Thursday, May 14, 2026
In today’s digest, Park Avenue turns into a six-block street festival, LaGuardia Airport gets an AI assist, and ChatGPT and Claude use widens. 🤖
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Park Avenue is about to get a rare tweak: pedestrians only. This Saturday, six blocks between 34th and 40th Streets will shut down to cars and fill up with 200+ vendors, live music, food pop-ups, and a public art debut from sculptor Dorit Levinstein. 🎨 (Secret NYC)
Pro tip from organizers: Show up at 10am for the best vendor access, or around 3:30pm if you’re mostly there for the vibes and sculpture unveiling.
You can’t spell airport without “AI”: LaGuardia Airport just rolled out an AI-powered hologram concierge named Bridget to Terminal B that can give directions, answer traveler questions, and help people navigate the terminal in English and Spanish. ✈️ (Time Out New York)
The hologram is stationed near Terminal B’s Food Hall and can point travelers toward gates, lounges, shops, and baggage claim using conversational AI.
The Long Island Rail Road may go on strike this weekend, and Governor Kathy Hochul has warned riders to make plans to work from home. While the state will provide shuttle buses, they won’t come close to handling normal demand. 🚆 (Gothamist)
The LIRR normally carries about 270,000 riders every weekday, and officials say a prolonged strike could trigger major gridlock across Long Island.
The last LIRR strike was in 1994.
In other reading:
The curators’ guide to Frieze New York (The Cut)
The New York City outdoor breakfast spots worth an early wake-up (Observer)
Mamdani will extend Astoria bike boulevard east into Woodside (Streetsblog)
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ChatGPT and Claude Use Widens (And What That Shows)
Two recent research drops from OpenAI and Anthropic (both Tech:NYC members!) suggest the AI sector (and the tech industry at large) is entering a new phase. Let’s take a look.
OpenAI reports that in early 2026, ChatGPT growth broadened across age groups, geographies, and usage patterns, suggesting AI is becoming more of a default layer in everyday work. 🤖
🧑💻 The user base is widening: ChatGPT usage grew across all age groups with more balanced gender usage in Q1 2026, with users under 35 still making up the largest share of messages (35.8%), but users over 35 gaining share.
The global map is changing: The biggest jumps in ChatGPT messages per capita came from countries outside the most established markets, including the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Japan, Mexico, Tanzania, and Brazil. 🌎
In other words, adoption is spreading well beyond the first wave of AI-heavy markets.
Work use is getting more practical: OpenAI found that while writing and visual creation still led work-related use on consumer plans, faster-growing tasks included content creation, health-related documentation, and information retrieval.
The bigger story is consistency — repeatable, recurring use cases are replacing one-off experimentation.
The edge is increasingly about AI fluency: Anthropic’s recent Economic Index found Claude use cases are diversifying, with the top 10 tasks making up 19% of all traffic in February, down from 24% in November 2025.
It also found that higher-tenure users (AKA more seasoned Claude users) attempt higher-value tasks and have a 10% higher success rate, suggesting the moat may come from knowing how to use the models well.
👀 The bigger signal for tech: This is a sign that AI is maturing into a general-purpose platform.
As adoption spreads across older users, more global markets, and more repeatable work tasks, the center of gravity shifts to real-world deployment.
That’s good news for the broader tech sector and especially for NYC, where applied AI in finance, healthcare, media, and legal services is strong.
In other reading:
April’s most active U.S. investors included some usual suspects, and some unusual ones (Crunchbase News)
Hedge funds are making a killing in the ‘golden age’ of AI hardware (Wall Street Journal)
Tapping the powers of Mythos-like models still requires human intervention (Axios)
Anomaly Insights, an NYC-based provider of healthcare RCM tools, raised $17 million. Sound Ventures led the round, joined by Alumni Ventures, Link Ventures, Redesign Health, and RRE Ventures.
GovWell, an NYC-based permitting and licensing platform (and Tech:NYC member!), raised $25 million in Series A funding. Insight Partners led the round, joined by Work-Bench and Bienville Capital.
Featured events:
⭐ May 18-20: Sports Business Journal Tech Week, bringing together sports tech leaders to network, drive innovation, and discuss the trends impacting the sector. Register here with promo code LG-TECHNYC-2025 to get 15% off your pass.
⭐ May 20: Nysernet Leadership Symposium: Cyber Resilience for Museums and Cultural Organizations, bringing together CIOs and CISOs from museums, arts, and cultural orgs for peer discussion and executive-level insight on today’s cyber risks. Register here with promo code TECHNYC for 10% off.
⭐ May 21: NYC AI Demos, from Tech:NYC, Pensar, and Two Trees, this month spotlighting design companies with demos from Figma, Air, The Browser Company, Cartwheel, and Contra Labs. Register here.
⭐ June 3: Axios AI+ NY Summit, a half-day event during NY Tech Week convening top leaders across tech, finance, media, health care, and beyond to explore what’s next for artificial intelligence in conversations live from the Big Apple. Register here.
Other great events:
May 16: Civic Tech’ish Sets Sail, where members of the civic technology scene will be gathering aboard the NYC Ferry. Register here.
May 19: Agentic NYC: Retail Analytics in the Era of Agentic AI, a session on how elite retail are using agentic AI to move faster, be more prolific, and build more sophisticated analytics. Register here.
May 19: Founder Poker Night, an intimate poker night for NYC founders where you can play some cards and meet other founders also building something great. Register here.
May 19: Commerce Leaders Mixer at The Lead Summit, a curated evening of networking with senior retail and brand leaders across ecommerce, marketing, and digital. Register here.
May 20: Female Founders and Funders, where female founders can meet potential investors, and funders can discover innovative new ventures. Register here.
May 21: Pitchfest: New York City, a matchmaking program that pairs city agency staff with support from university faculty and volunteer civic fellows on short-term, high-impact projects. Register here.
May 21: Gen Z NYC Founder & Creator Mixer, where you can network with fellow Gen Z founders, share your wins, and find your next collab. Register here.
May 21: Brderless Founder Dinner, a private founder dinner for a curated group of Series A+ founders. Register here.
May 22: Crowd Theory: Live Business Pitching, a live, interactive experience bringing innovators, founders, and builders into one room to pitch their ideas in front of a crowd. Register here.
May 27: Cornell Tech Frontiers of AI Summit, bringing together academia, industry, and the public sector to explore the foundational perspectives that are shaping the future of AI. Register here.
May 28: Niural AI Summit, a pre-NY Tech Week summit bringing together CFOs, finance leaders, HR executives, founders, and investors shaping the future of AI-native finance and people operations. Register here for a discounted rate for Tech:NYC Digest readers.
June 16: Business Incubator Association of New York State’s 2026 Annual Conference, featuring high-impact panels with communities building across New York. Register here with promo code TECHNYC for a discounted pass.
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