Why This Conversation Matters in San Francisco
San Francisco is where most of these tools are built. That makes it the place where the tension is sharpest: the engineers and product teams shipping AI are also the first to have it handed back to them as a requirement.
Companies from seed-stage startups in SoMa to the largest teams at Alphabet and Salesforce are now asking the same question. When you mandate Copilot, Cursor, or an internal LLM for every engineer, what happens to the judgement those engineers were hired to exercise?
California's regulatory environment is adding pressure from another direction. As state-level AI accountability frameworks take shape, organizations need staff who can evaluate AI outputs critically, not just accept them. That skill has to be built deliberately.
What Steve Covers
Steve's talk addresses the specific mechanics of cognitive offloading: how repeated reliance on AI suggestions degrades the reasoning habits that produced good engineering and product decisions in the first place.
He gives audiences a concrete framework for deciding which tasks to delegate to AI and which to protect as human work. The goal is not to use AI less. It is to stay competent while using it.
For San Francisco audiences, Steve typically focusses on engineering judgement, code review culture, and the organizational signals that tell you your teams are deferring when they should be deciding.
Topics for San Francisco audiences
Steve speaks on cognitive sovereignty, the judgment economy, AI and creativity, and related topics. Full details on the Speaking page.
Book Steve for your San Francisco event
If you are planning a corporate conference, leadership event, or offsite in San Francisco and want to discuss whether Steve's work is a good fit, the Work with Me page has the details.