Joy was palpable in the 20,000-person crowd that turned out on a spring night to celebrate what for many years seemed impossible: the reopening of Detroit’s Michigan Central Station, a former train depot whose 111-year history is intertwined with the city’s.

Speaking from a stage that would later host some of Detroit’s most famous musicians—including Diana Ross, Jack White, and Eminem—William Clay Ford Jr., Ford’s executive chair and great-grandson of the company’s founder, reminisced on the long road to this moment, starting with Ford’s purchase of the property in 2018.

“Six years ago we gathered here and we dreamt of what was possible,” he said. “We dared to dream that this station, which had become a symbol of a broken city, could once again shine as the symbol of the Motor City.”

Mobility is the foundation underpinning Ford’s nearly $1 billion effort to restore the station and create a 30-acre tech campus. Michigan Central eventually will have space for up to 2,500 Ford employees. Thousands more workers from other companies are slated to join them—and hundreds are already working on everything from aerial mobility to supply-chain innovations to electrification solutions.

“I wanted to make Michigan Central a place where the best and the brightest could come together to solve our biggest challenges,” Ford added. “I wanted the future of transportation to be created right here in Detroit, where it was invented in the first place.”

Keep reading here.—JG

The 2024 cybersecurity trends are in. ESG Research and Elastic Security Labs teamed up to give us a clear grasp on how AI is changing the threat landscape. Ready to hear what their surveys and research uncovered?

Tune in to Elastic’s on-demand webinar. Jon Oltsik, Distinguished Analyst and ESG Fellow, and Jake King, Elastic Security Labs Leader and Co-founder of Cmd Security, share the screen to examine today’s most pressing cybersecurity trends. You’ll hear about topics like:

• current and future use cases for AI in cybersecurity
• types of defenses orgs are building to protect against AI-based cyberattacks
• key metrics to measure the effectiveness of generative AI for cybersecurity

Get data-backed information on the changes happening in cybersecurity now—and how to prepare your org for the future.

Register for the webinar today.

AI hype train, meet an actual train maker.

Tech Brew recently caught up with Allison Whitesell, head of talent acquisition at Siemens Mobility North America, about the ways that the division of the multinational conglomerate is integrating AI into its workplaces and talent searches.

Whitesell, who will participate in Tech Brew’s June 26 event, Onboarding Your Favorite New Coworker: AI, has a background in finance but found herself working in recruitment during the Great Recession. She’s now been with Siemens for 13 years and last year she took on the talent-acquisition role, where she oversees numerous recruiters. Right now, her team is focused on staffing a new manufacturing facility in North Carolina.

Keep reading here.—JG

Your European vacation or brat summer could be loading a lot faster if you’re traveling through one of these airports.

According to internet speed analysis firm Ookla’s latest rankings, one of these seven airports would be ideal for downloading the latest season of Bridgerton for the plane:

• San Francisco International Airport
• Newark Liberty International Airport
• John F. Kennedy International Airport
• Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport
• Seattle-Tacoma International Airport
• Dallas Fort Worth International Airport
• Harry Reid International Airport in Las Vegas.

When Ookla ran speed tests at each location, the airports showed median 100+ Mbps wi-fi download speeds, the company said. That’s powerful enough to handle most online activities.

Keep reading here.—KG

Where’s your desk? Because where your teams sit matters. Boost your in-office productivity with data-driven office planning. Employees who sit within 25 feet of high-performing colleagues see a 15% boost in their performance, leading to better business outcomes. Ready for more collaborative office days? Check out the full report.

Can’t travel to New York on June 26? We have good news! We’re bringing our live event to you via livestream, so you can tune in wherever you are (well, wherever you have Wi-Fi). Join us and hear from Brex, Mozilla, Siemens, Mastercard, and many more on reskilling the workforce, updating company tech stacks, and reimagining AI-enabled work. Register now.

Usually, we write about the business of tech. Here, we highlight the *tech* of tech.

Do you want fries a human with that? After testing an AI-powered drive-thru system at over 100 McDonald’s locations, the Golden Arches announced plans to ax the tech after a series of snafus.

Morning Brew noted, however, that the fast-food chain isn’t planning to give up on AI entirely. After years of feverishly tapping 0 and hissing, “I want to speak to a human!” into our bot-addled phones, we can only hope that we don’t have to adopt a similar routine at drive-thrus and checkout counters.

Are you there, God? It’s me, AI: Pope Francis had bigger concerns than bungled fast-food orders at this week’s G7 summit, speaking at the gathering of world leaders about the tech’s potential dangers, “explicitly calling for a ban on lethal autonomous weapons,” Morning Brew wrote.

Regardless of your religious beliefs, that seems like…something we can all get behind.