New York Tech Week: Built in NYC – AI Edition
There is a growing consensus among founders, investors, and operators building in the artificial intelligence space: New York may be the best place in the world to do it right now. Not because it has the most compute, or the loudest hype, or the densest concentration of researchers chasing benchmark records. But because it has something arguably more valuable: proximity to the real world.
For New York Tech Week, Fenwick’s Kristine Di Bacco brought together Firsthand co-founder/CEO Michael Rubenstein, Databricks chief AI scientist Jonathan Frankle, Cinder CEO Glen Wise, and Radical Ventures partner Vin Sachidananda to discuss what makes New York so unique and how founders and builders can capitalize on those opportunities.
Proximity to the Customer Changes Everything
Perhaps New York City’s most consistent advantage is its geographic proximity to the industries AI is actually transforming. New York is home to some of the largest banks, insurance companies, healthcare organizations, advertising agencies, and media companies on the planet. For founders building enterprise software, that means potential customers are reachable not just by email or video call, but over lunch, or even across the street.
That physical closeness produces a qualitatively different kind of feedback. There is something about meeting customers in their own environment (seeing how they work, what problems actually slow them down, where technology is genuinely landing and where it isn’t) that no amount of virtual engagement can replicate. One recurring observation from the conversation: it is easy, in certain tech-saturated environments, to become so immersed in the excitement of AI that you lose sight of what problem you’re solving. New York, with its concentration of traditional industries and demanding enterprise buyers, has a built-in corrective mechanism against that drift.
Investors in the space have noticed the pattern too. Application-layer companies (those building AI into specific vertical workflows rather than developing foundation models) are increasingly gravitating toward New York, precisely because the city provides the commercial grounding they need to build things customers will pay for.
Talent That Stays and Diversifies
The talent question is one every ecosystem must answer, and for years New York carried the perception of a gap relative to the Bay Area. That perception is increasingly outdated. The city’s technical talent base has grown substantially, and it now draws engineers and researchers who actively want to live in a major urban center with life beyond the office. Employee tenure tends to be longer in New York, not because people are less ambitious, but because they are more settled. The city itself is a draw, not just the job.
There is also a talent characteristic unique to New York that may matter most in the current AI moment: domain depth. The city produces and imports professionals who bring serious expertise in finance, law, healthcare, media, and other industries alongside their technical skills. In an era where the real opportunity in AI is what one participant described as “AI and blank” (AI applied to a specific, hard problem in a specific industry), that combination is rarer and more valuable than pure engineering horsepower alone. Founders who know an industry deeply enough to understand its real pain points, not just its surface workflows, are disproportionately findable in New York.
Grounded ≠ Unambitious
None of this means New York lacks big thinkers. But there is a difference in orientation. The commercial culture of the city pushes builders toward revenue, customers, and outcomes faster than environments where the runway between idea and feedback can stretch for years. The idea of making one specific customer genuinely happy before trying to make a thousand happy was raised as a near-universal principle, and it is a principle that New York’s ecosystem enforces almost by default.
The conversation also surfaced an honest challenge. New York has the ingredients (talent, capital, customer access, industry diversity), but it does not yet have the density of connection that gives a smaller, more concentrated ecosystem its compounding effects. The solution, several participants suggested, is not to try to replicate San Francisco, but to create more of the informal connective tissue: the gatherings, introductions, and shared spaces that turn a collection of smart people into a genuine community.
The Broader Moment
New York’s rise as an AI hub is happening at a specific inflection point. Enterprise adoption is accelerating, but cost management is now a serious concern for organizations that have moved from experimenting with AI to deploying it at scale, a signal that usage is real and growing, even if the economics are still being worked out. The question of where value will ultimately accumulate in the AI stack (between frontier model developers, infrastructure providers, and application builders) remains genuinely open, and likely hinges on the trajectory of open-source models relative to proprietary ones.
What seems less open is New York’s place in that story. The city has always been where industries come to do business with each other. AI is simply the latest, and most consequential, technology to discover that.