Head over to our Events Portal to get the latest on upcoming AI Collective events near you. Search by city, date, or event format, and join thousands of builders at events across 100+ chapters on every continent (except Antarctica, for now).

🌁 Based in SF? Check out SF IRL, MLOps SF, GenerativeAISF, or Cerebral Valley’s spreadsheet for more!

Most startups raise money and then learn how to tell their story. Listen Labs did the opposite.

Listen Labs runs automated, AI-led customer interviews at global scale, turning conversations into usable research for teams at Microsoft, Sweetgreen, Perplexity, and Robinhood. In under a year, they’ve interviewed over a million people and grown to an eight-figure revenue run rate. This week, they announced a $69M Series B led by Ribbit Capital, pushing total funding past $100M.

What actually made them break out happened earlier. The team spent $5,000 on a San Francisco billboard covered in what looked like random numbers. They were AI tokens. Decode them correctly and you unlocked a coding challenge, which led to a job interview. Tens of millions of impressions followed, but more importantly, the right engineers paid attention. It worked because it reflected how the company actually operates: do the unscalable work first, then let AI scale what already works.

Pause. Anthropic just shipped Claude Cowork, a desktop agent that executes real tasks across your files instead of chatting. You give it a folder and an instruction, and it plans, executes, and reports back.

According to Boris Cherny, the creator of Claude Code, Cowork was written almost entirely by Claude itself. Anthropic engineers described the process as directing the product while Claude handled the implementation. The tool came together in about a week and a half. Even more striking: over the last month, Boris’s own contributions to Claude Code were fully written by Claude.

The AI Collective Ghana chapter convened builders, operators, creatives, and policy-adjacent professionals in Accra for AI Drinks: Networking Into 2026, a gathering focused on reflection and forward alignment. Hosted by a coalition of local organizers and community leaders, the evening centered on how AI shifted in 2025 from experimentation to operational reality, particularly across sectors shaping Ghana’s economic future.

The focus of this event was on access, trust, and deployment pathways that make AI productive for emerging markets. Energy, fintech, health, media, agriculture, and public-interest professionals exchanged concrete use cases, constraints, and regional priorities, ready to bring more of this energy in Accra and beyond in the new year.

This week, The AI Collective hosted a closed-door fireside chat at Silicon Valley Hub with senior AI leaders in Menlo Park examining what it actually takes to deploy Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems inside large enterprises. Senior engineering and AI leaders shared firsthand lessons from production environments, moving well past architecture diagrams and into the real drivers of organizational friction.

The panel comprised leaders from Visa, Snowflake, Zscaler, and Support Vectors who all shared perspectives that impressed upon attendees how to make RAG deployments successful in their organization.

Roam is the virtual workspace our team relies on to stay connected across time zones. It makes collaboration feel natural with shared spaces, private rooms, and built-in AI tools.

Roam’s focus on human-centered collaboration is why they’re our Premier Partner, supporting our mission to connect the builders and leaders shaping the future of AI.

Launching a new product or hosting an event? Put your work in front of our global audience of builders, founders, and operators — we feature select products and announcements that offer real value to our readers.

The AI Collective is a community of volunteers, made for volunteers. All proceeds directly fund future initiatives that benefit this community.

About Noah Frank

Noah is a researcher, innovation strategist, and ex-founder thinking and writing about the future of AI. His work and body of research focus on aligning governance strategies to anticipate transformative change before it happens.

About AJ Green

AJ Green is a founder, writer, VC scout, chairman, and respected community leader in the AI and startup space. A former athlete turned tech entrepreneur, AJ is on a mission to make AI the great equalizer scaling startups, connecting ecosystems, and turning disruption into opportunity.