What the Billboards in Silicon Valley Tell Us About AI

Billboards are not science, but they are one of the most expensive datasets in Silicon Valley. What the messages along the road reveal about the next shift in AI.

Recently I was back in Silicon Valley after about six months. And precisely because of that gap, something stood out that I always find interesting there: the billboards.

Billboards are of course not science. But in Silicon Valley they are remarkably interesting material. They hang literally in the middle of the ecosystem and target an audience of founders, engineers, investors and decision-makers. Companies pay a lot of money to put one message there in an extremely compact form. That is exactly why they show so well which words, problems and frames are considered relevant at that moment.

Come back after a few months and you can almost literally see how the conversation has shifted.

The shift: from bigger models to fundamentals

And this time that shift was striking. Where it used to be mostly about bigger models, more intelligence and new AI capabilities, you now see far more emphasis on the fundamentals of AI.

Safe AI. Reliable infrastructure. Solid code. Security. Control over data. Observability. Reproducibility. A grip on what systems actually do.

My impression based on those billboards: the conversation in Silicon Valley is shifting from "what can AI do?" to "how do we make sure we can really build on it?"

European themes become global preconditions

That is interesting, because these are exactly the themes that have had a lot of attention in Europe for much longer. Privacy, data sovereignty, control over infrastructure and governance were sometimes seen mainly as European constraints. But as AI becomes a more serious part of business processes, they increasingly become technical and strategic preconditions.

What we see at The Automation Group

We see the same thing at The Automation Group. Organisations increasingly ask for European models, European infrastructure and AI solutions that can run inside their own cloud environment or on-premise.

No hard conclusion, but an interesting observation

So no hard conclusion. But an interesting observation from what may well be one of the most expensive and most visible datasets in Silicon Valley: the billboards along the road.

And if they are a good proxy for where the market is mentally heading, then control over AI currently looks like one of the most important themes.