Baron traces the origin story back to his time building high-scale systems at Instana (which exited to IBM in 2020), where the reality of "always-on" platforms made one thing obvious: the tooling we rely on is often too low-level, too rigid, and too disconnected from real-world use cases. That gap has only widened as environments have exploded in complexity-more cloud providers, more managed services, more hybrid setups, more internal APIs, and "gillions" of tools stitched together into brittle workflows.
Between the lines: This isn't benevolence. It's customer acquisition. Mayors don't just buy "AI." They buy cloud, data modernization, cybersecurity, services, and long-term support - the tech stack underneath any serious deployment. In return, cities get tools that could fix long-standing challenges, Cris Turner, vice president of government affairs at Google told Axios last June when it first released its playbook.
