The built environment is cracking under pressure. 

Climate shocks, economic anxiety… it’s all happening at once.

and…AI is rewriting all the rules.
Most of us are siloed, overstretched, 

and trying to understand smart buildings, smart cities, and smart governance.

 Buildings aren’t getting smarter. 

Cities aren’t getting more resilient.
Owners are overwhelmed. 

Standards are fractured.
AI is accelerating everything, and the industry doesn’t know what to ask.

The conversations that matter are stuck in slides, 

silos, or in theoretical discussions.

Cafés are not new. 

In fact, they are over a hundred years old.

In the early 20th century, cafés and salons across 

Vienna, Budapest, Prague, Zurich, and Berlin 

became engines of intellectual and cultural disruption.

• You’d walk into Café Central in Vienna 

  • or Café Louvre in Prague 

    • and find Sigmund Freud exploring the architecture of the unconscious…

• Gustav Klimt pushing the boundaries of visual art…

• Otto Wagner re-defining the urban form…

• In Zurich and Berlin, Albert Einstein scribbled equations between coffee and conversation, 

  • trying to unlock the mechanics of time, 

    • light, and the universe

At Café Zai, we’re not reenacting that history.
We’re reclaiming it, 

and updating it for today’s complexity, 

with today’s tools.

And once again, we’re facing questions 

that don’t fit neatly into any discipline.
Today, we’re trying to understand intelligence itself, 

only now, it’s not just human.

AI, AGI, and quantum, 

these aren’t abstract trends.
They’re converging fast. 

And they’re asking us to re-evaluate 

what it means to learn, to decide, to govern, …to exist.

We’re afraid of collapse.
Not just of infrastructure or institutions, 

but of meaning.
Because when all human knowledge is mirrored back at us, 

the real question is:
what happens if we don’t know who we are?

Café ZAi is: 

Short.
Twenty minutes max.
Two or three voices at most. 

There’s no script, no slides, no long intros.
We talk about what’s broken. What’s working. 

If it needs a part two, we’ll come back.

When we gather at the café, there’s no formal intro. 

No bio. No context-setting.

You’ll hear the conversation 

as if you’ve just walked in on two people mid-thought.
The listener is at the next table, leaning in.
The intro happens in the show notes.

No slides. 

No talking points.
We’re not here to present. 

We listen, reflect, and challenge each other.

Cafe ZAi Salons

We’re organizing the first episodes of Café Zai into a few informal “salons”, 

like threads in a wider tapestry. 

Each one brings together a different set of voices, 

but they all sit at the same café table, 

grappling with the same question: 

How do we move from conversation to clarity, and from clarity to action?

I – ZAi Salon: Stewards of the Environment

Who they are:
Decision-makers, regulators, agency leaders, asset owners, 

and organizational voices who shape and govern the built and natural environment.

II – ZAi Salon: Builders, Movers, and Makers

Who they are:
Architects, engineers, planners, contractors,

 product manufacturers, supply chain experts, 

and logistics leaders.

III – ZAi Salon: Interpreters of Complexity

Who they are:
Technologists, scientists, artists, 

semantic modelers, standards architects, 

open-source developers, 

and creative thinkers.

In other words…. All of you!