Nina Schick at the San Antonio Policymakers Breakfast

Not every speaker changes the room. Nina Schick changed the room.

The San Antonio Policymakers Breakfast in April brought together civic and business leaders for a morning that was less about networking and more about reckoning with what is actually happening in the world right now. Schick delivered the kind of talk that makes you put your phone down and pay attention.

Schick’s central thesis is what she calls Industrial Intelligence: the argument that AI has stopped being a business opportunity and become the definitive engine of hard power. NinaSchick The race is not being won in software alone. It is being won through control of the industrial stack: energy, semiconductors, and compute. The nations and enterprises that control this infrastructure will define the next century of global power. Worldwide Speakers Group

Schick has advised the Secretary General of NATO, briefed U.S. President Joe Biden, and works directly with the U.S. Army, the United Nations, and Mastercard Worldwide Speakers Group on where this is all heading. She is not speaking from a think tank. She is speaking from the rooms where these decisions are actually being made.

For the business leaders in the room, the message was direct: this moment is comparable to 1993, when leaders were first being told to prepare for the Internet. Artificial Intelligence News The ones who understood what was coming built the next era. The ones who waited became cautionary tales.

San Antonio was fortunate to have her in the room. The conversation she started that morning is one worth continuing.