Inside Our Inaugural How We AI Event at NYC Tech Week

There is a lot of noise around AI right now.

That was the reason we launched How We AI: NYC. We wanted to bring people who are actually working with AI into a room together and let them share what their experience looks like. The honest, unfiltered reality of building with it and leading teams through it.

And I want to be clear about what this evening was. It was the inaugural launch of How We AI, our multi-city series designed to cut through the noise and create a space for real practitioners to share real stories. Our beta users showed up. Our community showed up. The people who have been in the trenches with us, building on the platform, giving us feedback, pushing us to be better, they were in that room. That made it something different entirely.

That is all we asked of everyone. And what came back was one of the most genuine conversations about AI that I have been part of.

The Panel Said What People Actually Think

Arnold Miller, the SVP at Gutenberg talked about what it genuinely took to rebuild Gutenberg's global operations natively on CambrianEdge.ai. He called it the three Ps: people, process, and patience. The patience part especially. Saying the same thing to your team over and over, month after month, until the new way of working becomes the default. That is what enterprise AI transformation actually looks like. Read their story here- https://cambrianedge.ai/customer-stories/gutenberg

Hannah Feminella, the CMO at Brownstone Social used CambrianEdge.ai to completely rebuild the Brownstone Social brand, directing every creative decision from color palette to typography to positioning. Her framing was precise: what you see is what you allowed it to create to realize your vision. AI articulated the direction she already had but struggled to express.

Kalpana Kanthan, the CMO at American India Foundation (AIF) brought the perspective the room needed most. She runs marketing and development for American India Foundation, which has served over 23 million people across India. Her take was direct: the only people who will be casualties are those who resist embracing the technology. Every wave before this one, from digital journalism to social media, rewarded adaptation. AI is no different.

What our co-founder and I said after

After the panel, I brought our co-founder Shrey Malhotra up and he explained what we set out to solve. Marketing is not one thing. It is five interconnected segments: research, creation, collaboration, distribution, and analytics. Every one of those segments has its own tools. Every one of those tools is fragmented from the others. The hours teams spend trying to bridge those gaps are hours not spent on actual work.

We built CambrianEdge.ai to collapse those five segments into one closed-loop environment. That is the architectural idea. Not a better tool. A different foundation entirely.

I used the electricity metaphor because I keep coming back to it. In New York, 120 years ago, there was a battle between Tesla and Edison to electrify the city. Most people were still lighting candles. Electricity required rewiring. It required organizations to tear out the old structures and rebuild for a new kind of power. AI is the same moment. Unless we rethink work from the ground up, we are not going to solve the adaptation problem.

One question from the audience stuck with me. Someone had been using CambrianEdge.ai for six months and said it was the one platform they had not been able to extract an apology from. That what it surfaces is consistently vetted, sourced, and honest about where the information comes from. They asked whether Salesforce integration was on the way. It is already there. We have 43-plus integrations across tools and SaaS products. We are model-agnostic. Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT, all of them accessible from within CambrianEdge.ai, with your data and context staying secure and governed.

Omnia: the brand mascot.

Before we wrapped up, I unveiled our brand mascot: Omnia.

The octopus has been around for half a billion years. When the Cambrian explosion happened, more life forms emerged on this planet than at any other moment in history. The octopus was one of them. It is the only one that survived. Not because it was the strongest. Because it was the most adaptive. Read her story here: https://cambrianedge.ai/omnia

Humans are adaptive too. That is what we keep forgetting when we talk about AI fear.

Everything that we are here for as humans. Intelligence is human. It always has been. AI gives us more room to use it.

That is the tagline we stand behind. That is what CambrianEdge.ai is rooted in.

Why This Event Mattered

I started the evening by telling a story about a friend who asked me about a year ago whether he should take a class to learn AI. I told him no. I gave him access to CambrianEdge.ai and told him to start using it. He was in the room that night.

That is the experience we wanted to create for everyone in that room. Not a lecture. Not a product demo. A gathering of people who are actually doing this work, including the beta users who have been with us from the beginning, sharing what it is really like so that the people who are still figuring it out have somewhere to start.

The recap video is live on our channels. If you were there, thank you for making it what it was. If you were not, I hope you watch it. How We AI is just getting started.