Artificial intelligence is not only a Silicon Valley concern, but also a New York City economic question. On Sept. 22, Brooklyn business leaders gathered at City Point to confront what that shift could mean for workers, small businesses and the city’s bottom line.
The Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce’s 2026 Economic Development Breakfast brought more than 250 members of the city’s business community together for a discussion titled “Beyond the Hype: How AI Is Actually Changing NYC Business.”
The event featured NYC Comptroller Mark Levine as keynote speaker, alongside a panel of technology, economic and civic leaders. Participants included Andrew Rasiej, founder of Civic Hall at Union Square; Julie Samuels, president and CEO of Tech:NYC; Reggie Thomas, head of New York State Government Affairs at Google; Natalia Emanuel, a research economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and more.
For all, the question is no longer whether AI will affect New York’s economy, but how deeply and how quickly.
For New York’s bustling workforce and growing tech landscape, the AI conversation is particularly consequential. The technology promises new efficiencies in everything from customer service to marketing and administrative work, but adoption also raises questions about who can afford the tools, who has the expertise to use them and what happens to workers whose jobs are increasingly automated.
The concern, according to Rasiej, is not just about the technologies themselves, but the education surrounding it.
“Let’s just say there’s about 300,000 New York City employees," he said. "There should be an up-skilling program for every civil servant in AI right now."
The problem, Rasiej said, is "that we don’t have any education about this technology happening in our schools properly, in our civil service properly and in the public proper way. It all comes back to education, education, education. We are not going to solve anything unless we start there.”
The event reflected that broader shift. What might once have been treated primarily as a technology-sector conversation is increasingly becoming a conversation about the city itself: how businesses operate, how New Yorkers work, and how local institutions prepare for an economy whose rules are still being written.
The challenge, as the discussion made clear, is separating the promise of AI from the hype surrounding it.
Leaders like Samuels reminded listeners that many of those promises can be positive.
“Historically, one of the main reasons that we have not been able to fix tech and government is because of things like procurement," Samuels said. AI, according to Samuels, makes fixing issues like procurement and interoperability easier.
"It's easier to fix those problems than it’s ever been and to modernize on top of them," Samuels said.
For Brooklyn’s growing business landscape, the more immediate question may be less whether AI will change the economy than who will be positioned to benefit from the change, and who will be left trying to catch up.
Just after the event, the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce and Google.org announced a $1 million renewal grant for Google Go Digital 2.0 to deliver AI training and technical assistance to small businesses across New York State.
