I've been heads-down — running workshops, building in person, showing up in rooms across the valley. What I’m coming back with is a better sense of what's actually happening here versus what people are saying and promising. I wanted to get today’s newsletter out because it just happened and because it provides a glimpse into the gap between actions and words from our valley leaders.

Last Thursday, I watched the Palm Desert City Council goal-setting session on YouTube.

When a city names in its annual goals, it tells you exactly where it thinks the future is — and more importantly, where it doesn't.

So let's back up. Exactly a year ago, on February 27, 2025, Palm Desert did something genuinely hopeful.

They adopted an AI top-tier goal — it was on the list:

AI, Business Innovation, and Entrepreneurship Hub.

Not buried in a subcommittee. Not vague language. Named. Assigned. And on record.

I had helped surface that language with a couple of council members. There was a lead team. There were supplemental materials. It felt like a valley city deciding not to wait on the future.

I remember thinking: this is great, this is smart. But on Thursday?

AI wasn't there. At all.

Not renamed. Not restructured. Not debated.

Just gone.

It surfaced twice in passing — once as a tool for crime data analysis, once inside "smart development" during a mall discussion. That was it.

The 2026 priorities were infrastructure for 6,000 new residents, a charter school feasibility study, extreme heat mitigation, positioning for LA28 and the World Cup.

All legitimate. All necessary.

But the AI chapter closed, or faded, without anyone saying a word.

And while I was watching that meeting, something else became clear.

Earlier in the week, during the State of the Union, AI came up exactly once. Data centers. Power load. Infrastructure.

Not the 55,000 job losses attributed to AI in January. Not the administrative roles quietly thinning. Not the analysts discovering half their workflow can now be automated. Not the middle layer of knowledge workers already under pressure.

At every level of government right now, leaders are talking about physical infrastructure while the disruption is happening in cognitive infrastructure. The buildings, the power lines, the data centers — that's the part they can see and fund and ribbon-cut.

What's harder to see is the work that's already changing, the roles already hollowing out, the decisions already being made by AI systems rather than people.

Palm Desert isn't an outlier. It's a microcosm.

Here's the part that matters for understanding why the goal might have disappeared.

The 2025 AI vision was anchored to the Entrepreneurial Resource Center at CSUSB Palm Desert. The ERC had inherited a long-standing mandate — seed a startup ecosystem in the valley, pick up where the Coachella Valley Economic Partnership left off after nearly two decades of trying. An effort that really never took root.

The thesis was sound. The problem was the foundation. CSUSB has largely left the ERC to fend for itself financially, and the ERC has been asking the city of Palm Desert to step up with more support. From what I'm hearing, the city may not renew its lease when it comes up in the next few months. When the anchor institution is negotiating its own survival, a forward-looking city goal becomes the first thing to drift.

So the AI priority drifted.

That doesn't mean nothing happened in 2025.

The ERC still exists. The CSUSB campus is across the street. College of the Desert is minutes away. Over 300 residents and small business owners came through AI workshops I developed and delivered. Some chambers engaged. Some city staff engaged. Some leaders engaged.

Education happened.

But education is not ecosystem, and it's worth being precise about the difference.

An ecosystem has density — of talent, capital, founders, and failures. The Coachella Valley doesn't have that yet. Mobile signal is inconsistent in places. Fiber isn't universal. The technical workforce is thin. The venture network is close to nonexistent.

Those are real constraints. Naming them isn't pessimism. It's the only honest starting point.

Here's what makes this moment different from five years ago, and why I think the valley's constraints matter less than they used to.

Agentic AI tools are collapsing the geographic penalty for certain kinds of knowledge work. You can now build products, run research, manage complex workflows, and reach global markets from anywhere with a decent connection. The desert is no longer a disadvantage for that kind of work in the way it once was.

Irony: the same tool doing that is also eliminating the role you might have relocated for. The geographic freedom and the job displacement are coming from the same source. The tool that lets you build from the desert is the same tool that may make the position you were building toward obsolete.

That paradox is real, and regional policy isn't touching it — not because leaders don't care, but because the disruption is moving faster than the policy cycle, and the people most affected aren't the ones in the room when the goals get set.

What the valley has, against that backdrop, is actually interesting. Low cost of living relative to coastal markets. Physical space. A civic culture flexible enough to move fast when someone credible shows up with a plan. And no entrenched AI incumbents — which means the story of what this region becomes in the AI era genuinely hasn't been written. Yet.

It's not a city goal. Goals follow energy; they don't create it.

What's missing is the first person or organization that decides to build here without waiting for permission — a recently vested founder who wants geographic leverage, a distributed team done with Bay Area burn rates, a small fund looking for a market nobody has priced yet.

Someone who looks at a mid-size region with no serious AI cluster, real infrastructure gaps, and a city council that just quietly dropped its AI goal — and thinks: this is exactly for me.

That decision won't happen in a study session. It won't appear on a council agenda. It will be made quietly, by someone who reads the silence differently than most people do.

I'm not frustrated that AI didn't make the 2026 goals.

I'm paying attention to what the silence is actually saying.

The valley has blue oceans, green fields, white space - metaphorically speaking. Whether AI converts all this into an asset depends entirely on who shows up next.

Until next time, have a bright and sunny day.

— Sat - SunshineFM