The event
- Name
- AI in Production 2025
- Dates
- 17 to 18 July 2025
- Venue
- The Collider, 1 Haywood Street, Asheville, North Carolina
- Host
- E-String Technologies, Inc.
- Also on the programme
- Anne T. Griffin (Griffin Product and Growth, workshop leader), Brent Laster (Tech Skills Transformations, LLC, workshop leader), Uma Uppin (Stealth Startup), Hannes Hapke (Digits), Shon Urbas (Pandium)
- Programme
- aiinproduction.com
Trip 17 to 18 July 2025 · Written up 18 July 2025 · Last expanded 29 September 2026
From Nashville to Asheville, into the foothills of the western Carolinas, for a workshop on AI strategy and production (not in one hop, mind: I went home from Nashville first, recouped, did the laundry, and came back out for this one). So much of this past year in AI has gone to “high falutin” notions, embedding and semantic spaces, convergent representations, agents resolving the Riemann Hypothesis!?, and I came here for the other end of the pipe.
Value over hype
I spent the time here digging into the nuts and bolts work that turns great models into real margin. The agenda was billed as AI in Production, which is exactly what I was after, value over hype.
The frontier result is the cheap half of the story now, and the plumbing that carries it into a billable product is the expensive half, which the headlines tend to skip. Rail gauges were never glamorous either, and they still decided who got paid.
MCP and whatever comes after Web 2.0
The agenda had a major section on the Model Context Protocol, which I think will be critical for large multi agent systems in whatever comes after Web 2.0. I first ran into open source MCP by accident, at an event at the Media Lab on mass decentralized intelligence last year (which is how most useful things seem to arrive), where MIT researchers have built a pretty extensive community around decentralized intelligence and its patterns. I get my hands dirty with it later this year, out in California.
The question I would put to anyone building in this space is which layer of their own stack they are assuming somebody else will standardise for them.
Building stubs, bagels and board games
Asheville is beautiful, though you can still see the footprints of the hurricane from last year. Driving into town I passed a few building stubs, including one that was apparently a fancy McDonalds, swept away whole during the floods. Things seem to be getting back to normal (coffee and bookstores were on my list too).
Scouring the town one night I found a place with all day bagels, every board game, and copious power outlets for laptops. The town is quirkier and nerdier than I anticipated, with very nice people all around, and if you have summer days left I would spend them here.
Links
The AI in Production agenda, and the Media Lab work on mass decentralized intelligence. To be added.
Open entry
This page is not finished, and is not meant to be. I add photographs, people and links as I dig them out, so it keeps growing after publication. Why the whole site works this way is on the colophon.
