The recent announcement of the $500B Stargate AI Project, in my view, is a monumental step toward reshaping America’s perception of AI and the infrastructure required to support it.
The ambition behind this initiative is fascinating to observe, and it reminds me of the many AI-driven innovations emerging, and as we integrate AI into most businesses, for better or for worse. It’s exciting to see this level of ambition being applied - and even YC Winter 2025 batch founders standing out in the space, a key indicator of things to come.
Over the past few months, I’ve reassured friends and fellow founders that the wheels of industry are about to turn on again for Tech and will move faster than ever. I’m hopeful Stargate marks the beginning of many steps in the right direction.
At Workflow Secrets, we’ve spent the past few years tackling scalability and adoption challenges in a different but equally complex sector: real estate.
Our product, the Systems Accelerator Manager (SAM), is an modern AI-powered CRM tool - automating workflows, building scalable processes, and enhancing agent productivity, while focusing on AI-assisted relationship-building in every one of those processes. The (R) in Customer Relationship Manager is really lacking in our industry tools, and we are seeking to fix that.
Reflecting on Stargate’s goals, here are some lessons I’m chewing on for both large-scale initiatives like this and smaller projects like ours:
Scalability of AI Adoption:
We designed SAM to help non-technical users leverage AI with minimal training. Stargate’s workforce ambitions will likely face similar challenges, requiring user-friendly interfaces and thoughtful adoption strategies.
Reskilling workers, especially for sales-oriented, relationship-driven industries - will be crucial, and for us, this is good news as it seems the administration is also concerned with helping younger generations get into housing. This excites me about what is about to occur in real estate, and ease of use getting technologically-literate agents only serves to help them succeed, and buyers/sellers that hopefully are coming into a growing marketplace will have a smoother process.
Energy-Efficient Operations:
While we don’t deal directly with energy, SAM optimizes workflows to save agents time. For every hour an agent saves sitting at their computer on repetitive tasks, computational demands and power usage decrease.
Scaled across 1.5 million professionals in real estate, this kind of efficiency can make a real difference. It’s worth exploring how similar principles can apply industry-to-industry to work towards better use of energy. Im personally in favor of a 1hr-blackout one night each month to observe the solar system, but that is probably a big ask.
Systemization as a Framework:
Just as Stargate aims to create modular AI data center networks, SAM builds modular systems that grow with a business. This is a by-product inherent of how workflow automation work, however I feel the more people exposed to, and thinking about systems we have as a society - the stronger chance we have at creating efficancy without bloat... Perhaps that's just a pipedream, and efficacy for efficacy sake is its own problem.
When I first heard about Stargate (SGU is my personal favorite from the TV series!), I was excited to consider how the initiative might shape AI’s role across industries.
Exploring overlaps between challenges in scaling AI for industries like real estate and the infrastructure demands of projects like Stargate has been a fascinating thought exercise.
I’d love to hear how others are interpreting the latest AI news and applying it to their own projects. How can smaller-scale innovations inform these ambitious moonshots?
