I ran a community AI workshop in Hilo, hosted by Vibrant Hawaiʻi. It was a great pleasure to be on Hawaiʻi Island for it, and to spend a morning with people who came in curious and left with something they could actually use.

The session was built for a general audience rather than a technical one. I tried to give a clear and non-hyped picture of what AI is and what it is not, how the field arrived at today’s machine learning and generative models, and what that shift actually means for organizations right now. I worked through short concrete examples from several industries, looking at where AI reliably adds value in areas like customer support, operations, analytics, software, and knowledge work, and at what usually fails. I spent time on how to pick use cases that are feasible, measurable, and worth the effort, and closed on the risks worth taking seriously, including privacy, security, and the effects on people’s jobs.

This was the first in a series of workshops under the Aloha Intelligence Initiative meant to demystify AI and make it useful to communities across the state. Mahalo Vibrant Hawaiʻi for the venue, the promotion, and for getting the word out to the right people.