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

Last week, The AI Collective’s very own Executive Director, Chappy Asel and Founding Director of Growth, AJ Green joined Grace Gong live to discuss how our organization has scaled into one of the largest grassroots AI communities in the world.

Founders, Inc. recently announced Artifact, its largest program to date, bringing 200 founders to San Francisco for five weeks of in-person building. The program runs from January 12 to February 13 and culminates in a public showcase, with up to $250K in first checks available for top teams.

Artifact is structured around shipping, and participants are expected to leave with a working demo or product artifact rather than a concept or pitch. The program is open to founders building across AI, machine learning, hardware, robotics, and other emerging technologies.

The AI Collective and KC Digital Drive hosted a sold-out Claude Code meetup in Kansas City with more than 70 builders, technologists, and founders in attendance. The agenda centered on direct exposure to Claude Code through a walkthrough, short community demos, and a live remote Q&A with the Anthropic team. The room was active through open hacking and extended discussion after the formal program.

Delegating work to helper agents in order to reduce context size and protect the main agent’s reasoning capacity resonated across experience levels. The overall discussion that night moved toward agent design and task partitioning as practical constraints for terminal-based workflows. From all of us at AIC, we’re looking forward to seeing what’s next, KC.

In Toronto, The AI Collective hosted an invite-only founders lunch with Roam at the CN Tower’s 360 Restaurant. Seven founders from five companies participated, operating teams across Africa, Canada, Europe, India, and the U.S. The conversation focused on how distributed companies structure execution when AI is embedded in daily operations.

Jon Brod, Co-Founder and CMO of Roam, joined during his visit to Toronto and shared a brief product walkthrough at the table’s request. Discussion stayed anchored in operating details, including collaboration patterns, meeting structure, and the tradeoffs teams encounter as they scale remotely. The session prioritized shared experience over general frameworks.

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.

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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.