100th day of MA AI Coalition
John Werner
As graduates across Massachusetts walk across commencement stages this spring, the Massachusetts AI Coalition is marking a milestone of its own: its first 100 days in action.
What began as an idea discussed among entrepreneurs, researchers, policymakers, and technology leaders has evolved into a statewide coalition bringing together organizations such as Whoop, HubSpot, Lovable, Blitzy, Jellyfish, and many other innovative companies. I wrote about the coalition’s launch in February, but today the story is no longer about an announcement. It's about execution.
Now, as we establish the coalition's tenth working group—Future in Action, which I am honored to help lead—we are focused on a larger question: How can Massachusetts help shape the future of artificial intelligence rather than simply react to it?
The answer may lie in our history.
Every generation faces technologies and opportunities that redefine society. The future is always viewed through the lens of the past.
Massachusetts has long been a place where people confronted transformative moments and chose action over passivity. Long before the American Revolution, colonial Boston challenged economic restrictions imposed by the British Crown. When monopolies and centralized control limited local opportunity, Bostonians organized, innovated, and ultimately helped launch a movement that changed the course of history.
The lesson isn't about tea or taxation. It's about agency.
When confronted with a defining challenge, this region has repeatedly chosen to build, organize, and lead.
Today, the Massachusetts AI Coalition represents a modern version of that instinct. With ten working groups now collaborating across industry, academia, government, and civil society, the coalition's first 100 days are less a conclusion than the beginning of a much larger effort.
Massachusetts has reinvented itself many times.
It helped launch the American Revolution. It became a center of industrial innovation. It played a leading role in the development of the telephone, photography, biotechnology, venture capital, CRISPR, mRNA therapeutics, and countless other breakthroughs.
The region's greatest strength has never been any single invention. It has been its ability to continually generate new generations of innovators.
Consider Lisa Su, CEO of AMD.
Su arrived at MIT as a young engineer from Queens NY, a graduate of Bronx High School of Science, interested in the technologies shaping the future. Decades later, after earning three degrees from MIT and building a remarkable career in semiconductors, she leads one of the world’s most important technology companies. This year, on what was the 100th day of the MA AI Coalition she returned to MIT as its commencement speaker.
Her story reflects something larger than individual success. It illustrates what happens when talent, ambition, education, and opportunity intersect within an ecosystem designed to support innovation.
Whether at MIT, Harvard, BU, UMass Amherst, Northeastern, Tufts, BC, Boston's startup community, Tech Week events, or gatherings like Imagination in Action, Massachusetts continues to produce stories of people willing to imagine possibilities and then build them.
On the coalition's 103rd day, members gathered for a hackathon and strategy session in a room steeped in innovation history.
It was a place connected to Alexander Graham Bell's pioneering telecommunications work and to Edwin Land's revolutionary inventions at Polaroid.
Standing there, it was impossible not to feel the continuity between past and present.
Every generation imagines the future differently. In 1985, "Back to the Future" imagined what 2015 might look like. Today, we live beyond that horizon, surrounded by technologies that would have seemed extraordinary only a few decades ago.
Yet the underlying pattern remains the same: bold ideas become reality because individuals and communities decide to pursue them.
As Massachusetts celebrates the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution, it is worth asking not only where we have been, but where we want to go.
One of my favorite examples comes from science fiction. The creators of Star Trek imagined futures centuries ahead of their own time. Their vision wasn't a prediction. It was an exercise in imagination.
That is exactly what we need today.
Artificial intelligence is not simply another software platform. It represents a foundational technology that may reshape nearly every industry, institution, and profession.
The future is not predetermined. It is a jump ball.
The best outcomes will not emerge automatically. They will require leadership, experimentation, collaboration, and action.
As AI capabilities continue to expand, we are beginning to see the emergence of two distinct categories of organizations.
The first are AI-native companies—businesses built from the ground up around the capabilities of large language models, agents, robotics, and machine intelligence. Their products, workflows, and economics are designed for an AI-first world.
The second are legacy organizations that must adapt existing systems and business models to remain competitive.
The challenge for Massachusetts is to support both.
We must help AI-native companies scale while simultaneously helping established organizations transform themselves. Success will depend on creating productive partnerships between emerging technologies and existing institutions.
The opportunities are extraordinary. Concepts that once sounded speculative—from autonomous vehicles to AI-driven scientific discovery and advanced manufacturing—are rapidly becoming practical realities.
Too often, organizations ask how they can improve by 1%.
AI invites a different question.
What would a 10x improvement look like? What would a 100x improvement look like? What would become possible if entire workflows, industries, or systems were redesigned from the ground up?
Breakthroughs rarely come from incremental thinking. They come from people willing to challenge assumptions and pursue outcomes that initially appear impossible.
Boston has a long history of doing exactly that.
Whether the innovation was paper currency, telecommunications, biotechnology, venture capital, CRISPR, or mRNA vaccines, this region has repeatedly demonstrated an ability to think beyond conventional limits.
Massachusetts' default setting has often been the order-of-magnitude leap.
The purpose of the coalition's newest working group, Future in Action, is simple.
We want to celebrate the accomplishments of the coalition's existing working groups while identifying transformative opportunities that may define the next chapter of AI innovation.
That includes physical AI, robotics, education, workforce development, entrepreneurship, public policy, and entirely new categories we have not yet imagined.
Most importantly, it means turning ideas into action.
The coalition's first 100 days demonstrated what is possible when people come together around a shared vision. The next 100 days—and the years beyond—will determine how much of that vision becomes reality.
The future is not something that happens to us.
It is something we build together.
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