A year is a long time in artificial intelligence, according to Norm Ai, which hosted its annual Central Park AI Forum on 24 September at The Plaza in New York. In the 12 months since the previous gathering, AI agents have moved into business workflows, compute demand has accelerated, and lawmakers have begun weighing the rules of an agentic economy.
More than 200 leaders from business, technology, law and government attended. Norm Ai identified five themes from the day.
The first was autonomy. Norm Ai founder and CEO John Nay said American law, which balances individual freedom against limits on harmful conduct, can help guide AI’s progress. Khosla Ventures founder and CEO Vinod Khosla described AI as a potential great equaliser, offering low-cost access to medical, educational, financial and legal expertise for people who cannot currently afford a tutor, lawyer or adviser. He also called for policies that support workers through the economic disruption ahead and help them move into care, craft and creative work.
The second theme was physical constraints. Mike Forman described a data centre market that sets record demand year after year, with agentic development expected to push compute needs higher still. Power, transmission, land, permits, equipment and skilled labour all limit capacity, and community concerns over water, electricity and jobs add further friction. New York State Assembly Member Micah Lasher argued that government must broker agreements between developers and communities on power, construction, taxes and local investment.
Third, Norm Ai said the agentic enterprise depends less on model capability and more on organisational redesign. Companies typically progress from personal productivity tools to AI-assisted services, and then to agents running complex processes. That final stage requires mapping workflows, defining approval points and fixing fragmented information architecture. Salesforce president and chief legal officer Sabastian Niles outlined work to build an AI-native, trust-first legal function. Morgan Stanley chief legal officer and chief administrative officer Eric Grossman said AI can standardise legal processes and preserve the knowledge of departing lawyers.
The fourth theme was judgment. Anthropic chief economist Peter McCrory cited data showing domain experts who guide Claude Code are systematically more successful, and that fully automated workflows degrade faster as tasks grow complex. Coatue founder Philippe Laffont warned that automating entry-level work could weaken the pipeline that develops future senior decision-makers. Stephen Wolfram added that complex systems behave unpredictably, so humans must decide when to trust, intervene or override.
Finally, Norm Ai framed law as infrastructure. Delaware Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez and former Thomson Reuters CEO Tom Glocer discussed a proposed regulatory sandbox for Agent-Managed Companies, where an AI agent could run an entity owned by a human member under registration, disclosure and oversight requirements. Norm Ai is helping the Delaware Department of State build the sandbox infrastructure. Legal services, meanwhile, are moving toward outcome-based pricing as AI absorbs junior lawyer work.
Norm Ai concluded that the shared test across every discussion was how AI can expand opportunity.
For more insights from the panel, read the full story here.
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