A Slice of the Ordinary When people debate artificial intelligence (AI), they usually start in Silicon Valley or Shenzhen, as in many forums it becomes about geopolitical competition between the U.S. and China. The conversation revolves around graphics processing units (GPUs), model architectures or the latest release from an AI lab. For instance, we just saw Oracle book more than $330 billion of future performance obligations in a single quarter.¹ Rarely does attention drift to a Midwestern convenience sto ...