The next frontier for cities is connection over capital
Key points:
- • The “connection economy” highlights human networks as a key driver of regional competitiveness.
- • Strong talent ecosystems and human skills are critical to unlocking value from AI and growth.
- • Cities that foster collaboration, trust, and shared problem-solving gain a long-term advantage.
April 2026 — Every city has a pitch, from low taxes to shovel-ready sites and a growing workforce. But the missing component is connection.
Abby Lindenberg has spent more than a decade watching what actually moves regional economies, and what she has found is that the differentiating factor is the density and quality of the human networks that a city has built around its institutions, its industries, and its civic life. She calls it the “connection economy” and believes it is the next frontier of regional competitiveness.
“Markets don’t move in spreadsheets alone,” said Lindenberg, founder and CEO of caa. “They move because people make decisions. And people make better decisions when they are connected — to each other, to information, to a shared stake in where they live and work.”
KPMG’s first Global AI Pulse survey, with early findings released in March 2026 and drawing from senior leaders at organizations with annual revenues exceeding $1 billion across 20 countries, found that organizations confident in their talent pipeline are nearly four times as likely to report meaningful AI-driven business value — 77% versus 20% — spanning productivity gains, cost savings, revenue growth, and improved decision-making. The differentiator is the strength of the human infrastructure surrounding those investments. The capabilities leaders most want as AI adoption accelerates remain distinctly human: adaptability and continuous learning (52%), critical thinking and problem-solving (49%), and creative and strategic thinking (41%). Cities that cultivate those capabilities through deliberate convening and shared accountability will attract and retain the organizations best positioned to grow.
At caa’s Invest: leadership summits, top business, civic, and institutional leaders come together by design, participating in various forms to discuss the challenges facing each city and wider region. From housing affordability to infrastructure gaps and workforce demographic shifts, leaders consistently highlight the need to work through it together rather than in silos.
“The best cities don’t quit when things get hard,” Lindenberg said. “They stay in the room and rewrite the script.”
From a decade of economic reporting and conference hosting, Lindenberg has found that resilience is not an individual virtue but a collective infrastructure, and that the cities and organizations investing in that infrastructure now will have a durable advantage over those that are not.
A recent Harvard Business School study of 300 nonprofit and community leaders — a group navigating some of the most publicly scrutinized decisions in any sector — found that trust rises when employees see their leaders humanize themselves: admitting uncertainty, pacing themselves, and showing vulnerability. And when resilience becomes a shared responsibility, leaders carry less of the emotional burden alone. The connection economy is the operating condition under which everything else — capital, talent, technology — either works or doesn’t.
What Lindenberg is identifying, and what the data is beginning to confirm, is that cities are entering a period in which the traditional levers of economic development are necessary but not sufficient. The regions that will define the next decade are those where leaders across sectors know each other, trust each other, and have practiced working through hard problems together before the hard problems arrive.
“I see people who believe that business is better together,” she told one summit audience recently, “and that real relationships are built face-to-face, in rooms like this one.”
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