With the rise of artificial intelligence, there’s been many conferences and business events to discuss the moral, risky and money-making — or saving — implications across industries.

But Denver’s DenAI Summit is the first event of its kind to be hosted by a city government, showing Mayor Mike Johnston administration’s openness to adopting the technology.

“One thing we want to do in Denver is to be able to say, we want the city to be an open API,” Johnston said Thursday morning referencing an application programming interface publicly open for software developers.

The inaugural summit at the Colorado Convention Center was sold out and had more than 800 registrations, according to the city. The event is designed to tackle the biggest themes cities are facing each year and how AI can be used to solve it. The first theme was a major priority for the mayor: affordability.

Another big theme of the main keynotes centered around how the private and public sectors can collaborate on A.I.

The DenAI Summit is happening simultaneously with Denver Startup Week, the 13-year downtown conference for technology professionals where A.I. and quantum are the biggest hot topics this year.

The summit featured co-founder and executive chairman of LinkedIn Reid Hoffman, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and Promise CEO Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins of the payment tech platform for managing government debt.

When the mayor interviewed Hoffman, the LinkedIn leader criticized Colorado politicians for recent legislation enacted into law to restrict artificial intelligence.

Hoffman said the state legislature’s recent bill tries to “prevent the future of software” from being built in Colorado, “which doesn’t strike me as a particularly smart play.”

Colorado is the first state to set a regulatory framework on the technology. Legislators passed Consumer Protections for Artificial Intelligence to go into effect in 2026 in an effort to ensure A.I. wouldn’t have biases that could prevent a person from securing a job, getting adequate health care or access to a loan.

The law, once in effect, would require companies with “high risk” A.I. to have proper documentation of their risk analysis and give proper disclosure to consumers. It also gives the state attorney general power to enforce the laws if companies don’t comply.

The policy set off a backlash from the business community criticizing it for potentially scaring away lucrative companies from working in the state or incentivizing them to move out if regulations are looser everywhere else.

Hoffman said there needs to be more space to develop the technology — then put guardrails once problems arise.

“It’s a dialogue of learning, as opposed to the ‘I have an amorphous, poorly defined big accountability stick’ which will quell investment,” Hoffman said.

Johnston commended the business community for speaking with legislators to strike parts of the bills to make it less restrictive.

“We’ll [Denver] be very much open to business in this space as well as Colorado,” the mayor said.

Most companies focus on attracting the best franchises with the most money to spare, Hoffman said. If governments want to get involved with A.I., he said cities should offer incentives such as offering to help A.I. companies navigate their local market and community concerns around it in exchange for products.

Johnston encouraged companies to think of how A.I. could solve some of the biggest problems cities face such as traffic congestion and crime. There’s “billions” of dollars out there coming from cities or countries looking for businesses who can tackle those issues, he said.

One use Johnston showed interest in was A.I. taking police body cam footage to create incident reports that may be more “objective” to free up time for officers to be on the ground as a preventative measure and keep them spending hours on reports.

Hoffman cited A.I. uses to find and detect cars blocking intersections due to a crash or mechanical issue or finding which drivers are of high risk of causing an accident due to distracted driving.

The LinkedIn leader said the new technology is going to change things and anything with computational abilities will get smarter, calling A.I. a “cognitive industrial revolution.”

While the original industrial revolution helped bring about a middle class, Hoffman said, the transition was rough for society. And he added there are many challenges that could come about with A.I.

“I think the end state is very, very good,” Hoffman said. “And I think we are trying to navigate the transition better than we did with the Industrial Revolution.”

Schmidt, the former head of Google who Johnston also interviewed, said he was hopeful around the uses of A.I. for health advancements and combatting climate change.

But he had two big fears, he said. The first was the application of A.I. for military use. The second revolved around computers beginning to teach themselves or build their own language models. If it starts to have a mind of its own, he said, “unplug it.”

“Because if these systems start doing things that we as humans don’t understand, that’s a danger,” Schmidt said.

When he cautioned against the use of the technology in matters of national security, his main concern was to make sure there’s still accountability involved. He said A.I. should be used as a robotic extension under human control, citing Ukraine’s deployment of drones in its war against Russia, and added there ultimately needs to be someone held responsible for making major decisions.

“We do not want that to change,” he said.