By CultureBanx Team
- Omni | X sees agentic AI becoming the “nervous system” connecting transportation, emergency response, drones and other city infrastructure
- U.S. private AI investment reached more than $109B, nearly 12 times China’s total and more than 24 times the United Kingdom’s
Artificial intelligence is quickly moving from answering questions on a screen to making decisions in the real world. For Cesar Hernandez, founder of Omni | X and Omni Public Consulting Group, His company Omni | X is developing an agentic AI orchestration platform designed to connect technologies across transportation, emergency response, drones, infrastructure and real-time data. This continues shift raises a critical question: who gets the agency, the technology or the people using it?
Why This Matters: AI is already becoming core business infrastructure. According to Stanford University’s 2025 AI Index Report, 78% of organizations reported using AI in 2024, up from 55% in 2023. Meanwhile, global private investment in generative AI reached $33.9 billion, an 18.7% increase from the previous year, per Stanford’s report.
Omni | X is developing an agentic AI orchestration platform designed to connect technologies across transportation, emergency response, drones, infrastructure and real-time data. Hernandez is betting that one of AI’s biggest opportunities won’t be another chatbot. Instead, it could become the connective tissue helping entire cities operate.
“Agency doesn’t belong to AI, agency belongs to the person,” Hernandez told CultureBanx during its Reimagining Our Tech Agency series in partnership with Omidyar Network. “AI is not a panacea that’s gonna solve everything for humanity. Humanity still has to solve its own challenges.”
Connected Cities: Agentic AI has the ability to serve as a nervous system for a city. Omni | X’s goal is to sit above those systems and help them work together while keeping humans in the decision-making loop.
Consider a car crash. Rather than information moving one step at a time from a 911 call to dispatchers, first responders and eventually a hospital, Hernandez imagines multiple systems responding simultaneously. A drone could reach the accident first, traffic signals could clear an emergency route and hospitals could prepare before a patient arrives.
That future is already beginning to emerge. The National League of Cities reports that Drone as First Responder programs can launch drones following 911 calls, allowing dispatchers and emergency personnel to receive live video and real-time information before ground responders arrive. In 2026, NLC also launched a national initiative with BRINC to help cities, towns and villages deploy drones to 911 calls.
AI Money Is Moving Fast: The economic stakes are massive. Stanford’s AI Index data shows U.S. private AI investment reached $109.1 billion in 2024, nearly 12 times China’s $9.3 billion and 24 times the United Kingdom’s $4.5 billion.
For diverse communities, however, the important question isn’t simply how much money flows into AI. It’s who gets to participate in that wealth creation. Black workers represent about 12% of the U.S. workforce but only 8% of workers in technology jobs, according to McKinsey’s analysis of the Black tech talent gap. Representation narrows even further at the top, where Black professionals account for just 3% of technology executives in the C-suite in McKinsey’s Fortune 500 analysis.
The financial implications are substantial. McKinsey estimates that Black households could miss out on more than $350 billion in cumulative tech-job wages by 2030 if the gap persists.
Access Determines Agency: AI-assisted coding and generative tools can lower some barriers to entrepreneurship, but they can’t eliminate structural inequality on their own. That digital divide matters when AI opportunity increasingly starts with something as basic as reliable internet access.
Pew Research Center’s broadband research found 68% of Black adults reported having home broadband, compared with 83% of White adults. The economic divide was even sharper: 57% of adults in households earning less than $30,000 had home broadband, compared with 95% among households earning at least $100,000.
That digital divide matters when AI opportunity increasingly starts with something as basic as reliable internet access. A laptop, Wi-Fi and increasingly capable AI tools can give aspiring founders resources that previously required expensive technical teams.
The economic upside of acquiring those skills remains significant. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, software developers earned a median annual wage of $133,080 in May 2024. Employment for software developers, quality assurance analysts and testers is projected to grow 15% between 2024 and 2034, with about 129,200 openings projected each year over the decade.
What’s Next: The next chapter of AI won’t simply be about which cities become “smart.” It will be about who designs the intelligence, whose experiences inform it, who owns the upside and who retains the power to say no. That’s an important distinction as AI moves deeper into transportation, public safety, education and other systems that disproportionately shape multicultural communities.
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