Because Salinas Valley can benefit from the progress Silicon Valley is making on AI and this event will help both sides recognize that.

There have been a lot of (and many are ongoing) discussions about the interplay between Silicon Valley and Salinas Valley. Lately, Silicon Valley is heavily focused on AI – how it’s getting used, how many vibe coders it is enabling, how many jobs it’s going to create, which industries may lose a lot of jobs, and the amazing hockey stick revenue growth of two of the largest “startups” (hard to use that word without quotes when revenue gets to the billions … hello OpenAI and Anthropic) that most of us have literally never seen before. That part is awesome. Better AI tools enable all tech startups to build faster, rollout better, and scale more aggressively while helping growers get access to AgTech faster because it is using AI. In a Silicon Valley world of “live fast, break glass, try everything – and report back by lunch” AI is like an adrenaline IV for tech developer teams.

Meanwhile, in Salinas Valley, it’s less about hockey sticks and more about boring old spreadsheets, because in order for someone to start buying robots, the math has to math. It’s bad to break glass or too many other things, and one failed experiment may mean you don’t get a second or third one without some serious back pedaling and a great explanation for why that happened … that the grower operations team believes (and that does not depend on you showing remorse for the failed test.)

While there’s plenty of dialogue on the funding fit side of things (some of my investor friends say Silicon Valley funders need to figure out how to tweak their model to AgTech. I’m of the opposite view that Salinas Valley needs to figure out how to grow companies that can scale on a growth curve that looks more like other tech segments because Silicon Valley is doing just fine creating unicorns for the most part and doesn’t need to tweak the model for an under-performing segment relative to its peer group), there is complete agreement on the product side of things.

AI is changing everything in all segments and Silicon Valley is leading the way. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini, Facebook Llama, and Apple’s (well, whatever Apple ends up doing with AI – some day!) are all in the heart of Silicon Valley, as are many of the AI investors. All of the advancements in AI can and will eventually benefit vertical markets like AgTech. It has always been this way. The platforms and infrastructure build and scale and then the verticals follow, leveraging what the horizontal players learned and built.

Enter Physical AI – the cross-over point between the two valleys. Yes, Nvidia (and now AMD and Intel and a bunch of others) is building chips and hardware for AI performance across several key functions (inference, training, etc.) to increase and to drive token capabilities up while driving cost per token down so the subscription plans can bump up in price as margins hopefully go up because token prices plummet. In theory, a win for everybody. In practice, well we will see, and mileage may vary. And every other Tuesday a new model arrives from one of the big dogs that create awesome new capabilities that all users get to take advantage of right now. So, the pace of change is accelerating and tools and infrastructure are getting better at the same time.

Now we go over to AgTech where hardware means tractors and robots and hardware and software have to work 24/7/365 in obscenely tough conditions – outdoors, all kinds of weather, not many days off, and it better not break down very often and get fixed quick when it does. Other than that…well, you get the idea. The part where Salinas Valley needs to pay attention is to watch the growth of the platform components and figure out how you can do Physical AI better and faster by leveraging the Silicon Valley toolkit and using it to speed up your AgTech automation solution.

Enter Ruggedize – the first show designed to bring those exact two audiences to the table in the same place at the same time. Naturally, it happens in Salinas at Reservoir Farms next month – this is the first one, and I predict it will be a big success because both sides will benefit from the panels, conversations, and lessons exchanged and learned over two days. When people ask me what’s the benefit of having someone like Danny Bernstein come down from Silicon Valley to found Reservoir Farms, Ruggedize is a great example of exactly the benefit – someone who knows both Valleys well is building an event that both Valleys will get a win from.

Ruggedize information here.