Notes from aiVermont's AI for Business Summit
On July 9th I drove to Hula for aiVermont's AI for Business Summit. I figured maybe thirty people would show up. There were about a hundred.
That was the first surprise. The second was the lineup.
A legal innovation director from Vermont Law School. A game studio founder. A cybersecurity professor. A wealth advisor. A department chair from Champlain College. The IT security team from NPI. The CEO of Vermont Gas, who also chairs the Governor's AI Economic Task Force. Adam Davidson, who co-founded NPR's Planet Money and has spent two years reporting on where AI hype outruns reality.
And one 3D animator. Me.
I don't think I was the only creative in the building. Marguerite Dibble runs a game studio and closed the day with the sharpest talk of the whole thing. But I'm fairly confident I was the only person there whose actual job is making pictures for a living.
Author
Mark Cernosia
Category
Studio
READ TIME
5 min read
If I'd gone to a design conference, I'd have spent the day hearing about AI from people who think exactly like I think, worry about exactly what I worry about, and use these tools the same handful of ways I do.
Instead, I spent it listening to a financial planner, a law school director, and a security professional describe problems I've never had, in language I don't use.
That's the whole value proposition. I went in expecting to teach. I left having learned considerably more than I brought.
What businesses are actually doing with AI.
Here's the honest picture from Hula, and it's less dramatic than the internet would have you believe.
Document summaries. Briefings. Ops tasks. Internal process work. The unglamorous middle of the business, where nobody is going to make a case study out of it but everybody is quietly getting an hour back.
Nobody demoed a robot. Nobody claimed AI had replaced their team. The most common use case in the room was, roughly, I have too much to read and not enough time to read it.
Brandon Tieso gave the line of the day as the title of his talk: AI access isn't AI adoption. Everybody has the tools now. Almost nobody has changed how they work. That gap is where every one of us actually lives, and it was refreshing to hear someone say it to a room of business owners instead of pretending the revolution had already happened.
Adam Davidson has been reporting on exactly that gap for two years. Having him open the day set the tone: less hype, more receipts.
Duane Dunston's hands-on block on vibe coding, cybersecurity, and local control.
This is not my world. I don't write production code. I'm a guy who occasionally breaks his own Netlify deploy and then Googles his way back out of it.
But that's exactly why it landed. Everybody is building things with AI now, including people like me who would never have called themselves builders. And when you build that way, you make security decisions whether you know it or not. Most creatives, myself very much included, are only thinking about whether the output is good. Duane was thinking about whether the thing you just built is going to get you owned.
He walked through Project CodeGuard and secure development practices. If you're vibe coding your way through your own business tooling and you have never once thought about how you're building, that's a blind spot. Mine got pointed at directly, which is what you want from a day like this.
The talk that should have been aimed at me, and was.
Marguerite Dibble closed with "Beyond Productive: Finding and Forging an AI Future of Human Value."
I'd spent my ten minutes on stage talking about efficiency. Getting my day back. Not drowning in proposals. Which is true, and which is what I needed, and which is also the smallest possible version of this conversation.
Her point, and I'm compressing badly here, is that "it makes me faster" is a terrible ceiling to aim for. If the only question we ask is how much time we saved, we end up with businesses that are more productive and less worth working at.
That hit differently coming at the end of a day where I'd just finished evangelizing my own six agents.
They listed my talk as "What Running an AI-Native Business Actually Looks Like," which is a better title than the one I came up with.
Ten minutes on how I built six AI agents to run the business side of a one-person 3D studio. Proposals, biz dev, social, copy, the IT stack. The stuff underneath the work that was eating half my day and none of my portfolio. There's a longer breakdown of that system here if you want it.
Standing there, I realized I was a little further out on the curve than most of the room. Most people were using AI to read faster. I'd built a team of agents wired into my email, my Notion, my Slack. That is not a brag. It's a function of being desperate. I don't have staff. I had to build something or keep drowning. Necessity got me further than curiosity would have.
Vermont is not a tech hub. We're not pretending to be one.
What we have instead is a business community small enough that a lawyer, a game developer, a security professor, a gas utility CEO, and a 3D animator end up at the same tables at Hula on a Thursday and actually talk to each other. The whole thing was structured around table discussions and hands-on work rather than a parade of keynotes, which meant you couldn't hide in the back and check email.
Nobody was selling a vision. Everybody was showing something they'd built and used, and then getting asked hard questions about it by someone from a completely different industry.
If you're a Vermont business owner and you missed this one, go to the next one.
And if you're a creative reading this: get in rooms that aren't full of you. The people who don't do what you do are the ones with something to tell you.
