The halls of the Special Competitive Studies Project (SCSP) AI+Education conference in Washington, DC, were buzzing with a distinct mix of urgency and optimism. Nowhere was this more palpable than during the fireside chat with Sal Khan, the founder of Khan Academy. As a technologist, watching Khan’s evolution from producing simple YouTube math videos to…

I’ve been discussing Agentic AI for some time now. It started off more in theory then it got very practical with a recent podcast about Agent platforms. Today we have a real example of Agentic AI in practice in the insurance industry. Artem leads a company that is proving the value of autonomous agents…

The rapid onset of generative AI has left the American education system in a state of “reactive whiplash.” At the recent SCSP AI+Education conference in Washington, DC, a panel featuring Alex Kotran (CEO of AiEDU), Dr. Christina Grant (Executive Director at Harvard’s CEPR), and moderator Eva Doug explored a critical pivot: we must move past…

This session from the SCSP AI+Education conference offers a compelling look at how the bedrock of our labor and education systems is shifting from static credentials to dynamic capabilities. As a technologist, reading between the lines of the dialogue between LinkedIn’s Catlin O’Neill and Microsoft’s Allyson Knox reveals a clear mandate: the “Human-in-the-loop” is no…

Since late 2024, I have been yammering on to whomever will listen, at parties, dog parks, grocery store lines, about one of the most important areas of our future, Agentic AI. We are rapidly entering a new era where the assistant doesn’t just suggest the flight; it books it, pays for it, and could…

At the recent SCSP AI+Education conference in Washington, DC, the air was thick with the usual policy jargon until Dr. Tasha Arnold, Head of Alpha Schools, took the stage. For a technologist, her message was a refreshing departure from the “AI will replace us” trope. Instead, she presented a vision where AI acts as the…

The dawn of the AI era isn’t just a technological shift; it is a profound economic and social disruption that requires a fundamental “rewiring” of the American workforce. At the recent SCSP AI+Education conference in Washington, D.C., a compelling panel titled “States, AI, and Workforce Competitiveness” brought together former Governors Eric Holcomb (Indiana) and Gina…

Blockchains are incredible for security and transparency, but by design, they are isolated. They cannot inherently communicate with the outside world or with each other. Without a reliable bridge, smart contracts are essentially flying blind. Oracles – one of my favorite topics going back to 2017 – because of my background in data repositories in…

The explosion of artificial intelligence is no longer just a software revolution; it is rapidly becoming an industrial and infrastructural challenge of unprecedented scale. At The Washington Post’s Building America: Powering the AI Age summit in Washington, DC, Associate Editor Frances Stead Sellers sat down with two leaders at the absolute forefront of this energy…

If hardware and software are the engines of the artificial intelligence revolution, government policy is the track they run on. Without the right permitting, infrastructure investments, and regulatory frameworks, even the most advanced technological breakthroughs will stall.

At The Washington Post’s Building America: Powering the AI Age summit, Dan Merica, Co-Anchor of the Early Brief,…

The world of finance is undergoing a metamorphosis so bizarre that not even Franz Kafka could have dreamt it up. We are watching the convergence of retail and institutional trading become entirely automated, driven by Agentic AI, and increasingly tokenized. Having just returned from speaking at Davos on this very intersection of blockchain and…

When we discuss the infrastructural demands of the artificial intelligence boom, the conversation almost immediately defaults to the electrical grid. We talk in gigawatts and megawatt-hours. But behind every headline about AI’s power hunger lies an equally critical, yet vastly under-discussed, resource challenge: water.

At The Washington Post’s Building America: Powering the AI Age summit,…