I have been selling real estate in Puerto Rico for 32 years. For most of that time, when people on the mainland asked what I did, they pictured beaches and vacation homes. That's not the call I get anymore.

The people reaching out to me now aren't shopping for somewhere to spend two weeks in February. They're relocating their families, their teams, and their companies. Fund managers. Founders. Software people. And over the last few years, a growing share of them work in or around artificial intelligence.

I sell homes in Dorado Beach, which gives me a particular view of who's moving to the island and why. The tax incentives get most of the headlines, and yes, Act 60 is a real driver — I've written about it at length elsewhere. But the part that never makes the brochures is the community that's quietly formed here. The dinners where half the table is running a startup. Neighbors comparing notes on where to find good engineers. At some point Puerto Rico stopped being a place people escape to and became a place people build from. This October, that shift gets a moment of its own.

What's actually happening

On October 9 and 10, the Caribbean AI Summit comes to the Puerto Rico Convention Center in San Juan. It's the first large-scale AI conference the region has ever hosted, organized by PRAIC, the local AI community, which now counts more than 1,000 members. I'm on the committee helping bring it together, so I'll be upfront about having a stake in it. I'd be telling you to come either way.

Here's the shape of it. Up to 1,000 attendees. Five keynotes. More than 20 sessions across three tracks: one for business and strategy, one for the people actually building production systems, and one for anyone earlier in the journey who wants to get up to speed. There's a hackathon with $11,000 in prizes, built around solving real problems here in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean. Every session runs with live English and Spanish subtitles, which matters more than it sounds, because this island sits right where the U.S. and Latin America meet.

Why I think it's worth the trip:

I've watched enough rooms come together over three decades to know the valuable part is rarely the agenda. It's who you end up standing next to.

A first-year event has a quality the big conferences lose. You can actually get to the keynote speaker. You remember the people you meet. And because Puerto Rico pulls talent and capital from both the mainland and Latin America, the person next to you at the coffee break might be the exact partner, hire, or investor you've spent a year trying to reach from behind a screen. Connections made in a room of the right thousand people have a way of outlasting anything you write down.

If you run a company, this is a short flight to a concentrated pool of the people you're competing to hire. If you build things, it's two days to get genuinely current on where the field is heading. And if you've ever wondered whether you should be paying closer attention to Puerto Rico — as a place to visit, to expand, or to live — this is the easiest way I know to see it for yourself, with a real reason to be on the ground.

The practical part

For anyone coming from the States, this is simpler than most domestic trips. No passport. No international roaming on your phone. There are more than 400 flights a week from cities across the mainland, and San Juan in October sits at a comfortable 85 degrees. The Convention Center is the largest in the Caribbean, about ten minutes from the airport and minutes from Condado and Old San Juan, so the evenings take care of themselves. You'll even find the summit listed on Discover Puerto Rico, the island's official tourism site, which is a small sign of how seriously the island is taking this.

Early-bird tickets are $299, capped at the first 150 registrations. If you've been on the fence, my honest advice is to sort your flights and your room sooner than later. Good rooms in San Juan during a strong week go fast, and I'd rather you hear that from someone who lives here than learn it the hard way.

If you're thinking about coming and want the real-world details — where to stay, how to get the most out of two days here, or what a longer look at the island might actually involve, send me a message. I'm glad to point you in the right direction, summit or not. Putting Puerto Rico on the map for this kind of work is something I care about, and I'd like you to be part of it.