During the summer of 2025 I met regularly with Brad Groznik, Bien Concepcion, and Kartikey Pandey to explore how AI could be used to strengthen our local community instead of isolating people further.

The idea that didn’t work

Our first idea was a daily State College podcast that summarized local news and events people actually cared about. I started building it right away — a platform that used AI to find sources, scrape information, generate a script, and then produce life-like audio.

It worked. But the system still needed human oversight, and there wasn’t much demand for the product. To make it worth pursuing we would have needed to personalize it for every listener, and there was no way we could compete with Siri or Alexa.

The pivot

So I pivoted. I started talking with tourism bureaus, destination marketing organizations, and chambers of commerce. While there wasn’t demand for an AI podcast, there was strong demand for accurate, constantly updated community events calendars. That became the new focus.

Within a month of shifting direction I landed my first four-figure client: Rediscover State College.