Ep 100 - Becoming America’s Most AI-Ready Region w/ Will Willis and Will Melton

Send us Fan Mail Richmond is growing, AI is accelerating, and the uncomfortable truth is that “being interested” is not the same as being ready. We sit down with Will Willis (Executive Director of AI Ready RVA) and Will Melton (Board Chair, entrepreneur, and University of Richmond instructor) to wrestle with a bold goal: turning Greater Richmond into the most AI-ready region in America without making it a tech-only story. We break down what AI readiness actually means for real people a...

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Jason McGuinthe?

  Welcome back to Inspire AI, the podcast where we help leaders, builders, and communities navigate in the 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.

• 0:44Jason McGuinthe?

  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.

• 1:27Jason McGuinthe?

  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 and how it might look very different five or 10 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?

• 2:13Jason McGuinthe?

  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, Executive Director of AI-Ready RVA, an organization working across businesses, education, government, and the nonprofit community to build AI readiness and workforce readiness throughout Greater Richmond. Willis also brings this 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 RVA,

• 2:56Jason McGuinthe?

  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.

• 3:39Jason McGuinthe?

  Will Willis and Will Melton, welcome to Inspire AI 100th episode. How are y'all doing today?

• 3:45Speaker 01

  Fantastic. Doing great. Thanks for having us.

• 3:48Jason McGuinthe?

  It's a bit surreal. Couple of things 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?

• 4:27Speaker 02

  Yes, sir.

• 4:28Jason McGuinthe?

  Awesome. 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?

• 4:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'd take that. 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 high workforce, and a drastically lower unemployment rate than the national average.

• 5:24Jason McGuinthe?

  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, Melton? Anything else jump out at you?

• 5:41Speaker 02

  I work backwards from a more macro perspective of what Richmond needs. Richmond has been, has a long history, and I won't get into that, but it has been left behind in some ways. And 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.

• 6:24Speaker 02

  And we've got some real competitive factors in some of the states to our south 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.

• 6:46Jason McGuinthe?

  Yeah. Okay. 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, 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?

• 7:20Speaker 02

  Cheap. I think it's cost of living is low here. 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 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 need to happen. But I think we have a lot of the center of technology here, proximity to these very old-school stuffs. Some of the baked-in natural benefits. The river remains still a tremendous asset for us and the water resource that is. So I think that there's just some baked-in things.

• 8:04Speaker 02

  You could get to the people side of it, and I'll probably let Will do that because my thoughts are part of it.

• 8:09Speaker 01

  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 Greater 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 the 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,

• 8:53Speaker 01

  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 hub, huge medical hub. We have a little bit of everything. So we're actually really almost a model city for the rest of the nation because we're not so massive like in 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, fail, and adjust quicker than bigger organizations or bigger cities,

• 9:35Speaker 01

  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.

• 9:50Jason McGuinthe?

  Okay, those are big, breaching 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, what would you say are the biggest gaps for Richmond? I really, I want to know 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.

• 10:31Jason McGuinthe?

  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?

• 10:39Speaker 01

  I think it really comes down to equity. 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 are. And the low hanging fruit tends to be the people who are the most affluent inside of those technology stacks. Where we now need to, we're now, but sure enough, we now are starting to get our resources in place where we now need to make more conscious effort 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 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.

• 11:20Speaker 01

  And then as far as the other meetups and kind of RBA tech council, we got a data enthusiast, we got the Java, was it the Java? You know, because there's so many media 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 complimentary.

• 12:01Speaker 01

  And it's just making sure we stay in communications as we start getting closer to 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.

• 12:12Jason McGuinthe?

  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?

• 12:32Speaker 02

  My answer is going to be a little bit different because while I agree with Will, and I think he answered it in the starting point of what I was going to say is the equity gap. If you go back to what I said earlier about the fact that to 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, the man causes prices to go up. And that has 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%. 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.

• 13:11Speaker 02

  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 RBA 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 going to 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 the place where people come to make things happen.

• 13:53Speaker 02

  And this 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 going to exacerbate the problem for those who are on the bottom. So that's what I would say I lose 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.

• 14:26Jason McGuinthe?

  Okay.

• 14:26Speaker 01

  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 street 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 for Richmond. So much technology, so much innovation has happened in Richmond. It's part of our DNA and that's our superpower is 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.

• 15:10Speaker 01

  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.

• 15:18Jason McGuinthe?

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

• 15:31Speaker 02

  Need to chronicle that. That's actually a really good thing. And it goes back hundreds of years. It's, that's a cool story.

• 15:37Jason McGuinthe?

  Yeah. We have a lot of history here. 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. 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, get back a response, judge the response, make good out of that response.

• 16:20Jason McGuinthe?

  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 one-on-one prompters and judgment decision makers versus really examining their workflows and redefining how AI shapes what they do every day? What do you say?

• 16:49Speaker 02

  I would say that 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 to AI ready RBA. So I get to talk to a lot of other businesses. I think when we zoom out to the larger spectrum of businesses in Richmond, you'll see a bigger spread. You'll see a lot of small businesses that are on the earlier, the adoption curve or later on the adoption curve, rather, and not as mature with it. But what I would say, and I think you hit it right, like the big difference is, are you a company that uses AI to do the things that you did before faster?

• 17:30Speaker 02

  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 do 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 so I think 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?

• 18:09Speaker 02

  Like it's this thing that's opposite us, it'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 going to 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 going to make a lot of things a lot better, but we're not used to change. We have a tendency to be reactive and not proactive. And so it's going to have a ripple effect for sure. And it's not necessarily going to be easy. I don't know if it's going to be good or bad, it's not going to be easy.

• 18:45Jason McGuinthe?

  You want to jump in there, Willis?

• 18:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, a lot of the conversations I've been having too, the spectrum's all over the place, just because depends on what industry you are in. And with the diverse economy we have in Richmond, 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, the system design thinking where, hey, let me find a business problem I need to solve. Often 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 solopreneurs, they're just going like game busters. I'm my only employee, I have no other overhead, let me just figure out what I can do with AI. And they're just creating content, creating products, creating stuff like that. So I think the startup ecosystem, you're starting to see accelerate with AI.

• 19:29Speaker 01

  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 where I talked to, they're building a foundation model. 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.

• 20:13Speaker 01

  And here it is, it's 2026, it's now four years since chat GPT 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 operation team or outsource a dev operation team. They're 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 out of it. So it's been really cool seeing the different spectrums, but it is not like a, a single moving down the pipeline. It's all over the place, depending on industry, business size, and even the owner itself.

• 20:54Jason McGuinthe?

  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 nauseam about these things. And I feel like we are in the middle as well, where we're experimenting, like at breakneck speed with

• 21:35Jason McGuinthe?

  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 operation should look like in six months. And I think honestly, I'd like to bend your ear a little bit, right? And 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 of their, how do we use it responsibly, et

• 22:17Jason McGuinthe?

  cetera, built into their DNA. And we're a scrappy organization, 501(c)(3). 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?

• 22:33Speaker 02

  What I can say is, from a nonprofit perspective specifically, one of the challenges that we face as a two-year-old nonprofit is organizational maturity, not necessarily technological maturity. We're probably the most technologically advanced nonprofit in Richmond, just based on skills and even 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 waivers 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

• 23:13Speaker 02

  to be able to create solutions to those problems that yield mission impact and drive more funding or more services or whatever. With us, we have the ability to create anything we want. And we've got a million problems. So the challenge is in identifying the biggest problems that we have. And because we are, I wouldn't say immature nonprofit, 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

• 23:55Speaker 02

  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.

• 24:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. And to 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, hello, this is a cool thing to build, let's go build it. We think this is a, 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 that company level, what is companies doing? So early iteration of that, we're capturing NPS score, or ZEMEX 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 use in our community, being able to report out, that will be the mechanism that will

• 24:48Speaker 01

  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 are 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 creating mechanisms that allow us to quantify and justify organizations to invest more heavily in us, that will give us the resources to do more of those down the road.

• 25:26Speaker 02

  Yeah. 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

• 26:10Speaker 02

  about what's happening, not necessarily AI ready RVA, 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.

• 26:48Speaker 01

  I love that because I've been doing exact, kind of that late work 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 is create relationships with the different workforce development organizations, whether it's universities and trade schools, as well as things like Virginia Works or the Capital Region, or even EAs from Bristol, Virginia, or Hampton Roads, and I think at Boynton 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 the resources on it. I can

• 27:30Speaker 01

  go do something else and fill another gap. So we're doing that really 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 build, I always go back to my old, I love cartoon quotes is the from iRobot is see any fill a need, is trying to identify that need and how can we fill it? Are we the ones to fill?

• 27:49Speaker 02

  The lanes are fuzzy though, these days.

• 27:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:52Speaker 02

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

• 27:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, we very rarely stay in our lane.

• 27:57Jason McGuinthe?

  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 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, but the other day, you put a LinkedIn post on the fact that you are the premier speaker on AI.

• 28:32Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 28:33Jason McGuinthe?

  And ChatGPT called you out specifically?

• 28:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:37Jason McGuinthe?

  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?

• 29:07Speaker 02

  So the answer to that is we are 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, 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 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

• 29:50Speaker 02

  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, doesn'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

• 30:32Speaker 02

  for the things that you want to show up in, and also controlling the narratives that AI, how it speaks about you. Now, there needs to be a fundamental truth at the foundation of what we 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 is not real, 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. I've seen it work, not necessarily for a community, but for for myself. And I've seen countries, nation-states do this very effectively.

• 31:18Speaker 02

  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 going to do the job.

• 31:26Jason McGuinthe?

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

• 31:30Speaker 01

  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 a chancellor for the Micklenburg College in Tennessee reach out to me that they want to figure out what we're doing. We've had, we actually are helping and we signed a letter of support for AI ready Bristol, that they're starting the EDA in Bristol, 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 are almost like mirroring of data centers, Polytech.

• 32:13Speaker 01

  Met with them, we're now meeting with the French consulate. We just had to 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. And but and then even in the Richmond region is we were a 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. 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?

• 32:50Jason McGuinthe?

  That's insane. What are some of the factors that are driving that awareness?

• 32:55Speaker 01

  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 had one of our good friends from these, Dr. Mensah is actually a German, lived in Germany, came over here, he's a VC professor now. He's actually assistant dean at the School of Humanities and Science. He introduced us to the Germany Rotary 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, anything about AI comes up. The Chamber RVA, Great Richmond Partnership, these organizations are now name dropping us, saying, hey, you got to talk to this organization.

• 33:36Speaker 01

  So we're starting to get to the point where we we're now becoming the the hook for these technology companies within our areas. 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 performer of the reason to come to Richmond.

• 33:55Speaker 02

  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 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. 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 in the network. But with their brand story and their constituent audience concerns addressed, so that it can be published quickly, community wide.

• 34:39Speaker 02

  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, 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. We, 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 hundred episode podcast here, it's focused entirely on what we're doing. That does get picked up by AI.

• 35:21Speaker 02

  There's a good information ecosystem already, but it can be more strategic.

• 35:26Jason McGuinthe?

  Did you see my content studio by chance?

• 35:29Speaker 02

  I did not.

• 35:30Jason McGuinthe?

  Yeah, it's an inspire AI content studio that I built. It has nineteen 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 transformational leadership in the age of AI, it'll pull five episodes that are related to that topic.

• 36:09Jason McGuinthe?

  And obviously there, 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?

• 36:22Speaker 02

  Story tracks.

• 36:23Jason McGuinthe?

  Yeah, so I'm interested. I'd love to hear more offline. We don't need to share the details here, even for the forty people that listen to this, they probably shouldn't know.

• 36:33Speaker 02

  There's something that I think is important about this conversation though, because we don't have to reveal anything with, we can reveal something very important, which is your team of agents and my story tracks or Carl writes 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 were 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.

• 37:15Speaker 02

  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 a 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?

• 37:57Speaker 02

  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.

• 38:02Jason McGuinthe?

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

• 38:31Speaker 01

  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 twenty thirty 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 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.

• 39:15Speaker 01

  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.

• 39:54Jason McGuinthe?

  Anything to add to that, Will Melton?

• 39:56Speaker 02

  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 twenty thirty? 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 that needs to be managed and that it recognizes that there are shortfalls that we have neglected historically. They call it deferred maintenance

• 40:40Speaker 02

  in 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. I mean, 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

• 41:21Speaker 02

  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 intentionally, 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 could 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.

• 41:55Jason McGuinthe?

  Okay, that's great. You both incited a deeper question I want to dig into 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. It's underlying data set is a vectorized store of knowledge for our organization and accessible to all

• 42:38Jason McGuinthe?

  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 brainchild there. You just said, we gotta have all this knowledge and we gotta make it accessible. We gotta 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?

• 42:58Speaker 01

  Yep. In my mind, it's not really the technology. It's the community. It's 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 create 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 the technology helps support those. So it's really on that is how do we engage that? How do we set the precedence

• 43:39Speaker 01

  where when you talk to another city is escalating 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. If that's not, that means you hear 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

• 44:24Speaker 01

  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 nursemaid 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 the, I was speaking to somebody in the South Virginia that worked for 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

• 45:06Speaker 01

  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?

• 45:20Jason McGuinthe?

  When you say playbook, I immediately think of technology, man. I'll be honest. You say the one-on-one FaceTime connectivity is what is going to 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?

• 45:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. So it's the documents. It's literally like the process. It doesn't, no, yes, I think technology can be it, but the technology should not be the centerpiece of it. We shouldn't have 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.

• 46:07Jason McGuinthe?

  Yeah.

• 46:08Speaker 01

  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.

• 46:15Jason McGuinthe?

  Yeah.

• 46:16Speaker 01

  That's what I think of. Like, here's your kind of playbook. Let me hand you like you do for plays at a 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.

• 46:30Jason McGuinthe?

  A warm handoff of the playbook. Yeah, I feel you.

• 46:34Speaker 02

  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 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 looking. 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 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.

• 47:17Speaker 02

  If Richmond's on the map, if this is leading AI city, because we have these relationships, that's going to bring people to us. But if we don't do the workforce development side here locally, we're not going to 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 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

• 47:59Speaker 02

  just saying that the reason AI ready R and B 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 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 going to 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'll get adoption after other people feel like they've had something to do with it.

• 48:44Jason McGuinthe?

  Yeah, that's true. We have signed up for the September 22 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 going to 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 in the nature of what you're saying, Will Willis, is that you can't take all of that

• 49:28Jason McGuinthe?

  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 Jo 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.

• 50:02Speaker 01

  I think too, on the technology side too, I think one of the, one of the opportunities we have that 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, the interface is just as good as the interface itself, like the, what the, 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 cohort and get them to do it. It's been a little bit low, just because they're in the middle of their lives and stuff like that. It is finding ways to test it with a, a focused UX environment where they're giving feedback on how easy it is to use, how easy it is to glean the information I need from it.

• 50:41Speaker 01

  Because I think that the capability engine itself is very strong. I think it's, 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, the acceleration of the adoption curve there. A great piece on that.

• 50:55Jason McGuinthe?

  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. 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 a, an administrator in a school or a local government or a university leader, business leader, small business owner. What should they be focusing on 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?

• 51:39Speaker 01

  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 anything.

• 52:17Speaker 01

  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, even in the loop that we call it kind of my human in the 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?

• 52:43Jason McGuinthe?

  Good stuff.

• 52:44Speaker 02

  I would say that if you classify your organization or 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 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, drop and roll. Cause if you run, like you'll fan the flames and that's 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.

• 53:20Speaker 02

  They're going to 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 a scale, he's going to outpace me. It's a different business model, but he can do that in a year because that's what he said I have 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 going to win. And so business people specifically, they've got to get their hand on the stand. 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've got to take some time to think about this stuff.

• 54:04Speaker 02

  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. We'll make sure you have what you need.

• 54:14Jason McGuinthe?

  Beautiful. 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.

• 54:29Speaker 01

  Fun to do it with you. And congratulations on your 100th episode. That, that is a testament to perseverance, to having a, a vision there. A hundred 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 Richmond region.

• 55:00Jason McGuinthe?

  Yeah. I feel like the, the podcast is thriving. It's in a good place right now. I'm learning so much by running it. So.

• 55:07Speaker 01

  Podcast happy hour, podcast happy hour. There we go.

• 55:10Jason McGuinthe?

  Gosh, you guys are endless with the ideas here. I appreciate you. All right. It's a wrap.

• 55:17Speaker 01

  Perfect.

• 55:18Jason McGuinthe?

  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 the 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.

• 55:54Jason McGuinthe?

  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.

• 56:34Jason McGuinthe?

  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 or 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.

• 57:22Jason McGuinthe?

  This episode of Inspire AI Podcast is sponsored by Exponent 21. I keep hearing the same thing from business leaders lately. We're doing the work, but leads are harder to explain.

• 57:38Jason McGuinthe?

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• 58:23Jason McGuinthe?

  What stands out to me is that when people ask AI tools, who's leading in this space? Exponent 21 and its leaders are often referenced near the top. That comes from doing the work and shaping how this new search environment actually functions. To understand what this shift means for your business, visit exponent21.com.