Jason Gardner spent about a year and a half driving to AI Tinkerers events in New York City. He loved the format: real builders demonstrating working code, followed by people staying afterward to talk shop.
Eventually, though, the four-hour round trip became difficult to sustain. Jason pulled up a map of every AI Tinkerers chapter in the world and noticed a significant gap across central and upstate New York. He applied to fill it, and the Upstate New York chapter was approved.
The Idea
A demo-first room, 60 miles wide
AI Tinkerers is a global network spanning 245 cities and more than 115,000 members, but every chapter is built locally.
The Upstate New York chapter is centered in Binghamton and reaches approximately 60 miles in every direction, including Ithaca, Elmira, Cortland, Oneonta, Syracuse, and northeastern Pennsylvania. That region includes more than a dozen colleges and a strong network of engineers, founders, and researchers who had largely been building with AI on their own.
The premise is simple and intentionally firm: working code over slide decks.
Each presenter gets five focused minutes to demonstrate a real system running live, followed by questions from a room full of people capable of building something similar. There are no sales pitches, no keynotes, and no gatekeeping. Anyone who is curious and actively making something belongs in the room.
The Launch
SUNY Broome said yes
When Jason began cold-emailing everyone he could think of, SUNY Broome responded quickly.
Dr. Christine Martey-Ochola, the college’s Associate Vice President and Dean of STEM and Workforce Development, secured a room, learned the AI Tinkerers format, and hosted the chapter’s first meeting in the Applied Technology Building in February. She said yes before the chapter had attracted a single attendee.
Attendance was predictably light that first night, but the college supported the effort anyway.
Sharlene Provilus, Assistant Director of Workforce Development and Community Partnerships, has been on the ground at every meeting since, ensuring that the room, calendar, logistics, and small details all work. The chapter would not exist without their early support.
From there, the group found its home at the Koffman Southern Tier Incubator.
A space helps set the tone for a community, and Koffman is one of the most startup-oriented environments in the region. Meeting there helped the chapter become the kind of community Jason had envisioned: builders gathering in a builder’s space, curious, ambitious, and a little scrappy.
The crowd has grown every month since.
The Koffman Southern Tier Incubator in Binghamton serves as the chapter’s home base. It is a fitting location, as many of the region’s startups begin their journeys there.
The room before the demonstrations begin, filled with builders from across the Southern Tier. The informal “mingle and eat pizza” portion of the evening is where much of the real connection and collaboration happens.
What a Night Looks Like
Real systems, running live
The best way to understand the meetup is through the projects demonstrated during recent events. Each presenter stepped forward, connected a laptop, and ran a real system in front of the room.
Matt Brooker of PostHog demonstrated an agent loop capable of taking a production error from detection to resolution on its own. The system moved from an error tracker to a Claude agent and ultimately to a merged pull request, with no human intervention in the middle. PostHog sponsored the chapter’s April meetup.
Nick Githinji presented SetForMoney, a household budgeting application that uses AI to generate spending insights. A user can text the app a message such as “groceries 45,” and the system handles the rest.
What the Chapter is Building Toward
Where this goes next
Jason’s goal extends beyond organizing a monthly event.
He wants to build a durable community that makes the Southern Tier a place where people can pursue ambitious AI projects without feeling as though they are building alone.
That means developing deeper relationships with the universities and incubators that shape the region, welcoming more first-time presenters, and keeping the door open to anyone curious enough to walk through it.
With SUNY Broome and the Koffman Southern Tier Incubator behind the chapter, that future feels much closer.
Submitted by: Workforce & Community Partnerships
Tags: STEM Division
