AI Ready RVA

10/01/2026

The AI Ready RVA Board of Directors has elected Jason McGinthy as Vice Chair. Jason previously served as Board Secretary.
Jason is a technology executive and AI strategist at Capital One, where he leads enterprise engineering organizations delivering AI-powered products at scale. In that work, innovation has to be balanced every day with security, governance, and customer trust. His experience spans software engineering leadership, organizational transformation, and applying emerging technology to complex business problems.

Outside the enterprise, Jason has put real time into AI literacy across Greater Richmond. Through workshops, public speaking, community initiatives, and as host of the Inspire AI podcast https://www.aireadyrva.com/podcast, he brings together executives, engineers, educators, entrepreneurs, policymakers, and lifelong learners to explore how AI is reshaping their work.

His focus matches ours: help people move past the hype and build the knowledge, judgment, and confidence to help shape the AI era, not just adapt to it. Jason believes the greatest opportunity in AI is developing more capable people. That is exactly the work ahead of this board.

Please join me in congratulating Jason.

09/17/2026

The application deadline is coming fast: September 30!

AI Ready RVA is proud to help bring the Mark Cuban Foundation AI Bootcamp to Richmond this fall, giving local high school students the opportunity to explore artificial intelligence through hands-on learning, real-world applications, and mentorship.

And the best part?

It is completely FREE for students.

No prior AI or coding experience is required. Students will have the opportunity to explore AI through areas they already care about, including:

• Healthcare
• Business & Entrepreneurship
• Computer Science
• Arts & Entertainment
• Sports & Fitness
• Food Security & Ecology

A huge thank you to VCU da Vinci Center Shift Retail Lab for helping sponsor this opportunity and supporting the next generation of AI-ready talent in our region.

We are still looking for additional sponsors.

Keeping programs like this free takes community support. If your company or organization wants to invest directly in Richmond's students and help us continue bringing high-quality AI education opportunities to our region, we would love to talk.

📩 [email protected]

Students and families: Apply by September 30.

👉 https://markcubanai.org/students/

This is what building an AI-ready region looks like. We start early. We remove barriers. We give young people access to the technology, mentors, skills, and opportunities shaping their future.

Help us spread the word.

08/21/2026

A Richmond employer can put every one of its employees through AI training this year and still be hiring from an applicant pool that has not changed.

That gap is what Corporate Membership at AI Ready RVA now works on. Training seats for staff, access to industry cohorts running across healthcare, HR, financial services, manufacturing, and education, and early visibility into internships and the regional talent pipeline. Higher tiers add executive briefings, pilot-program access, advisory participation, and training built around a specific employer's roles.

Suppliers, candidate pools, the schools future hires are sitting in right now, and the small businesses inside a company's supply chain all sit beyond what any single employer can reach on its own. Those are regional conditions. They get built collectively or they do not get built.

Membership begins at $500 per year for small businesses, with tiers for nonprofits, growing organizations, major employers, and strategic partners.

https://www.aireadyrva.com/membership

08/21/2026

AI Ready RVA events are open to the community. Anyone can buy a ticket and walk in.

Membership is for people who want to keep going after the event ends.

Subscriber Members get free access to cohort meetings and member mixers, entry into industry-specific cohort programs, 10% off Signature Events, and the membership newsletter. Tiers are Advocate, Champion, and Visionary, starting at $15 a month.

Dues also fund AI literacy programming across Greater Richmond. More cohorts, more community events, and fewer financial barriers for people who would otherwise be priced out of these rooms while AI reshapes the work they do.

If AI is going to affect your career, your business, or your industry, the hard part is working through it alone. Membership puts you next to a nurse informaticist, a payroll manager, and a middle school principal who are all asking a version of your question, some of them a few months ahead of you.

https://www.aireadyrva.com/membership

08/18/2026

🏌️ AI Ready RVA is participating in Birdies for Charity!

This is a simple way to make your support go even further.

Through the 2026 Korn Ferry Tour Championship Birdies for Charity presented by TowneBank, donations made to AI Ready RVA through the program receive an additional 10% bonus.

That means:

$50 becomes $55.
$500 becomes $550.
$5,000 becomes $5,500.

And every additional dollar helps us continue building a more AI-ready Greater Richmond through education, workforce development, community programs, and opportunities for people to learn how to use AI responsibly and confidently.

Our goal is bigger than teaching people how to use the latest technology.

We are building a region prepared to lead through one of the biggest economic and workforce transformations of our lifetime.

If you have been looking for a way to support AI Ready RVA, this is a great time to do it.

Your gift goes further. Richmond gets stronger.

👉 Donate through the AI Ready RVA Birdies for Charity campaign. https://p2p.onecause.com/kftcbfc/charity/ai-ready-rva

Thank you to the Korn Ferry Tour Championship, PGA TOUR Charities, and TowneBank for creating an opportunity that helps local nonprofits multiply their impact.

08/07/2026

08/04/2026

A written requirement can be read ten different ways. A working prototype can only be read one way.

That is the reason we brought Cursor to Richmond.

Thursday, August 13, at Dominion Payroll. A hands-on workshop for product managers, product owners, business analysts, designers, and founders. Not for developers. For the people who write the requirements and then wait to find out what got built.

Read this part before you register. This is not an AI 101 class. It is not an introduction to anything. You should already be using an AI assistant regularly, be comfortable installing software, and be fine seeing code on a screen even if you never write it. Setup instructions go out ahead of time and you need to complete them before you walk in. We will not have time in the room to get anyone installed. A little over an hours is barely enough to build, and it is not enough to build and troubleshoot laptops. If you have never used an AI assistant, come to an AI Ready RVA sessions and experiment first and catch this one next time.

Fazal Aslam is leading it. He is an AI Deployment Manager at Cursor, where he helps engineering organizations put AI coding agents into real production environments. Rollout, enablement, and the daily workflow decisions that determine whether a tool gets used or gets abandoned. He is not coming to demo features. He is coming to work through how this fits into what your team already does.

Capacity is capped because people are building, not watching.

One more thing. We are looking for a presenting sponsor for this workshop. That underwriting is what lets us bring companies like Cursor to Richmond instead of asking Richmond to travel to them. It covers the room, the food, and the drinks that keep people in conversation after the session ends. If your company wants its name on this one, message me and I will send the details today.

Registration link in the first comment.

07/24/2026

Cybersecurity has been one of the most requested cohorts since Power of Possibility. You asked. Here it is.

AI Ready RVA is launching its Cybersecurity AI Cohort in October, during Cybersecurity Awareness Month.

The focus is practical: how security teams are actually using AI in the work. Alert triage, log analysis, anomaly detection, phishing identification, incident response. What holds up in production, what is being oversold, and where human judgment still has to sit in the loop, because in security it always does.

Before October, we need a planning team. We are looking for 5 to 10 practitioners to help shape and run this cohort across security operations, threat intelligence, incident response, GRC, application security, cloud security, and security leadership. This group sets the agenda, recruits the speakers, and decides what the cohort actually covers.

Planning starts in August. The cohort opens in October.

Richmond has real depth in security across financial services, insurance, healthcare, and government. This cohort should reflect that.

If you want to help lead it, start here: https://forms.gle/fvvoor3NfaoGq6m79

07/23/2026

Winvale has spent more than two decades helping organizations navigate government contracting — the research, the compliance, the strategy behind decisions that carry real consequences. Today they join AI Ready RVA as a Community Business Member.

That background is worth naming. AI adoption gets talked about as a tool choice. It rarely is. It takes governance, compliance, workforce planning, and the judgment to make good calls while the ground is still moving. Winvale has done that work for more than 3,000 commercial and government organizations since 2003, and holds ISO 9001:2015 certification for the operational discipline behind it.

No single company, school, agency, or nonprofit builds a region's AI readiness alone. Membership is how AI Ready RVA expands programming, deepens regional partnerships, and keeps practical AI education within reach of the people who need it most.

Welcome to the work, Winvale. We're glad you're here.

Organizations ready to help build a more AI-ready Richmond can explore membership here: https://www.aireadyrva.com/membership

07/23/2026

AI Ready RVA's board of directors has elected founder Will Melton as Chair of the Board.

Will started AI Ready RVA in 2023 as a small task force built on a simple premise: no one in this region should be left behind as AI reshapes how we work. Since then, that task force has grown into a nonprofit reaching educators, workers, small business owners, and civic leaders across Central Virginia.

As Chair, he will help guide the next phase of that work, deepening the programs and partnerships that put AI literacy within reach of everyone in Greater Richmond, not just those already fluent in the technology.

We're grateful to William Willis, who has served as Chair and has already stepped into the role of Executive Director. His leadership brought us to this point, and his move into day-to-day direction sets up the next chapter well.

There is real work ahead, and the region that learns faster together is the one that will thrive.