to mature and to do things better and to and so I think that the the outreach piece is an important piece that is not isolated from the internal piece. And so the way I see it is like that's economic development. If Richmond's on the map is this leading AI city, because we have these relationships, that's gonna bring people to us. But if we don't do the workforce development side here locally, we're not gonna win the game. And so what I would say, Jason, is the capability engine is a good solution to the problem, but it's not you cannot just introduce technology without the people communication side. And so what I would say about the capability engine, and this is something that I've personally felt internally, it's not just a tool, it is a new economic model. And economic model shifts that cause people to be nervous because we are in a competitive society. And so when you introduce new economic models, that might be a detriment to somebody's business. I'm not saying that it is, I'm just saying that the reason AI ready art works is because we brought a bunch of people in a room and several rooms over a long period of time, and consensus is built through this social fabric. And I think that when we take something like Capability Engine and give it to the social fabric, which is the people, to think about it and to challenge the pieces of it, the edge cases, and to think through the shifts of the economic model and how that's going to impact people, I think you're gonna have a lot more success with it. And I think our region will benefit more because the tool will ultimately serve the needs of the people. So let's get the weekend workshop together. Let's actually bring a group of folks to dive into this because you need adoption, but you you'll get adoption after other people feel like they've had something to do with it.

SPEAKER_01 48:44

Yeah, that's true. We're have signed up for the uh September 22nd Builder Lab event, Will Melton, so that we can have this conversation in real time because that's exactly what I hope to bring to that segment, is my own inspiring thoughts. I'm gonna have a little work group on this topic specifically and how to leverage the technology that is at play here without forcing it, like you both are saying. We don't want to force feed the technology into the process because it wouldn't be a genuine feeling. I totally understand. And the nature of what you're saying, Will Willis, is that you can't take all of that rich network communication and back and forth discussion and establish some tech technical system programming that eliminates it. It's important that Will Willis talks to Sally Joe in Tennessee and can vibe about the process more than just look at the 50-page document on the run book and say, here, go have at it. I get that. And I think it's an important thing to keep in mind when I think about like where we should be going as well with the technology.

SPEAKER_02 50:02

I think too, on the technology side, too. I think one of the one of the opportunities we have that they can really accelerate this is finding ways to get better. So sometimes is the UX, sometimes you want to make sure the user experience on the web, the the interface is just as good as the interface itself, like the what the interface is supposed to accomplish, is finding focus groups to go in there. But I know we've tried to reach out to the cohorts and get them to do it's been a little bit low, just because they're in the middle of their lives and stuff like that, is finding ways to test it with a focused UX environment where they're giving feedback on how easy it is to use, how easy it is to clean the information I need from it. Because I think that the capability engine itself is very strong. I think it's more people like who's going to use it consistently, giving feedback on how to make it more user-friendly and create that. I think that will be the acceleration of the adoption curve there. A great piece on that.

SPEAKER_01 50:55

I look forward to playing this episode back as I edit it and figuring out what goodness y'all are providing me. This is great feedback. I appreciate it. I appreciate your honesty and everything.

The Next 12 Months Of Action

SPEAKER_01 51:07

Let's dial it into kind of a final set of instruction for the community here. You've got a 12-month challenge, you've got meeting that challenge over your whether you're an administrator in a school or a local government or a university leader, business leader, small business owner. What should they be focusing on in the next 12 months? And even if you can inspire them to wake up tomorrow, if they were to hear this today and wake up tomorrow on Monday and do something, what would that be?

SPEAKER_02 51:38

For me, I think two things. One is if they're they're truly trying to work on their adoption curve or even the curriculum curve of where AI is going is engage the community, whether it's through us or through another organization. It's sometimes we get so siloed in our industry or so siloed in who we're comfortable with communicating with, we lose the opportunity to get a new perspective and to possibly solve a problem that we don't think is solvable because it's not in our framework. And then I think the other two is especially when it comes to AI, is find a valuable problem, find a problem that you have within your organization or things and find out if AI is the best way to solve it. If not, great. There's certain things that a power BI tool might be able to answer. An if then state might be able to answer. But if AI is the answer, how do you do it responsibly, ethically, humans in a loop? We call it kind of my human in command. And as you start doing that, is how do you train your workforce? How do you train your staff and your teams to be a part of that journey and not just have it dictated to your organization?

SPEAKER_03 52:43

Good stuff. I would say that if you classify your organization, your company as being too busy to implement new technology, it's probably a sign that you need to stop what you're doing and implement a new technology. I've been using this analogy recently, and I think it lands for a lot of people. When we were kids, they told us that if you catch on fire, then you stop dropping rolls. Because if you run, you'll fan the flames, and that's what makes it worse. People who are too busy are running and they're fanning the flames. And until they stop and look at what they can automate in their process, it's not AI, it is process automation. They're gonna remain on fire. And we live in a world that is hyper competitive. When somebody over here opens up, a 20-year-old kid opens up an agency and starts building websites with AI and slings them for 500 bucks, but does it at scale, he's gonna outpace me. It's a different bot business model, but he can do that in a year because that's what he set out to do. And so not saying that's a threat to me, but that's an indicator that I need to be competitive with people like that if I'm gonna win. And so business people specifically, they've got to get their hand on the sand, they've got to go here, they've got to get clear on what this technology can do for them. It's not adoption first, it's clarity first, it's understanding first. And so you've got to be curious, you gotta take some time to think about this stuff. And hey, we have a really fantastic community that you can come and be a part of. You don't have to join, you can just show up and we'll take care of you, and we'll make sure you have what you need. Beautiful.

SPEAKER_01 54:15

Will Willis and Will Melton. We're helping build a workforce here where workers have the opportunity to adapt to their professions as they change, and you guys are at the forefront of all of that. So thank you. Fun to do it with you.

SPEAKER_02 54:30

And congratulations on your hundredth episode. That that is a testament to perseverance, to having a vision there. 100 episodes in less than two years. Kudos to you for picking up the torch and running this. And I've listened to a good portion of those episodes, and a lot of them are very in-depth on the industries as well as the leaders that are in there. So you've done a very good job on collecting a great, diverse group of people to talk with and bring that information to the Richard region.

SPEAKER_01 55:00

Yeah, I feel like the uh the podcast is thriving, it's in a good place right now. I'm gonna bring so much by running it. So podcast happy hour. Podcast happy hour. There we go. Gosh, you guys uh endless with the ideas here. I appreciate you. All right, it's a wrap. Perfect.

Closing Reflections On AI Readiness

SPEAKER_01 55:18

For nearly a hundred episodes, we've explored artificial intelligence from a lot of different angles. We've talked about extraordinary technologies and watched models become more capable. We've watched AI move from research labs into workplaces, schools, phones, and increasingly into everyday decisions we make. And that's why this conversation about Richmond matters. Because an AI ready region isn't about having the newest technology. And it also isn't about turning everyone into an AI expert. It's about creating a community where people understand enough to participate, where businesses know how to turn these capabilities into real value, where educators prepare students not just to use AI, but to think critically alongside it, where workers have an opportunity to adapt as their professions change, and where we make sure the benefits of this transformation aren't reserved for the people who happen to get there first. And maybe the goal shouldn't be for Richmond to become the next Silicon Valley. Maybe the goal is for Richmond to become the first Richmond. A region that figures out what responsible, practical, human-centered AI adoption looks like at community scale. And if we can do that, we won't simply be preparing Richmond for an AI-powered future. We may end up creating a model that communities can learn from. So to everyone who has listened, shared an episode, joined a conversation, challenged an idea, and been part of this journey over the first 100 episodes. Thank you. Episode 100 isn't the finish line. In many ways, I think we're just getting started. So until next time, stay curious, keep innovating, and let's build a future where Richmond doesn't just adapt to the age of AI. We help define what an AI ready community can become.