Keynote: How will AI impact Chiang Mai?

The question in the title is the one the AI for Chiang Mai track has spent the whole month on. Not what AI does to the economy in the abstract, but what it does to a city of this size, with this mix of students, small businesses, farmers, agencies and people who moved here from somewhere else.

Ian Borders leads that track, and he leads the Claude Impact Labs Hackathon that runs across Main Week, where teams build things Chiang Mai actually asked for. By the time he gives this talk he will have spent September watching people try.

He comes at the question from three directions at once. As Managing GP at Darkstar Venture Capital he sees which AI companies get funded and why. As founder of Kybernesis AI he builds with the tools himself. And as a Claude Community Ambassador based in Chiang Mai, he has spent the past year running Claude Code meetups and workshops here, which means he has watched a lot of people in this city meet these tools for the first time.

That last part is the interesting one. The question is not whether AI arrives in Chiang Mai. It is who here gets to use it, for what, and what the city looks like on the other side.