Dec 11, 2025 - Axios Events
Axios AI+ SF: Making technology available to all faces key hurdles, experts say
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Attendee eating lunch during the roundtable. Photo: Chris Constantine on behalf of Axios.
SAN FRANCISCO – The opportunities and challenges of bridging the digital divide and expanding access to AI to vulnerable populations were the focus of an Expert Voices roundtable discussion at Axios' AI+ SF Summit last week.
- Axios' Ashley Gold and Maria Curi moderated the Dec. 4 roundtable discussion, sponsored by Securus Technologies (an Aventiv company).
Why it matters: While AI and other advanced technologies are integrating into everyday life and connecting with economic opportunity, a digital divide persists.
5 big things: Here's what the attendees had to say …
- Many proposals for digital broadband in rural states were canceled due to policies from officials in the Trump administration, said Jonathan Hasak, Coursera senior partnerships lead for AI and government: "I don't know what their policy is around connecting, creating more broadband."
- "Certainly access to compute really needs to be viewed as a public necessity, a public infrastructure," ZentLaw founder and CEO Monica Zent said.
- Gaurab Bansal, executive director at Responsible Innovation Labs, said he supports California's CalCompute safe AI law but had questions given the state's budget climate. He said federal block grants could be an option for smaller states that lack tech infrastructure. "Most of my questions are much more implementation-oriented, and how do people in their states feel like they're getting some value out of it?"
- "I actually think we are asking the wrong question, because it's in corporations' sort of interest to make sure everybody is paying for these kinds of things, and it'll be a problem that's actually solved pretty quickly," Technovation CEO Tara Chklovski said. "The harder problem is what are people going to do with this technology, right?"
- AI is being used as a tool in social services work with vulnerable populations, Binti CEO Felicia Curcuru said. For social workers, "they're out in the field, sometimes out in rural areas without connectivity, and they can on their phone kind of record the conversations that they're having with families." Those conversations can be uploaded to Binti, which completes the necessary documents.
