Cheryl Contee: We Asked for Flying Cars, We Got LLMs Instead | Intelligence at the Frontier 2026

Sat, May 2, 2026, 12:00 AM

Radio took 36 years to reach 50 million users. The internet took seven. ChatGPT took two months. Cheryl Contee's message is simple: we don't have the luxury of waiting to figure out what we think about this. Cheryl, CEO of Brightworks AI and Change Agent AI, has spent years helping nonprofits and mission-driven organizations navigate technology transitions. She opens with a memory of her grandmother's washboard — kept in the basement just in case the washing machine broke — and builds from there. We are in a moment comparable to electrification and industrialization, but moving faster than either. The institutions collapsing around us are not the destination; they're the precondition for something better. Her argument is that the question is never whether technology will change society. It's who gets to shape that change. Only around 10% of nonprofits she works with have an AI policy. That's a leadership failure. And leadership, not technology, is what she came to talk about. Speaker: Cheryl Contee (Brightworks AI / Change Agent AI) This session was part of Intelligence at the Frontier, held March 14–15, 2026, at Frontier Tower in San Francisco. Learn more at https://www.fundingthecommons.io