Earlier this week, team Tangify had the wonderful opportunity of attending the 2025 Tech Innovation Summit hosted by the Boston Globe Media, a gathering that brought together leading minds across venture capital, climate tech, and artificial intelligence. From insightful panels to engaging fireside chats, the day was packed with deep dives into how our region can remain competitive, fuel growth, and responsibly scale next-generation technologies.
The summit opened with Linda P. and Noubar Afeyan channeling da Vinci’s wisdom that “nature has her own laws” to remind us that innovation isn’t random, but rooted in discoverable patterns we can tap into. Noubar proposed the term “polyintelligence” to describe the juxtaposition between human, nature, and artificial intelligence, where we continuously learn from nature and cooperate with thinking machines. He shared a striking example of AI transcending patterns of the natural world: when AI was fed a hundred fluorescent‐protein sequences, an AI model generated dozens more that were structurally novel yet still fluorescent. Through repeated cycles of variation and selection, where AI tools generate ideas just outside of the ordinary and prune for the most promising, we drive real novelty. Noubar ultimately referred to our modern age as a true polyintelligence renaissance, where human creativity, machine insight, and the coming wave of artificial general intelligence are converging to unlock innovations beyond anything we’ve imagined.
Gregory T. Huang then continued the discussion by asking how Boston can sustain its innovative edge amidst threats facing the Commonwealth, from healthcare funding cuts to drastic changes in international student policies. Jeffrey Bussgang urged us to defend America’s “brand and culture” as the magnet that draws the world’s best students and entrepreneurs, and reminded us that the prevalence of Boston–New York hybrid teams demonstrates how geographic flexibility can amplify impact. Eric Paley built on this by emphasizing that an innovation mindset must be woven deeply into every company, especially as AI tools begin to reshape customer engagement and service offerings. He spoke about how AI tools can boost human creativity without replacing it, making clear that demand for skilled programmers is only going to rise. Daniela Rus then painted a picture of a momentous inflection point: years of AI research are finally bearing fruit, human potential is expanding, and every crisis presents both “danger + opportunity.” She closed by highlighting that our funding pipelines and talent-training & retention programs will determine whether we win and how quickly we can translate foundational advances into real-world applications.
Shirley Leung shifted the conversation to nurturing Boston’s homegrown talent, exploring how the region’s workforce can keep pace with growing demand amidst current economic headwinds and tailwinds. Georgina Campbell Flatter shared that Greentown Labs has generated 14,000 jobs and supports over 600 companies, calling climate a “lens that touches all industries,” with $2.1 trillion injected into the climate tech industry in 2024 alone. Christina Luconi noted that while the overall hiring mood remains “pretty good” for now, companies are spending extra time finding not just skilled but mission-aligned candidates who truly care about the work that they are doing. Deborah Liverman, PhD added that even though more firms are hiring new graduates, the application process has grown slower, driven mainly by the increasing number of applications and more intensive hiring processes. Most importantly, across the board the panel agreed on three things: the immense value of building genuine in-person communities, offering robust mentorship to young professionals, and improving salary transparency – all key elements to retaining homegrown innovators.
Next, the discussion pivoted to AI’s transformative impact across industries, where Aaron Pressman led a deep dive into sector-specific AI use cases. Justin Whitehead described how his wealth-tech firm uses AI to assist with client research as well as acquiring and developing proprietary datasets, while Scott Weller explained how employing AI agents within the credit lifecycle can increase efficiency in commercial lending, delivering more capital with the same team. Sadid Hasan walked us through his multi-year, human-in-the-loop training approach to build copilots that learn from expert feedback, and Andrew Beam highlighted the potential of “scientific superintelligence” by running AI at scale and accelerating scientific discovery by pairing LLMs with autonomous question-asking agents. Across all these applications, panelists stressed that rigorous human oversight, multi-stage evaluation, and frequent verification are essential to guard against “AI slop” and maintain trust.
In an afternoon session moderated by Andy Rosen – Dave Balter, Kathleen Chase, and Ethan Heilman explored crypto’s evolving role as both a decentralized financial system and a new vessel for investment. They acknowledged the market’s volatility and regulatory headwinds but celebrated blockchain’s power to enable peer-to-peer transactions and transparent, trustless record-keeping. As infrastructure matures, they pointed out, you can land in most major cities and instantly convert crypto into local currency – proof that digital assets are moving from niche speculation toward everyday utility. Ultimately, as more people use crypto, from sending money abroad to buying tokenized assets, its combined strengths in decentralization and investment potential will continue to build momentum.
Finally, Janet Wu sat down with Ramin Hasani to explore how edge AI is moving intelligence off the cloud and onto devices. Ramin outlined the promise of liquid foundation models that allow parameter communication computational costs to be reused, estimated to be 20 to 1000 times more efficient than traditional methods. He highlighted real world applications of Liquid AI in fraud detection, e-commerce, and biotech, specifically mentioning possibilities of interactive AI agent exchanges in online shopping as well as new protein structure design in biotech. Additionally, Ramin explained the exciting future of SLMs – compact, specialized small language models that can run on local devices with near-zero inference cost, low latency, and enhanced privacy. Looking ahead, he envisions a “sovereign” AI ecosystem where each machine hosts its own specialized AI, broadening innovation while keeping costs and risks tightly controlled.
It was inspiring to see Boston’s ecosystem rally around the challenges and opportunities ahead, from talent pipelines and climate impact to the responsible scaling of AI. A huge thank you to all the speakers and panelists for sharing their expertise, and to Governor Maura Healey for highlighting Massachusetts’ leadership in education and healthcare, championing our diverse student community, and advocating for applied AI initiatives across state agencies. Congrats to AssurTek Surgical and Alicia Everitt, Ph.D. for winning the pitch competition, and shoutout to BioSens8, Helix Carbon, LymeAlert, Parrots Medical AI, PONS, and Vocadian for your fantastic pitches! We’re excited to carry these insights forward at Tangify, and we look forward to collaborating with this incredible community to shape the future of innovation right in our backyard.
