Ai4, day 3: AI leaves the screen

That's a wrap on Ai4. Three days, more than a dozen sessions, 100+ conversations - and the last day saved its biggest theme for the floor: AI is leaving the screen.

The video says it better than I can.

The morning keynotes were very impressive. Sebastian Thrun and Dmitri Dolgov, Waymo's founder and co-CEO and then Cisco's Jeetu Patel's perspective on the future of artificial intelligence seems spot on.

Session standouts:

• Keith Soura (CTO, Arch): Very informative & my best session of the day! "RAG is a flashlight. Your agent needs a map." Regulated rules as living dependency graphs agents traverse - the deterministic steering layer that lets probabilistic AI act safely where errors aren't an option.

• Bhaskar Roy (Workato) on building an "AI factory": governance, deterministic workflows exposed as Enterprise MCP tools instead of raw API wrappers, and ruthless token economics — plain text over JSON (800+ → <50 tokens), field filtering (10x fewer), tool-call chaining (12x fewer). Workflows that cost dollars per run now cost cents.

• Jasleen Singh (Google): evals are the bridge across the trust gap. Assertion tests, LLM-as-a-judge with strict rubrics, deterministic sandboxes, and CI/CD gates — no agent update ships without passing evals. Quote of the day: "Never go to production on a vibe check."

• Quantum isn't replacing AI - it's arriving to help. Murray Thom (D-Wave) on energy: a materials simulation said to need more electricity on a top supercomputer than the world uses in a year ran on their annealer for under $1 of power, plus wins like BASF cutting scheduling from 10 hours to seconds. QCi's room-temperature photonic Dirac-3 slots into diffusion models as a sampling layer and denoises NASA LiDAR data. Honestly, most of it went over my head. I need to read quite a bit on this topic.

• The moment I'll remember: Noland Arbaugh, the first Neuralink implant recipient. Paralyzed below the shoulders for a decade, now back in school with a 4.0, building a speaking business, controlling a computer with his mind. "I am what happens when the human mind connects to a computer." A reminder of who we're building for.

Day 1 was about governing AI. Day 2 was about paying for it. Day 3, AI left the screen — cars, robots, qubits, and one remarkable human.

Flying home with a full notebook. Thank you to the organizers, the speakers, and everyone who stopped to talk agents, identity, and governance with me.

If you were there — what's the one thing you're taking home?