A recent “AI in the Heartland” panel at the Back2KC event in Kansas City featured tech experts Julia Kanter, Ryan Shreve, and Usman Wajid discussing the realistic impacts of artificial intelligence on business and the workforce. Kanter noted that while AI makes building prototypes faster and cheaper, it creates unrealistic expectations about how quickly these can become viable, market-ready products, emphasizing the need to narrow a project’s scope and learn quickly.
When it comes to the workforce, the panelists agreed that AI is more likely to reshape how people work than broadly replace employees. While some knowledge workers will spend more time reviewing, editing, and approving AI-generated output, significant human effort will also shift toward building, configuring, integrating, maintaining, and governing the systems themselves. AI can also help preserve institutional knowledge as experienced executives and employees retire, but capturing that knowledge and making it useful still requires thoughtful implementation and ongoing human oversight.
The discussion also touched on an escalating cybersecurity arms race. As bad actors use AI for advanced attacks like personalized phishing, companies will need to deploy their own AI-driven security tools to fight back at scale. Finally, the panelists highlighted Kansas City’s unique advantages in this evolving tech landscape. The region’s affordable cost of living and local universities producing tech-native talent make it an attractive hub. Companies like TENEX.AI are actively leveraging this by offering relocation packages to bring tech workers from expensive coastal markets back to the Heartland.