Worth Magazine

Every conference this year has asked whether the technology works. That question is settled. The more useful one—the one worth clearing a day for—is what happens to your company, your industry, and the institutions meant to govern all of it now that it does. That’s the premise of Techonomy 26, which we’re holding on Tuesday, October 6, in San Francisco. The theme is Intelligence at Scale: what changes when AI stops being a feature and becomes infrastructure. The distinction matters.

Sport utility vehicles are supposed to be mainstream offerings for mainstream buyers. They’re go-anywhere and do-anything machines that can haul your kids and cargo to all manner of destinations, both epic and mundane, with a good degree of comfort and compliance along the way. Some SUVs lean harder into the sport part of the acronym than others, but Porsche has pushed its latest to the extreme. It’s the new Cayenne Electric, and in Turbo form, it’s the most powerful production Porsche ever.

Knowing that people with strong social connections tend to live happier and healthier lives, you muster the courage to walk across the room at a party and introduce yourself to someone you don’t know. You exchange pleasantries—and then the conversation sputters. Now what? Your mind starts racing as you search for something interesting to say. What should I ask next? Am I talking too much? Is this getting awkward?

Perched on the upper terrace of Ammoudi Fish Tavern in Oia, somewhere between my last bite of octopus and my first taste of loukoumades, I watched the dimly lit waters of the Ammoudi Bay settle into evening. Catamarans slipped into their berths for the night while skippers disappeared ashore. The wind softened the conversations around us, lending an unexpected intimacy to the meal. Then a cruise ship emerged.

Dr. Jay Luthar described the flaw in modern medicine in a single sentence, and once you hear it, you can’t unhear it. “The traditional medical model to this point has used population studies to find what the average person responds to and then fits an individual to an average,” he said. “Whereas we know that every individual is not an average, but very individual.” Tell me if this sounds familiar. Your doctor treats you with drugs validated on a population you don’t belong to.

On a secluded beach in Clayoquot Sound, a young black bear works the low-tide line, flipping rocks with one paw and eating the crabs underneath—methodical, almost cat-like. The audience watches from a zodiac idling offshore, 20 minutes into a tour that will also produce two more bears, three bald eagles, and a lone sea otter drifting in calm water. That is Tofino’s core product: wilderness, delivered in comfort.

We were 30 minutes late for our whisky tasting. In our defense, the name is everywhere in this corner of Speyside. We stopped at the Glen of Rothes Trout Fishery. We pulled up to the gates of Rothes House. The town itself is called Rothes, and somewhere inside it, unmarked and unbothered, is The Glenrothes distillery. It was 10 in the morning. Kat Robertson, the brand’s guide and brand education manager, met us at the distillery and drove us up the hill to a natural spring overlooking the town.

Americans agree on almost nothing, but everyone hates a data center. They are big, ugly buildings that hold few human jobs after the initial construction. But the real issue isn’t aesthetic; it is the fact that the cost of these centers in water usage, energy rates, and even tax breaks is often falling on average Americans. The result is a political consensus it would be woulda shame to waste on simple NIMBY-ism.

One year ago, enterprise AI was defined by experimentation. Companies were building pilots, testing large language models, and trying to determine where generative AI fit inside their organizations. Success was measured by whether the technology worked. Today, the conversation has fundamentally changed. At Worth’s second annual AI reception with IBM during the Ai4 conference in Las Vegas, I sat down with Sunil Murthy, IBM’s AI Field CTO, to discuss what has changed over the past twelve months.

“Everything Everywhere All at Once” is not only an Oscar-favorite movie. It’s an excellent description of how our personal health works. Sleep reduces stress, which lowers the risk of diabetes. The company we keep affects how much we drink. And vigorous exercise improves nearly every aspect of health. All our activities are interconnected and work together to determine our overall health.