The Book of Synthesis Came to West Virginia

A day in Morgantown reminded me why the work matters, and where the real workforce challenge actually lives.

I almost didn’t go.

April 1st was stacked. There were proposals in motion, emails that needed answers, and the usual pull of just staying at my desk and grinding through the day. But I’ve learned to pay attention when something keeps showing up on your radar and this event had been on mine for weeks.

Focus Forward is a one-day symposium held annually in Morgantown. It’s not a tech conference. There’s no vendor floor, no badge-scanner gauntlet, no keynote delivered from behind a $40,000 stage set. It’s a volunteer-planned event built around one question: what is coming at us, and are we thinking hard enough about it? This year’s theme was “Minds and Machines.” I figured I owed it a few hours.

I ended up staying all day.

The keynote was delivered by Mike Sexton from Third Way, a D.C. think tank that advises federal lawmakers on AI and digital policy. Mike did something I wasn’t expecting. He didn’t lead with use cases or threat scenarios or productivity statistics. He opened with Genesis.

He called what we’re entering the Book of Synthesis, his framing for a moment when AI isn’t creating intelligence from nothing but drawing it out of the accumulated inheritance of human language, knowledge, and culture. He talked about J.R.R. Tolkien’s concept of sub-creation, the idea that humans, made in the image of a maker, are themselves makers, and that AI systems are now something like sub-creators in their own right. Partners in the process. Surprising us. Contributing things we didn’t anticipate.

It was a genuinely interesting frame, and not just philosophically. Because the alignment problem Mike described, how do you ensure that an intelligent system with growing autonomy behaves in accordance with the values of its creators, is exactly the problem we’re wrestling with in federal AI governance right now. Different language, same challenge. OMB, NIST, and every agency AI policy I’ve read in the last three years is really asking one question: how do we instill values? How do we set boundaries? How do we remain engaged? Mike’s point was that religion arrived at the same answer thousands of years ago. The work of creation does not end at the moment of creation.

I wrote that line down.

Our own Craig Molina, Chief Technology Officer at Trilogy Innovations, sat on the workforce panel that followed. I’ve watched Craig explain technology to rooms full of people for a while now. He’s good at it. But yesterday he said something that I thought landed differently in a room that wasn’t a GovCon conference or a federal IT briefing.

He said AI isn’t just another tool in the toolbox. It’s the workbench. The surface where all the work gets done.

He walked through a real example: a piece of software that took developers three to four months to write three years ago was rebuilt in one week with Claude Code. Improved in the process. And what he said next is what I keep thinking about. The challenge isn’t the speed of output anymore. It’s the review cycle. It’s teaching developers at every level how to validate, govern, and take accountability for what the AI produces. The junior developer who used to learn by building things from scratch now has an agent that can do that in minutes. Which means the path from junior to senior, the experience curve that produces the people who can actually catch the mistakes, is getting compressed in ways we don’t fully understand yet.

That’s not a technology problem. That’s a workforce development problem. And it’s sitting right in front of us.

The through-line across every panel that day was the same three words: education, trust, guardrails.

Whether you were talking about cobots on a Toyota line, brain-computer interface implants at the Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute, predictive grid sensors in the energy sector, or AI tools in West Virginia classrooms, the room kept returning to the same tension. People don’t fear change. They fear being changed. The organizations moving fastest right now aren’t the ones with the most advanced tools. They’re the ones that built a culture of curiosity before they needed it.

West Virginia ranks low on the Anthropic Economic Index for AI adoption. That came up explicitly in the workforce panel. But I didn’t leave discouraged. I left thinking the gap is smaller than the index suggests, and that the people in that room are exactly the kind of people who close gaps.

There’s something about this state that makes me think more clearly about mission. Maybe it’s because the problems here are visible in ways that coastal corridors make easy to abstract. Rural health access. An aging workforce carrying tribal knowledge that’s about to walk out the door. Communities that have been told their future is somewhere else, and have decided to stop believing that.

When Dr. Pete Konrad from WVU’s Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute talked about bringing brain-computer interface technology home to patients who can’t travel three hours to Morgantown for physical therapy, that wasn’t a research pitch. That was someone describing what it actually means to deliver technology in service of people.

That’s the version of AI I want to be part of building.

The day ended with Senator Shelley Moore Capito and a conversation about the pace of federal policy versus the pace of technological change. The keynote opened with the Book of Synthesis. The closing brought us back to the sober realities of governance. A good bookend. The right tension to sit with.

If you’re in West Virginia or Appalachia and you’re not paying attention to Focus Forward, you should be. And if you’re in federal IT or AI policy and you think the interesting conversations are only happening in Washington, Palo Alto, or the event spaces that charge $1,800 for a ticket, I’d push back on that.

Some of the clearest thinking I’ve heard in a while happened in a conference room in Morgantown on April 1st.

See you at the edge,

Bill

Editor’s Note:

This article was originally published on Substack and is republished here with permission from Bill McKenna. You can read the original post here: https://bmac4fedit.substack.com/p/the-book-of-synthesis-came-to-west

About Trilogy Innovations, Inc.

Trilogy Innovations, Inc., located in Bridgeport and Morgantown, West Virginia, is an SBA Certified 8(a) small and minority-owned systems and software engineering company that delivers superior technical solutions for a variety of industries across private and public sectors. By applying a strong work ethic and an unwavering commitment to excellence, Trilogy’s highly skilled and talented personnel have successfully applied these core values across a multitude of government agencies and businesses. Inc. Magazine named Trilogy to the Inc. 5000 for four consecutive years from 2022-2025. The company was also named a 2025 Elev8 GovCon Honoree by Orange Slices for demonstrating a culture of excellence for talent, partners, and clients, marking the second consecutive year Trilogy has received this recognition.

For more information about Trilogy, go to www.trilogyit.com.