How AI Will Run Your Life Soon! | Dr. Jonathan Reichental | Ctrl Alt Podcast

Tell us a story of your imagination of the digital city of Palo Alto.

When I came in, the city manager says, jonathan, we want to have a new progressive strategy for tech use. After all, we're the birthplace in the heart of Silicon Valley. And that's exactly. I took that as literal.

There's one question which bothered me when you proposed open data sharing. How did you navigate the data paradox?

So we started with.

Let's go to your latest article in Forbes. The five traits of a leader who needs to keep up with technology. Let's hear it from you.

There's two that come to mind. One is you really have to define the vision. And we're moving from fourth industrial revolution into what some are calling, and I'm talking a lot about the cognitive industrial revolution. There are more set of cognitive cities emerging in the world. One in Florida called Elysium, where there's real money being spent is something called the line in a kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

So how do we take this cognitive city concept further? Is the government interested?

Well, if we're talking just about the United States.

So Jonathan, I've not met anybody quite like you.

Oh, that's nice.

You're the CEO and founder of Human Future. But you were at the peak of your career. You were named as one of the top CIOs in the world. And you made Palo Alto the number one digital city. You were the CIO of Palo Alto City. I cannot imagine what that could be like. Palo Alto is one of the richest localities in the United States. Or I can say in the world. You made Palo Alto a cutting edge digital city everyone looked up to. And right at the peak of the career, you walk out of it to start your startup in the future. And you also are a gentleman faculty professor at University San Francisco where you teach students. Yes, but what impressed me most is you have 50 LinkedIn courses. Okay, 50 with more than 3 million users and in gazillion number of languages. So, so, so, doctor, I can tell. I'm going to call it Jonathan.

Jonathan's good.

Okay, Jonathan, who. Who are you? Who do you see yourself as?

Yeah, well, lovely introduction. Thank you. You and your team did amazing research. Everything was spot on. There I was at the city of Palo Alto. It wasn't just me, of course. I worked with a great team and great partners. That was part of the fact that it was the city of Palo Alto here in Northern California was part of the appeal. Right. A city of technologists. It's often called the birthplace of Silicon Valley. I'm not sure I would have worked for another city in another part of the country. I think just Palo Alto was compelling to me.

Yeah.

And as a technology guy for, you know, my whole career.

You're a doctorate in information system.

Yes, that's right.

Is that the inspiration for you to take on the role of a cio?

Well, no, I've always loved technology since I was a kid. I was programming very, very young. You know, watching my older brother, you know, bring a computer home, you know, many decades ago, and looking at him program. And then I picked up, you know, coding myself. I like the fact that technology, when used in a positive way, can have great impacts on all of us. And so I'm attracted to that. And so, you know, that's my career. And then I. I get an engineering degree. And then I. When I immigrated to the United States, I. I wanted to really focus on computer science topics. And what happened was I did this a little later than a lot of people and some studying, and I'm like, can I really go back to school and be good at this? And I got into a flow and then I went straight from a second undergraduate degree to a master's degree. So let's just do this now that I'm on a roll, right? And me being. Being a little bit, you know, crazy in how I approach things and very determined. I had the opportunity to then go from the master's into a PhD program. And I said, let's just do it. Let's do the, you know, the full terminal degree, if you like. I knew it was going to be hard. The hardest thing I've ever done in my life.

What was the topic of your thesis? What did you study? I mean, what did you have to defend?

So I had all these amazing ideas to change the world. And I was like, I'm going to research a topic that's going to change the world. And two things came up. One is my professor said, you should do something. You know a lot about my Advisor, right, my PhD advisor. I thought that that's. I mean, we talked about it, and that seemed like very good advice. And then he says, you also want to finish your degree.

Yes.

And so these two things meant I super focused on something I actually knew about as opposed to this big thing that, yeah, it would have been a passion, it would have been interesting, but I probably wouldn't have finished it and, you know, I wouldn't have got the quality that I expect out of myself. So my focus was on software engineering. You know, at the time, I was running a large software Engineering team at a very large private company. And it was the world I was immersed in. And so you knew a lot about it. I knew, I knew a lot about it. And I was surrounded by people who knew even more than me. And it became an amazing research environment. And I thought, well, I love this topic and I am in the right environment and I want to finish the PhD. Let's just do it. So I focused on, you know, the requirement, what's called the requirement solicitation phase. You know, how do you gather requirements, especially when the topic that you're gathering requirements around is tacit. Right. And that means it's difficult to actually articulate what a person does and then codify that into software code. And I was very happy with the outcome. And of course I was able to finish the PhD in record time and then move on. And it's been, I mean, you don't do a PhD necessarily to make a lot of money or something. You do it, you've got to have a passion for learning. You got to perhaps want to research and you want to teach. And these things are, these are very important to me. I think one of the things you'll see probably in my bio is you can look over many years. I'm an educator. That's what I really am.

Yeah, yeah. No, that's amazing. Also I feel you, you get hang of systems thinking, building large complex systems which you did for the city of Palo Alto. Now there's one question which bothered me when you propose open data sharing for the city of Palo Alto. It's like a double edged sword. The data is accessible to other cities or to build large scale platforms, which is very forward thinking. But also the security of the data becomes a main concern. Will the data of the city get hacked into? In a cyber war, the first thing you do is attack the data repositories of nation states or the cities. So how did you navigate the data paradox? The data and privacy paradox? I know you have a book called Data Governance which you authored a year and a half ago, the right time, but let's go back to that paradox. How did you navigate it?

Yeah, I love that. And it's probably worth sharing a little bit like the story of how I arrived at open data.

Yeah, tell us the story of your imagination of Palo Alto. The city of the digital city of Palo Alto. What was that? And then we can.

Okay, so forward. I love that. I'll tell you about that journey and then lead it to the open data question. Well, look, I was a guy working in the private sector for many, many years. And a recruiter called me out of nowhere and I picked up the phone and the recruiter said, would you be interested in working for a city? Never worked for government, by the way, but I was always a technology guy and it was to be the CIO of the city of Palo Alto.

Oh my God.

First of all, I knew Palo Alto. Of course, if you're in, if you're in Silicon Valley here and you're a technologist, you understand the role that that city has historically played in the world. And I thought, oh, that's interesting. And then I was very interested in government and how, and particularly city government, right. How does it really function every day? So that part of me, that curiosity part of me, which is so important, I think we all need to have more curiosity. That curiosity part of me was like, I need to do this just so I can look behind the curtain, like, how does this work? So I took the role. And you know, when I was, when I was finalizing the arrangement with the city manager who would be my boss, you know, he said, we'll, we'll make a bet on you if you make a bet on us. And I love that. And I remember this, that him saying that to this very day, we weren't sure if it would work. You know, me being sort of more of a fast mover, you know, move fast to break things, kind of attitude in the private sector, coming to government, maybe not such a good quality. And, and I said, well, what can we do? What can we do in, in a city that is tech centric? I mean, there's lots of CIOs and CTOs and entrepreneurs who live in the city. How can we collaborate with them? For those maybe listening who don't fully understand Palo Alto, this is where Steve Jobs used to live. It's where Mark Zuckerberg lives today. It's where Stanford University is one of the best computer science schools.

You can collaborate with the CIOs and the CX who live in the city. How cool is that?

Well, as you said earlier, it is a double edged sword, or use that term in that as a cio, you know, in an organization you want to be pretty bright and be the leader around technology initiatives. But I was surrounded by CIOs that often knew more than me or could be more accomplished, more experienced. So they were always advisors. But they also were very critical, of course, because they knew better.

CIOs are notoriously called the Tower of no. They say no because they're guarding data. So you want to innovate with CIOs. What did you do? How did you move the needle?

Yeah, well, you work a lot with your colleagues in the city, in the agency itself. You have to work with the leadership team, and I was part of that team. And you got to work with the elected officials. I mean, they ultimately set policy. So city of Palo Alto has a council of elected people, so they set policy, and then, you know, you advise. As a. As a CIO for Citi, one of your most important functions is to provide advice for them to set good policy, to advise a city manager so he can. He or she is able to run the city really well. So part of why did they hire me, you know, was because they wanted to do things differently. You know, sometimes it's a case of, you know, be careful what you ask for, you know, don't have buyer's remorse. And I think when I came in and the city manager says, jonathan, we want to have a new progressive strategy for tech use. After all, we're. We're the birthplace and the heart of Silicon Valley. And that's exactly. I took that as literal and. Well, of course, then things are. I'm starting to move a bit faster than they're used to. We're experimenting much more than we ever did. And so this gets us to the data question. So one of the things I observed very early on in my time at the city was it is a world of scarcity. So, for example, Palo Alto is a world of scarcity.

Why do you say that?

Well, it's funny because you might think, you know, it's abundant, got unlimited money. Now, even a wealthy, wealthy, successful city like the city of Palo Alto is constrained. Right. There's lots of priorities. Lots of priorities. And, you know, it's more fortunate than a lot of communities. Let me be clear about that. But everyone is still competing for a finite amount of dollars, Right. There's always more to do in a city than there are. There is talent and budget, Right? Yeah, probably you could say that about every organization, but it's particularly amplified in a government context. And so I noticed, not enough talent. Right. In the city. Too many projects, not enough money. Right.

Not enough talent in the Palo Alto city team.

Yeah.

Or because Palo Alto has a lot of talent. Yes, but you mean for your team.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah. And I don't mean they weren't talented. There just wasn't enough of it.

Enough of it.

Okay. I mean, I. I think the team I had, if you add in contractors and stuff, was about 3540 people. Quite good for the city of the size of Palo Alto, I'm not complaining about that. But there was a huge amount of demand. We were running a citywide utility, right. Electrical and gas utility, for example. Very unusual, high demands from a demanding community. And that's good. And so in this environment of scarcity, it struck me that one thing that wasn't scarce was data. So one day I was within the first few months of being at the city, I talked to my team, my managers and my team and I said, what do we do with the data after we collect it in the process of running the city? Because that's what happens. You have lots of these enterprise systems and they collect data, whether it's billing information for utilities or traffic information, energy usage, lots and lots of things. The answer was we do nothing. We just capture it, we store it and archive it, back it up and I guess eventually maybe delete it off the production systems. So I thought to myself, wow, we've got this incredible resource that we do nothing with like with no derivative value after the initial value. So that's where we started thinking about, well, what happens if we gave data sets away? If you like, when I say give it away, what happens if you make those data sets available, open, basically open the data up to people who maybe want to create innovative solutions like to co create. So all of the burden is not on the city, it's with entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and maybe even beyond. So we started with very low risk data sets. That's the thing. And this goes to the heart of your question. You evaluate the data set, right?

Yeah.

Is this a protected or sensitive data set? Like if it's, you know, if it's personally identifiable information. Pii. Right. You're probably not going to, I mean there's laws protecting, if it's health care information, there are United States laws that protect healthcare information. So we don't wouldn't give those away. Then there's a lot of Homeland Security type stuff like this will just be fun for you to know and your audience the location of. I say they're called manholes, but I don't know what they call them today. You know what I'm saying? Yeah.

Potholes or manholes.

Yeah, yeah. The entry points into, you know, infrastructure that's beneath the roads and you know,

that type of thing, that fanhole. Okay.

That kind of manhole. So, and so you don't necessarily want to advertise the explicit details of those because that's a vulnerability if somebody wants to do a city harm Right, Yeah. Anyway, so it's a rigorous system of identifying high quality data sets, but ones that don't put the city at risk and the ones that are not protected by law. So that's how we did it. So we started, we spun up a open data website and platform. There are many, and we chose one. And over time we made available data sets. I'll give you actually one little story that I think really brings this puts the right light on this. One of the things that I didn't fully appreciate, but now I appreciate very much in public life is you do lose a lot of your privacy. For example, things like your salary and your benefits that is accessible by the public, not like the private sector, where that stuff you protect. Things like if there's a public records request, which is by law, you got the California public records request, you got the federal one too. Somebody wants to see your emails, they can request them and see them. Right. So it's a whole different level of transparency. And so the, the local press were always interested in salaries. It's always a good story, you know, and I actually, I'm a very big fan of transparency. I, I'm very, very supportive. So I. There's a journalist in the community and he says, Jonathan, every year it's difficult for us to get the complete set of current salaries from the city. And eventually they do, and they always have. They're actually legally, they have to do that, but it would be a PDF and it will, maybe it'll be printed out or something. And I said, well, I think we can fix that. I'll just upload it to open data and you can then do what you want with it. And he sort of, as we had this very casual conversation, I think was on the street, I think he thought that I was talking ahead of myself, that, you know, I was promising something I couldn't do. Well, I went back to my team. I had a little data team that I created. I said, let's get the salaries of everybody in the city on our open data platform. It's by law, that's exactly what we're supposed to support. And we did. So it was in a machine consumable format in a database, so no longer locked into a PDF or printed format or scans. But it was in a way that anybody who goes to the site can extract it right, as an XLS or CSV file, a format which you could import it to your analysis tool. And they do. So I did this and then we told, we sent out an email to everybody. Salaries are out There. And then I meet the journalist on the street. He says a few days later he's Jonathan. I'm surprised. And I thought, oh my goodness, like I thought I'd gone above and beyond. I'm thinking this to myself. He says, I'm surprised how good it is, like how far you went with this, how transparent it made the city. It was such a good gesture. It showed that you are doing what you're saying, which is you want to make the city digital and accessible, collaborative. And so we did well with it and it was recognized by, frankly it was actually recognized at the time by the White House. And I went there and didn't get to meet the president that day, but I did go to the White House.

No, that's amazing. But why, why did that get such a high visibility? What do people do with the salary data? Like.

Yes.

Is that going to bring a discussion about the federal budget and how it's allocated?

Yeah.

Is that the line of thinking?

If you go back 15 years? Because we're only talking 15, barely 20 years ago, accessing city data was near impossible. Yeah.

It's like you have to go through the records, physically print it out.

Yes, yes. For example. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It might be on microfiche or something. The people watching this video don't even know what that means, but they can imagine. You know, let's say you wanted information about some, I don't know, real estate information about the, or planning information. And, and you go to the planning office and they give you a binder of paper and you're supposed to make sense of it.

I know what you mean. I've worked with the congressional candidates. When they go for election, they need all kinds of data.

Yes.

Because need to run their campaigns or the companies like Google, when they transform cities, they need to know like if they're building a smart city, what is the city like right now?

Yes, yes.

How do you quantify it?

Right, yes.

Yeah.

There are many, many demands and needs. So when we started doing this, it was groundbreaking and we got a lot of recognition because. Not because the technology was particularly smart or transformational, it was what we were doing was making data sets machine consumable to anyone in the world.

And you delivered 250 projects successfully?

Over the course of my seven years, we delivered 250 technology projects.

That's incredible. What was that like? What kind of projects were there?

Everything. It had never been done before, by the way. I don't think in the hundred years of the city or so, had there been so many projects done in so little time. And these were all technology projects, by the way. Oh, my goodness. Well, they range from back office. Right. Things like making a better, improved financial system for the city, an enterprise system for better planning and permitting, which is very important in cities. Improved geospatial information. And then on the front end, things like experimentation around dynamic traffic signaling systems.

So traffic lights, Very helpful.

Yeah. Change.

Bring it to 101, please.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

3:00pm that's right.

To get the best benefits of a dynamic signaling system, you have to have it over a wide geography. We were experimenting on a few of the very important major roads in our community. Interestingly, the city had four. I hope I don't get this wrong, but it's about four libraries and I think a children's library. So that brought it to five.

It does have that.

Yeah. It's a beautiful. And I think, in fact, it has the oldest children's library in America in Panama. It's beautiful. By the way, this is me pitching, you know, for people to visit. We also built a brand new library called Mitchell Parker Physical Library, but we also built a digital library, one of the first, you know, major E libraries. So you would get the experience of our physical libraries, but simply on a smartphone or a website. And by the way, again, today in 2025, that doesn't sound so interesting. It doesn't have any wow factor, but 15 years ago it was a wow factor.

Right.

People were not used to being able to check out books online from a library. So we weren't the only ones, but we were one of the first.

I used those facilities. So I'm a stakeholder. I know that it definitely makes a difference having a digital app, getting it to your phone, it saves a lot of time.

Yes.

It's incredible.

Yeah, yeah. We created a whole app store for the city. The city manager had this idea of like, could we actually have. Because we had lots of apps. Yeah. And then he's like, could we, you know, use the metaphor of the App Store, the Apple App Store. And so I created one, and I don't remember today how many apps, but there was a lot doing everything from library to reporting issues, to understanding the city more geospatial. I mean, just a lot. So that, that was quite unique, but a very, very digital centric, you know, low friction set of entry points for not only the community, the businesses and tourists that would come, but anywhere, anyone in the world. Everything we were doing, in my view, should be available to everybody.

So, Jonathan, there's a lot to this story, but There is a lot more beyond this, which you accomplished in the last few years. So we have to move on from this. But there's one question I want to ask. Look, Estonia is a highly digitized nation. It's a small nation, but they did a great job. The health, the DNA information of every resident is digitized. So if they have to deploy vaccines, they're probably the quickest country to do that. Where did you learn about this vision of transforming Palo Alto into a digital city? Is it from your home country or is it from the European countries? Because the more digitized you are, the more advanced you become as a nation. So how did you get that vision?

Yeah, well, certainly we got inspiration from Estonia, sometimes known as Estonia because of the digital transformation. Very unique among the world, even, you know, even today. But Certainly back in 15 years ago, they had an opportunity because they emerged out of the breakup of the Soviet Union as a very undeveloped country and in bad shape. And they countries don't typically get this. They got an opportunity to start again and they said if we're going to start again, we're going to do it right. We're going to be digital by default. Digital from day one.

Amazing.

So, yeah, they certainly. But I think the drive to be a leading digital city, and at the time we weren't even sure what that really meant. It just meant we were going to use a lot of digital tools comes from my own interest in, first of all, my background in technology and the work I'd done in the private sector, but also realizing that you could bring digital to bear in an urban environment to solve lots of problems and cities were not there yet.

Look Uber. Look at Uber and look at the doordash. Yes, they're thriving on digital data and yes.

Yeah, well, please, as of today, it's, it's. We take it for granted.

Yeah.

But not, not 15 years, not 15 years ago. I knew that. Well, look, when, when I joined, sort of been about 2011. So it is about. It's going. By the time this airs, it'll be 15 years. And my cohort to, to, you know, with great respect to them, my, the CIOs who are running other cities. We're not even sure whether social media was a thing. They certainly were not embracing cloud computing and mobile wasn't even on the agenda. And here's me coming along and saying, well, we're going to fully embrace social media as a communications tool to embrace the viewpoints of the community, have conversations with the community. We're going to be cloud first and we're going to be mobile first. This was language people weren't using. And I want to stress though, this was the mandate that I was given when I was hired.

Yeah.

I don't think I would have been interested in just being a operator or caretaker. The opportunity was to how can we, how can we reinvent local government?

Yeah.

That's a big ask and I love that.

Yeah.

And by the way, that that shapes my life to this day, 15 years later, I'm still asking the question. And as technology is evolving, the impact of tech is even greater in not only what we can do, but how our cities function and what people expect from them.

Amazing. So, Jonathan, let's go to your latest article in Forbes. In November 2025, you released the five traits of a leader who needs to keep up with technology. I may have paraphrased it, but let's hear it from you. What are those five important steps a leader in a company or a large organization should adopt in this day and age? Because this is the age of continuous learners.

Yes.

If you don't keep up with technology, you're not going to be able to run an organization. You'll be a relic. So tell us what the article is about.

Yes.

And why did you write the article?

Sure, sure. Well, I'm not sure I can remember the five, so I'm going to give you maybe two of them.

Sure.

Well, I write for Forbes as a little side hustle. I do, I do because I love to do it. I don't have to do it. It's part of my genes, you know, my DNA.

That communicating and writing.

Exactly.

Envisioning things.

Yes. And helping others.

I mean, you're a futurist, right?

Well, I'll let other people, you know, give it my title.

Yeah, yeah.

Thank you, thank you. I'm writing these articles to inform the public and Forbes is very focused on leaders. That's part of their.

You know, when you say leaders, what kind of organization leaders like CTOs or CIOs or CX.

All the C Suite.

C Suite.

The C Suite of across all industries is a target audience for them. But it's not limited to them. I mean, lots of people can get benefit from the articles. So I know you have to know the audience, of course, when you write. And so the question I was asking, what are some really top skills you need to have in this era, this time we're living through as a leader to enable change? And while I don't recollect the five off the top of my head, there's two that come to mind. One is you really have to define the vision of what you want the organization to be, where you want it to go. You might think that's kind of obvious, but I would actually have anyone listening to this later on. Go and test it with your team, Sit down with your team and ask what's the vision of this business? And see whether everybody around the table knows exactly what it is. I think I know where that conversation is going to go. So you have to have a clear, articulated, known vision. Bold, aspirational. Right. Not just the mission of every day, but where do you want to go and what do you want to become in this time of change? Is your, for example, is your the traditional buyer of your product or service? Is it evolving? Is that person that you know, that

consumer or the customer profile?

Yeah, exactly. Is the profile changing and what does that mean to what you do? For some organizations, by the way, that means they're no longer relevant. Right. And they have to shift. The second thing is to experiment more, to be an experimenter.

So like have focus, good budget on

R and D. Yes, yeah, much more than it's always been important.

Much more. Even in this day and age.

Yes, yes. You know, medium to large sized businesses do, one hopes usually has some sort of R and D and it was important and maybe casual. And that's not the case for everybody. I mean, if you're a big consumer products company, that's your livelihood is innovating new products all the time. But if you have a solid narrow set of products and services, you probably had an RD just to kind of help the product evolve over time. I'm talking about a much more aggressive approach, introducing completely new ideas of how you run the business, how you produce your products and services and what they actually are.

Yeah, like what you did in the city of Palo Alto, unheard of was unheard of. Social media, unheard of. Cloud, unheard of. And then you said we're going cloud first. So you. Something like that.

Yes. Yeah, that's right. You have to be bold. Right. And the reason why, look, the way you can measure if you're doing this right is if people push back on

you, that means you're bold.

That means something's happening. You know, if people are like uncomfortable with what's happening, it means you're doing something different, right?

Yeah.

If it's business as usual, I don't think you're in the right place. So those are two really important ones. Now you asked me then about this sort of. We're Moving, you know, from the fourth Industrial Revolution. Right. The use of the Internet, you know, digital Internet of things, data. This intersection of the digital and physical worlds into what some are calling. And I'm talking a lot about the cognitive Industrial Revolution. Cognitive, which some say is the fifth Industrial revolution. I like the cognitive Industrial revolution. And cognitive comes from this notion of thinking machines. Yeah, right. Yeah. People know what cognitive is. It's how we think.

Is it thinking, reasoning or just thinking?

No, no, it's thinking and reasoning and taking actions ultimately.

Yeah. It's like, you know, I remember the Steve Jobs chart.

The.

There's a person trying to walk and then he gets a bicycle and then he goes much faster. So cognitive is like that for. It does that to the digital. It takes it to the next level.

Yes.

So we have to speed up.

Yes. Well, it's, it's, it's even more. That's very nice. I like that. It's more than that, though. It's perceiving the world. It's understanding the world and perceiving it. It's reasoning, it's. And then taking action. I'm sure there's one other there in that. And so. Well, we understand the increasing role of artificial intelligence. We're still trying to figure it out. It's all very. The generative AI revolution or set of major shifts that have happened in, you

know, the agentic AI way.

It's all happening very quickly. We're. We're trying to figure it out. Right. As we. And I speak now in December of 2025.

Exactly.

It's all very new. We'll figure this out over time. Cities, for example, have been very reactive to events. So. So city services are typically reactive. Right. You need something, so you go on a site or an app and you request it. Yeah. You know there's a pothole, you go fix it. It's all reactive. What was happening here in the city context, and then you can think more broadly, is anticipatory. The city anticipates needs and either solves them or is able to bring them to you. You think about a very basic version in the private sector, something like predictive maintenance. We've had this for a while, but now it's getting to a point where the accuracy level is increasing. We know when a machine is going to fail or we have a high probability of that, and then we can

anticipate it or attack cybersecurity.

Oh, yes, the integration.

Crazy.

Yeah.

The adversary is accelerating his moves as well.

All of that can be applied in a city context. Too. There's something, there's some traffic on the network that is, the pattern looks unusual. And so the AI or sorry, the system doesn't just alert the chief information security officer and says with a red alert, whatever, it actually starts to take actions. So it anticipates reasons and then proactively takes action. So we have to be comfortable with that. And so that's what we're beginning to see. So I'll give you a funny sort of example, but it brings us all together, right? There are just a small set of what are called cognitive cities emerging in the world. For example, a one in Florida called Elysium, there's a conceptual one called Telosa. I say conceptual because they're actually looking for location. Maybe the one that's most, got the most amount of news and where there's real money being spent is something called a line in an area called Neom in northwest Saudi Arabia. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Or the Neom city.

Yes, yes, yes.

What about the forever city in Sonoma?

Yeah, well, not, not. I, well, we'll see if that, where, if that gets built and where that's headed.

Is it also cognitive city or it's a smart city?

I don't think so. I probably falls more into a well run city. So perhaps a smart city uses technology to run it well. So the example is in for example. And of course you have to remember this is a creative thought. It's not actually implemented yet. But the idea is you have a beautiful sort of home in the line. It's called the line. And every day the first thing you like to do is go to your local coffee store and get a, your favorite coffee. Well, to get there you actually have to take a train because only like for five minutes. There's no, by the way, there's no cars or roads in some of these cities anymore, or at least not projected to have. So what does it mean then to be cognitive? Well, first of all, the, the city and your environment is learning about your behavior. And, and so it knows that every day at around 7:00 you, you get up and you, you throw on your shorts and T shirt, whatever, and you go and you get the train. So you get up and suddenly you see a message on your device, whatever that device is. Assume it's a smartphone, says the train is 10 minutes delayed. Well, it knows, right? It knows what you typically do, so that's good. And says in order to get the delayed train, you can now leave at this time. You'll get it. So you get on the train. And then when you get to the coffee store, the coffee is waiting for you. It's hot and on the counter. You didn't order it and you didn't tell anybody. Just the infrastructure is learning about your behavior and making these things happen. Now, yes, you can listen to this and think that's all really silly. I think it's more of kind of trying to characterize what it means when the environment around you learns. The number one thought that goes through a lot of people's heads and maybe it's going through your head, is, what about privacy? Isn't this a huge. Yeah, you got to choose this. You got to choose to provide that kind of insight. And what we learn from the most current generation, if you like Generation Alpha, is if a diminished amount of privacy results in a better quality of life or some entertaining or some positive, they're okay with it. And I think that's the phenomena we're going to see as time passes.

This is incredible. I mean, I'm getting, getting dizzy here. No, but there is this concept called nation states, which Balaji Srinivasan talks about, where people of a certain mindset are digitally connected to form a nation. Now he's bought an island, and this is like a startup network state where the founders live on the island. Every person who lives there is a founder. So that's a physical manifestation of a network of people. But now you're talking about a cognitive way of building a city. So they. They. So there is this whole concept of beyond boundaries. You're creating something interesting. So it's not exactly on a map, but it's already happening.

That's interesting. Yeah. Thank you. So.

So how do we take this cognitive city concept further? What are you doing with them with that idea?

Yeah.

Is the government interested, the federal government interested, or is the Silicon Valley, the billionaires, are they doing something about it or.

Well, if we're talking just about the United States, AI is a national priority. No question about it. This current administration has made it an absolute priority, and in actions and in funding and in the way it's embraced the technology and wants to see the positives. We also see it as not only national security priority, but also as a global competitive priority. Right. So you can see you don't want to lose the AI race. United States needs to keep ahead and push. So as a consequence of that national agenda, it's permeating all aspects of society. So, you know, of course, Silicon Valley continues to be a center of action, but it's not the only Area. Right. Let's be clear. There's some great stuff happening in the Northeast and southwest and, sorry, the Northeast and the southeast parts of this country and other areas too. I want to be clear. Silicon Valley just happens to have not only the financial wherewithal, but the history and the expertise here. And so as it permeates through our tools and more people get educated around it, it's entering our government mindset too. I think my role is a couple of things. Number one is education. Right.

Which you do at Human Future.

I do, I do as an individual, but also through my small boutique tech firm, Human Future. A mayor or city manager needs to know what to think about. If they're not even aware of what's possible or that there's a thing called cognitive cities. Well, there's that. What's the starting point they have. So I have to. I have a role to write and talk and I do many keynotes.

So, Jonathan, along those lines, can we look at the book Smart Cities right behind you. It's one of your best sellers. Tell us what this book is about and tell us what your keynotes are like.

Okay.

Yeah. This is Smart Cities for Dummies.

It is, yeah.

And what do you talk about in this?

Well, I wrote this after I left the city of Palo Alto. I think simply by perfect timing, Wiley, leading educational publisher, reached out to me and they asked would I like to write a book about cities. And the time we didn't know, we hadn't chosen the Dummies brand yet. In fact, Wiley has a number of brands. They went away and they came back and said, hey, how about we do this as a Dummies book? And I. Everybody's familiar with Dummies, I think, in the United States for sure. But it turns out across the world, it's the largest selling reference series in history. Over 250 million Dummies books exist. Right. It's amazing. I didn't sell 250 million of these. So I said, let's do it. And that was just before COVID in 2019, Covid hit. I was writing it and actually was good because now I was at home, you know, couldn't.

That was the time where a smart city really mattered. We needed supplies which were delivered, you know, without in person interactions. But I think it was digital.

Yeah. Well, what we did find out was if you didn't have digital, how weak things were. I mean, communities that had bad Internet.

Exactly.

It became a real issue with terrible stories of kids parked out, you know, outside McDonald's doing their homework. Because that was where they could get fast Internet from.

Yeah.

And it wasn't just cities. Private organizations also realized that they had to be able to support remote workforce. So, yeah, I got to write about that a little bit as a consequence. But the book is about, if you like, at the heart of it is how can technology improve the quality of life for people who live in cities? I mean, simple as that. And particularly digital technology. Right. The often used definition of a smart city is it's a city that uses technology and data to improve livability, sustainability, and workability. I like that definition. Simple. Boom. So, as you can see, it's a big book, and it tries to cover things like transportation, energy, sustainability, public safety.

And what are your keynotes like? Because you teach the leaders.

Yes.

Large organizations how to think.

Yes.

So, and you're working with the C Suite. What are your keynotes like? What do you talk about?

Well, they're amazing. All right. When you ask me what are they like, they're amazing.

Okay.

No,

I know they're amazing.

Thank you. No, I just feel funny because your question, the way you ask the question, it's a great joy. I mean, I feel very privileged that I get asked to speak at big conferences like Jitex in Dubai or Leap in Saudi Arabia or even the Consumer Electronics show here in Vegas, the large show every year. So I get this chance to speak at very big conferences about timely topics. And, you know, the thing is, going back to your point about continuous learning, I don't have one topic that I just speak about year after year after year. I speak about topics that are current and are technology related.

So give me an example of what would you do a keynote about or talk about at the CES 2025 or 2026?

Yeah. Well, I'm not speaking at this one, but if I was, hypothetically, you're saying I would probably be talking about the Cognitive Industrial Revolution, because that's hot right now. That's really hot. How is. How is artificial intelligence, automation and robotics reshaping the world, Every aspect of it. How we live, work and play. Right.

And if I were a C suite leader, what would I learn from your keynote? Which I could take home and improve my operations?

Yes. Yeah. Well, going back to the article I wrote recently, you have to become masters of change, much more so than you ever had. You have to be able to be comfortable with more experimentation, creating bolder visions, revisiting your vision, retooling your workforce.

Yeah.

Having a very sober evaluation of what it is that you do as an Individual, are you adding value as a leader and what your organization does? I also bring to bear things like what is agentic AI and what does it do? So there's an educational part to it.

Yeah. So I want to highlight your book on data governance because you're talking about agentic AI and I know you have a book for children also, very simplified version. But let's focus on this because we were talking about the keynotes you do with the C suite. So the Data Governance for Dummies. What do you talk about it? Do you cover the agentic wave and things like that?

Yeah, well, a few years ago, the publisher, by the way, I have eight books. I write more than Dummies books, but I have two very successful Dummies books. And my publisher came to me, said, jonathan, can you write a book about data and particularly data governance? I said, well, I've been a IT leader for 30 years, believe it or not. And as a technology leader, data plays a central role. Central role, right.

And what did you mean by governance in this book?

And so, yeah, it's one part of the data or the enterprise information management world, what we call eim. And so think of it this way. There is data management, right? Data management. Everybody does data management because it's about the tools to manage your data backups, you know, access, you know, to data archiving. Yeah, that's very basic, but that's. Then you have things like data analysis, right? So you have data in some repository. Can you look, how do you look at it, evaluate it, use it, you know, make it, make it meaningful, make decisions from it. Right? You've got data strategy. So that's what is your plan? How do you get from here to here? You know, how to use data to propel your organization, increase profits, make better decisions, innovate. Right. Those are three and people are very familiar with three. The fourth one is data governance. Data governance is about two things. One is how you reduce the risks associated with data. So things like cybersecurity is in the scope, compliance. There's lots of rules about using data in an organization today. But the other half, we call that defensive. Data is offensive data, the other side, offensive, which means how do you use data to actually innovate, to propel your organization forward.

Exactly, yeah.

So while enterprises have been really good at data management, data strategy and analysis, they've been very bad at this. And in fact, as I did survey work for this and research, it turns out that the understanding of what it is and how to actually go about a data governance Plan was either not being done or poorly understood, or there simply was no understanding. There was no. I wasn't even aware of it. Right. And then what happens is you take those four things again. Data management, data strategy, data analysis, and data governance. And in total, you're talking about what's called data culture. Right.

I like that.

Right.

Did you coin the term data culture?

I don't think I did. I'm happy to.

I love it.

No.

Data culture is going to be the core and crux of every technology company.

Correct. No. Every organization.

Every organization. Every organization is going to be a data organization.

Correct? Correct. Spot on.

We are moving into an unstructured world which is going to eventually become structured.

Yes.

We will be able to label any unstructured data in a structured manner.

Yes. Yes. And AI is going to help with that? The cognitive revolution is going to help.

Yeah. Data labeling is almost fully automated. Is that right?

Yeah. Well, we're getting there. We're getting there. Yeah. But. But tools are one thing, right? I think what happens is you interview a technologist, whatever, and they talk about tools, whatever. No, you have to have people who understand the possibilities.

Yeah.

You gotta have education, you gotta have strategy, you gotta have policy. There's other layers where leadership is required in order to have success.

Yeah.

Sometimes we think we sit in our offices as leaders or executive, you know, business people, engineers even, and a vendor comes to you and says, we have a tool that will transform your business. And you're like, I'm so excited. I love your demo. I want this product. You buy it and you don't have success. Well, why? Well, because you didn't have the other things. Right. You didn't maybe have a data governance team and approach. You didn't have a strategy, you didn't have the right talent, you didn't integrate it and collaborate across the enterprise. The tools are only one part of it. The summary of all of this is, what is the foundation of the cognitive industrial revolution? What is the actual raw material? It's data. And if you don't get this right, nothing else is going to matter.

And how do you get it right?

Well, you buy this book.

Listening to you talk about this book, I also thought about the Gardner keynote where they do a chart on AI readiness and human readiness. So how will you help organizations achieve the balance between AI readiness and human readiness? We've got all these amazing tools. AI is ready. How do you make the human ready?

Well, I do think we're early.

You do think we're early.

What I mean by that Is organizations generally are using AI today for prompts, prompt engineering, creating reports, doing analysis. They're doing very important things. But the big evolution, the reshaping of society and of how business operates, as a consequence, AI is still ahead of us. So. So I do think that there is a balance here between, you know, business as usual, but with a forward, you know, vision and preparing for that vision. Yeah. And part of what emerges out of that is, I think at the heart of a lot of. Well, at the heart of your question, perhaps, and others is what is the role of the human in all of this? Yeah. And again, it's really early to know answers around that, I would think.

Orchestration. Am I being wrong or is it more than orchestration? Is it also design?

Well, tell me more about the question again. So I understand it is the role

of human being an orchestrator because we built all these amazing tools doing things for us. Are we just orchestrators or are we also designers? Will we have the capacity to redesign this as we orchestrate?

Well, that's a good idea. I think the right answer is we don't know. Part of it is we don't know what we're going to be doing. Sometimes we answer the question relative to the world that exists today. What I learned about innovation, having had an innovation in my title and done this for a long time, is you actually have to think and innovate for a world that doesn't yet exist.

So you have to live in that world.

You have to live in that world. So if you think about. If I asked, you know, we go back to a year before smartphones. Yeah. And you asked me a question about information or about applications, I would be talking about them. Like about websites.

Yeah.

A year later, smartphones come out, and then not long after that, we have apps. And now everything. I said a year and a half earlier. It doesn't make any sense. Right. So there's technologies and usage that doesn't exist in 2025, that's going to exist in 2027, 29, that we'll have to adapt to. And so it's not a way to sort of avoid the question. It's more to put it in context, to say, well, let's imagine what that world looks like. And let's go through a number of scenarios. It may be, for example, here's a specific one. The other phenomenal technology that's about to emerge is quantum computing. Yes, you got it. Exactly. You knew I was going to go there. It's not on most people's radars. Outside of the quantum community. And maybe people like yourself who, you know, think about this a lot and you might think, well, goodness gracious, that's more automation, more technology, more, you know, it's going to result in less use of humans. It turns out to build a quantum industry requires a lot of humans. There's a lot of things to build. We've got to build refrigerators, right. For quantum computers. We have to, you know, build cooling systems, the cooling system, chips, the. We need a lot of electronics and energy and we have, we have to develop new approaches to energy and fusion seems like it's on the horizon. So you might say, well, where are the jobs going to come from, you know, today? Well, because quantum is not a thing right this second when I say that it's not a global commercial offering at the trillion dollar level yet, but it will become that. So I'm actually very positive about that. The role of humans. We're going to have an enormous amount of high paying blue collar jobs for quantum. Yeah, right.

And I think the white collar jobs will transform Metamorph.

Yes.

If you're programming for xyz, you're going to be programming for abc probably. Yeah. Amazing. So on that note though, which technologies do you think are hyped and are going to go away? Like, I know, decentralized technologies, crypto. Crypto and quantum, will they ever coexist? You know what I mean?

Yeah. I'm laughing partially because this is so, so hot right now. This is so current, the whole bitcoin movement.

But you're laughing at it because it's going to go away?

No, because people who believe in bitcoin are almost, and I say this nicely, sort of almost militant about their belief. Like no one.

The decentralized.

You can't counter the strong argument. I. Look, I think blockchain is incredible. In fact, I wrote a book about it and I have several videos. I have a book about cryptocurrency as an educator, not as an evangelist. I'm not a promoter of cryptocurrency, but I'm an educator. Like, this is how it works. This is the options. Here's how this whole system and ecosystem works. Look, just to have it on the record, I'm not as enthusiastic about the future of bitcoin as so many millions are. And maybe I'll get some hate mail because of that. I think people need to be very careful about it and just do their own homework, their own research. And so I think that could be something that is, in the long term, overhyped.

And by the way, not AI, not Quantum, they are here for the long run.

Oh, yeah, yeah. No, I. Look, and by the way, I just want to say about crypto, if it works out, amazingly, bitcoin works out, I'll say I was wrong. I will. I'll say I was wrong. I'm okay with that.

All right.

No AI and Quantum going to change the world? No, they're going to change every aspect of life as we know it. So I'm 100% secure in saying that.

Amazing. Wonderful on that. You know, this has been a fantastic conversation. We should chat more about your life, you know, please come back again, as a last question, what is the best way for people to reach you and what are some of the gigs you love to do outside of your work at University of San Francisco and Human Future? What are some of the things you're available for, like for example, keynotes or what else do you do?

That's very kind of you. I'm very easy to find. I'm all over the Internet and so you can get to me through my main website, reichental.com, my last name, dot com. You can get to me via LinkedIn or maybe Instagram, but LinkedIn is probably the most obvious place. My website has a form if you're interested in hiring me or learning about by work or something, or you have another podcast, whatever it is. I get a lot of requests through that. So very easy to get in touch with. So I do a lot of workshops for public and private company organizations around technology, you know, help you. Maybe you're struggling with an issue or don't know how to approach digital transformation or AI or whatever it is that you're kind of struggling with in the digital realm. So I can be helpful to organizations in that regard.

About smart cities. Is there something you're helping people with? You know, I think about San Francisco. I have 200 thoughts. What needs to be done to see, you know, I wonder what you think about that.

Well, they have, you know, some very. There's a very active new mayor in San Francisco right now. Very, very knowledgeable and well intentioned mayor. Let's give him a chance. He's also hired some good people and there's a good tech team there. So they will see what they can demonstrate. And the work they do, they do some nice work around AI and so I won't suggest anything to them. They can come to me if they want my help. But some really smart people are there. But one of the things I've been helping Cities with a lot is training going in and training their staff on how to use some of these tools and AI tools to help them with their work. I've been helping a lot of cities with developing policies. You have to have policies. Right. And that can help, you know, the kind of the, your guardrails in terms of what is going to lower the risk but also maximize the benefits. I also help cities now with their, with their, not only their overall tech strategy, but specifically around their AI strategy. So help them develop those. So very engaged, not only here in the US but around the world on AI, on a whole lot of tech strategies for cities.

Yeah. One last question. What can we do to improve the public private partnership for technology adoption? Because the public sector and the private sector, public sector is fairly slower. You know, if you look at the federal government and I mean I work with a lot of cyber security geeks and they talk about the kind of attacks these adversaries who have access to tech can pull off.

Yes.

So what is a good way to accelerate the public private sector partnerships?

Yes. Well, I'll talk from both sides. So on the, on the private side, on the, on the tech firm side, we need to see more solutions. Right? You might think, well, there are lots of. It's probably saturated perhaps. No, my experience is we don't have enough solutions. Cities have a lot of challenges, they're very complicated. Historically, some of the solutions have been not great. They've been adequate, but not great. So we need a lot more innovation happening coming out of the entrepreneur community and the tech industry for the cities, for that, that deploy for government of cities. Yes, we're seeing that. By the way, there's now a, there's a new category called govtech. Right. Or sometimes urban tech, but govtech seems to be the one.

Yeah, no, that's the term.

Yes, the term. So that's in the time I've been in serving cities now, 15 years, 16 years. Went from nothing really, just a handful of like again, not so innovative tech companies to today in 2025 and into 2026. Some really awesome solutions. We need more. We need those, we need them to be reaching out and educating our public sector colleagues. On the public sector side, I would say they need to have an open door policy just like I had at the city of Palo Alto.

That's amazing.

Tech firms used to love it because they'd call me up and they say, I have an idea. And I'm like, I was like, come on in. You don't see that a lot.

And what do they have to get. When they work with a city.

Yeah.

They get a large audience. I mean, large user base.

Is that. Well, no, it's great business, I mean. Oh, yeah, yeah. The Smart City movement and now the cognitive city movement is worth trillions over the next few years. No, it's massive. Massive.

That's interesting.

The opportunity is there to be tapped into now. Some of the big firms win a lot of the deals. The Microsofts, the Oracles.

Yeah.

You know, saps and the screwing movement of startups. But there's still. There's still a lot. There's that middle tier, by the way, of like the Tyler's. Tyler Technologies and, and, and, and I can't remember the other one. Anyway, there's several others.

No, no, this is amazing. No, no, you can, you can.

They can all be looked up. So. Yeah, the buyer and the seller need to approach the opportunity differently than they have historically have.

Yeah. So they create sort of an alignment.

Yes.

Of problem and solution.

Yes, yes, yes.

Great. So on that amazing note. Yeah. It's hard to stop the conversation. We could talk all day, but maybe there's a next time where you can come back and. With your new book and new strategies and.

Yeah.

Thank you so much for your time and I would love to have you back.

That's been a. It's been a real pleasure. I'd be delighted to come back. Thank you, Vida. Thank you.