Building the
Brain Positive
Human+AI EconomyWorking Session

For the first time, we can build an economy on human capability itself.

In August 2026, the Global Brain Economy Initiative named Human+Tech Week its convening partner, creating a year-round platform for advancing brain capital and human capability in the AI era. This session is the primary GBEI convening of the week.

We are all living through the rebuilding of the systems that shape human life, health, work, and cities, as AI arrives. And we are all discovering the same thing: the capabilities that matter most in this era are the human ones. Creativity, judgment, resilience, adaptability, the ability to learn.

Brains are infrastructure.

Foundational, scalable, degradable without maintenance, multiplicative when strengthened. Brain capital integrates brain health and brain skills, and these remain largely unmeasured and unmanaged, a critical risk in an AI-driven world.

The Global Brain Economy Initiative holds the deep frame.

GBEI treats brain capital, the fusion of healthy minds and adaptive skills, as the essential infrastructure of the 21st century. It hosts the secretariat of the Nature Medicine Commission on Brain Health for Economic Resilience with IHME as founding partner, and introduced the Global Brain Capital Index at Davos. CBEI is its California expression: connected to GBEI, quasi-independent, built as a statewide economic strategy anchored through UCOP.

Human+Tech Week holds the wide frame.

Flourishing across health, work, and cities, with human capability as the infrastructure beneath it. The two theses reinforce each other everywhere they touch. Stronger brains power flourishing systems, and flourishing systems build stronger brains.