Startup Grind NYC

The AI Workflow Exchange: Live Builder Demos by Startup Grind

25. Aug. 2026 18:00 EDT

The Yard: Herald Square, 106 West 32nd Street, New York, NY, US

🚨 CLICK HERE TO RSVP 👈

6 builders show how they use AI to solve real problems, at work or in life. Come see how you can steal their prompts and repos and put them to use yourself.

​Each practitioner gets 10 minutes to demo a workflow they actually use. These aren't intimidating AI Engineers (probably).

​They're AI users, just like you and me.

​What to expect:

• ​6 live demos: 10 minutes each, with the presenter walking through the decisions behind the build.
• ​The problem first: every demo opens with what was slow or broken before the workflow existed.
• ​Simple and complex side by side: a single custom GPT gets the same stage as a full multi-agent system.
• ​Take something home: presenters share a prompt, template, or setup you can copy after the event.

​🚨 CLICK HERE TO RSVP 👈

Come curious about what other builders have made, and leave with ideas for putting theirs to work for you.
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Want to apply to be a presenter for the next AI Workflow Exchange? Click here to submit your workflow to be considered.
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Agenda:
​6:00 PM - Arrive & mingle
6:30 PM - Live demos
7:30 PM - Meet the presenters

🚨 CLICK HERE TO RSVP 👈

Tech Happy Hour by Startup Grind

28. Aug. 2026 17:00 EDT

Time Out Market Union Square, 124 East 14th Street, New York, NY, US

This is the monthly Startup Grind tech mixer. It's a low-key way to connect with the NYC tech and startup community to discover shared interests, explore areas for collaboration, and find your next co-founder or key hire.

​Join us for a casual happy hour to build real relationships and make friends, not just contacts. No pitches. No presentations. No agenda.

​This happy hour is for:

• ​Startup Founders & Employees
• ​Technologists, Developers & Tech Workers
• ​Product Managers & Designers
• ​Investors, VCs, Advisors & Mentors
• ​Anyone curious about the NYC tech scene

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Agenda:

• ​5:00 PM: Happy Hour starts. Come and go as you please.

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We're at the new Time Out Market at Union Square. It features a selection of the city's best food and drink together under one roof, offering a wide variety of options to choose from throughout the event.

​Look for Startup Grind table signs toward the back near the outdoor terrace.

The AI Briefing by Startup Grind - The Workforce Gap in AI Readiness

11. Sept. 2026 10:00 EDT

Civic Hall, 124 East 14th Street, New York, NY, US

👉 CLICK HERE TO RSVP FOR FREE 👈

The AI Briefing is a recurring AI deep-dive for decision-makers.

Each month, we select one high-signal industry report, circulate it in advance, and meet to cut through the noise.

📜 This Month's Source: 2026 People Readiness Report (Kyndryl – Jun 2026)

Kyndryl's newest survey of 1,100 business and technology leaders found something specific: workforce readiness dropped 6 points this year, to just 23%, even as broad AI deployment climbed to 57%.

The gap between rollout speed and people readiness is widening.

Leaders agree the technology itself isn't the constraint anymore. 79% say AI will outpace their organization's ability to adapt its workforce, governance, and operating model.

And the confidence gap tracks straight down the org chart: half of executive leadership believes their teams are enthusiastic about AI, but only 3 in 10 individual contributors and entry-level employees agree.

The same survey found 66% of organizations have already given AI agents unsupervised read and write access to their core systems of record. Trust and governance haven't caught up with what's already running in production.

🏔️ The Mission: Where adoption, the C-suite divide, and agentic governance actually meet

• Every AI Briefing this year has examined one piece of this from the top: how fast enterprises adopted, where leadership's confidence outran execution, and how governance is lagging behind autonomous agents. This session looks at the piece none of those touched directly: whether the workforce itself is ready, and what the data says happens to trust and outcomes when it isn't.
• We'll use Kyndryl's own segmentation, the small group of organizations it calls Pacesetters, to ground the conversation in what readiness actually requires versus what most organizations are doing instead.

📊 The Format:

• We'll open with the readiness numbers: adoption at 57%, workforce readiness at 23% and falling, and the widening distance between what executives report and what individual contributors experience.
• From there, the room works through Kyndryl's Pacesetter data: the 9% of organizations that redesigned roles, built change management, and got measurably better outcomes for it. What's replicable here, and what's easy to claim but hard to actually execute.
• We'll also spend time on the report's agentic AI numbers: two-thirds of organizations already letting agents act on core systems without a person in the loop, and what that means for a governance conversation this room started in August.

🤝 Who Should Attend:

• Enterprise Executives: Compare your own workforce-readiness numbers against Kyndryl's benchmark, and see what actually separates the 9% of organizations getting outcomes from the 91% still catching up.
• Founders & Builders: See where the readiness gap (skills visibility, change management, trust-building) is becoming a real buying trigger for enterprise customers, not just a talking point in their RFPs.
• Product, Data, and Operations Leads: Get concrete detail on what change management and role redesign look like at organizations that have already done the work, not just the aspiration.

📬 The Prep: This is a working session, not a lecture. Read the report here. Bring a specific example from your own org, especially anywhere the gap between leadership's read and the floor's experience showed up.

👉 CLICK HERE TO RSVP FOR FREE 👈