On Wednesday, I went to a panel session in Boston on AI. I thought my notes might be useful to others, so here they are. The title of the panel was "How to Thrive in an AI-Driven Future", the thing thriving is the city of Boston and the surrounding areas.
What was the panel about?
The panel was about the current state of AI in the Boston area, focused on how Boston might become a hub for AI in the near term. It discussed the Boston areas' strengths and weaknesses, and along the way, it pointed out a number of great AI resources in the local area.
It was held in the Boston Museum of Science on Wednesday June 4th, 2025.
Who was on the panel?
- Paul Baier, CEO GAI Insights - moderator
- Sabrina Mansur, new Executive Director of Mass AI Hub
- Jay Ash, CEO of MACP, Massachusetts Competitive Partnership
- Chloe Fang, President of MIT Sloan AI Club
What did the panel talk about?
The panel was at its most comfortable talking about universities and students. There was a lot of chatter about Harvard and MIT (the event was sponsored by Harvard Business School Alumni) and the 435,000 students in the state. There was also mention of the state's great educational record. Jay brought up the term "the brain state" for Massachusetts.
Apparently, there are about 100 business incubators in MA housing 7,500 companies, with 20,000 employees. These are bigger numbers than I would have expected.
Several panel members mentioned the Massachusetts Green Higher Performance Computing Center in Holyoke. I didn't know about it and it's nice to hear about these kinds of initiatives, but no-one connected it to promoting or developing AI in the state.
Sabrina talked about the state releasing some data sets in the near future as data commons. The panel all agreed this would be a great step forward. It wasn't clear what data was going to be released, when, and how, but comments later on seemed to indicate this would be Massachusetts data only.
A good deal was made of the state's $100mn AI Hub initiative, but it seems like this money has been approved but not allocated and it's not clear what it will be spent on and when. There was a hint that there might be some focus on SMBs rather than large businesses.
Chloe talked about how AI and code gen has enabled new people players. She said that a few years ago, MBA students didn't have the technical skills to build demo products, but now, with the rise of code gen, they can. She talked about MBA hackathons, something that would have been impossible until recently.
The whole panel seemed to have a love affair with the MIT and Harvard Sundai Club. This is a student club that meets on a Sunday and produces complete apps in a 12 hour period, obviously focused on AI. (I agree, there's some very interesting things going on there.)
There was some discussion on making regulation in the state appropriate, but no discussion about what that might mean.
While there was a lot of discussion on problems, there were strikingly few ideas on how to resolve them. Two issues in particular came up:
- Funding
- Livability
The panel contrasted how "easy" it is to get funding in San Francisco compared to Boston, and that's both at the early stage and the growth stage. There were some comments that this view is overblown and that it's easier than people think to get funding in the Boston area. Frankly, there were no real suggestions on how to change things. One ideas was to tell students in Boston that it's possible to get funding here, but that's about the only suggestion that panel had.
There were a couple of questions around livability. An audience question pointed out that rents in the Boston area are high (though San Francisco and New York rents are probably higher), but the panel dodged the question. On the subject of "things to do for twenty-somethings", the panel deferred to the youngest panel member, but again, nothing substantive was said. The panelists did talk about Boston being an international city and how its downtown doesn't really live up to that right now; the view was, Boston city government needed to step up.
Boston AI Week, which is being held in the Fall, was heavily promoted.
What were my take-aways?
While there was a lot of discussion on problems, there were strikingly few ideas on how to resolve them and I'm not sure then panel had thought the issues through.
MIT and Harvard (in that order), dominate the intellectual landscape and mind share. They certainly dominated the panel's thinking. In my view, this is fair and the other universities only have themselves to blame for being left behind. While they don't have the resources of Harvard and MIT, they could run the equivalent of the Sundai Club, and they could put people up for panel sessions like this. They could also organize events etc. Yes, it's harder for them, and yes MIT and Harvard have more resources, but they could still do a lot more.
I was left with the feeling that there's no real coordination behind Boston's AI groups. While there are individuals doing great things (Paul Baier being one), I don't get the sense of an overarching and coordinated strategy.
The International city thing struck a chord with me. My trip in was easy, I parked up and got one train right to the door of the Museum of Science. On the way back, things went wrong. I had to get three trains and a shuttle bus (almost two hours door-to-door, shocking). Nothing about my return trip said "international city".
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