The inaugural AI in Action Business Summit was hosted by Northeastern in partnership with the Maine State Chamber of Commerce and the Portland Regional Chamber of Commerce.
As the founder of Resilient Coders, a not-for-profit coding bootcamp, David Delmar Sentíes tries to stay up to date on the latest trends in software development.
The organization recently began integrating artificial intelligence into its curriculum, recognizing the field’s growing importance.
“There’s a huge market for people with AI skills,” Sentíes said while attending Northeastern University’s AI in Action Business Summit on the university’s campus in Portland, Maine. “What that actually means looks different at a lot of different companies. It’s a very exciting moment in the field.”
At the summit, Sentíes got a closer look at how New England companies — including those in some of Maine’s most hands-on sectors — are embracing AI.
“Those are spaces I wouldn’t have equated with AI,” he said of industries such as lumber and salmon farming, “but they are using AI just like everybody else.”
Building an AI-driven economy
The inaugural AI in Action Business Summit, hosted by Northeastern’s Roux Institute in partnership with the Maine State Chamber of Commerce and the Portland Regional Chamber of Commerce, aimed to spotlight Maine’s evolving economy and AI’s transformative role in it.
“At the Roux Institute, we’re focused on being a catalyst for the economy of Maine,” said Chris Mallett, chief administrative officer for Northeastern’s Portland campus. “We firmly believe that the future of economic opportunity here is driven by AI.”
But as interest in AI grows, so do fears and uncertainties around its use in the workplace. That’s why one of the summit’s key messages was about building familiarity.
“You’ve got to get it in their hands,” said Matt Holbrook, vice president of data and analytics at MEMIC. “If they don’t want to experiment with it themselves, show it to them. … There’s always early adopters in your organization. You use those folks to learn things about it and they show it to the laggards.”
Holbrook also stressed the importance of giving employees agency when adopting AI and investing in formal training around responsible AI practices.
Scaling AI across infrastructure
Larger companies can offer powerful examples of AI’s potential at scale. Enrique Bosh, director of corporate innovation at Avangrid — an energy company serving more than 3.1 million customers across New England, New York and Pennsylvania — called the electric grid “the biggest machine on Earth.”
“This big infrastructure is very old and difficult to maintain, which is a very big engineering problem. That’s where you identify the gap for using AI,” Bosh said.
Avangrid has implemented hundreds of AI applications. One is Geomesh, a platform that integrates weather prediction data with grid infrastructure to help forecast power outages, scale maintenance, and strategically position repair crews before a storm even hits.
Small businesses, big innovation
It’s not just large corporations embracing AI. Smaller firms are also using the technology to target niche problems.
Conductor AI, a software company in Biddeford, Maine, helps clients simplify the red tape of government contracting by offering tools that automate parts of the paperwork process. The company works with agencies like the Air Force, Navy, Army and Department of Justice.
“We take a maximalist approach to AI,” said ConductorAI co-founder Ben Fichter. “There’s so much tooling popping up around facilitating and celebrating the software development life cycle. We really lean into adopting tools — or at least trying them out.”
One such tool is Code Rabbit, an AI system that reviews code for bugs and quality. It’s helped Conductor AI speed up delivery while keeping humans in the loop for final approval.
“It minimizes this unsexy task that you have to take on,” Fichter said. “Everyone can be more efficient and not have to do the parts they don’t want to do.”