To Tyrance Billingsley II, partnering with trillion-dollar tech company Microsoft is a triumph.

But it’s not the ultimate trophy.

“I want to make it clear; we’re here to win,” said Billingsley, founder and CEO of Black Tech Street and the Greenwood AI Center of Excellence. “Microsoft was not brought here under the banner of charity. Microsoft was brought here under the banner of us showing how Tulsa can be a national leader in artificial intelligence and cybersecurity.

“The degree to which we can prove that will be determined by what kind of products, what kind of things can you all build with Microsoft that show what this community is capable of and what this technology is capable of.”

Along with Microsoft’s Michael Salazar, general manager of the Greenwood Cyber + AI Lab, Billingsley was a special guest Tuesday at the Tulsa Regional Chamber’s Joint Board of Directors and Board of Advisors meeting at Tulsa Tech’s Lemley Campus.

With Jonathan Long, the Chamber’s senior vice president of community development, moderating, the pair talked about the Greenwood AI Center of Excellence (G-ACE), an initiative backed by Tech Hubs federal funding to pilot what an AI-powered economy will look like.

 An arm of the G-ACE is the 9,000-square-foot Greenwood Cyber + AI Lab, Microsoft’s applied AI and cybersecurity innovation platform that opened in May.

“The last couple of years, we’ve been laying the groundwork,” Salazar said. “We’ve been working with our government partners and friends and primarily working with Tyrance and his team to ensure that we have a sustainable way to be here for years to come.

“This is our premier physical infrastructure innovation hub. We have other lab environments throughout the world in places you might assume, but none of them sit within a Microsoft product group. So, what we develop, what we innovate on is going to be here in this community before it’s anywhere else.”

Black Tech Street is an organization working to rebirth Greenwood as a premier innovation economy. G-ACE’s headquarters is inside Greenwood Entrepreneurship at Moton (GEM), which sits on the redeveloped Moton Hospital property, which dates to the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre.

“There are a lot of much bigger, fancier spaces where the lab could have been,” Billingsley said. “But we insisted that it be there because it’s what sent the most powerful statement, to have innovation around the most critical technology that humans ever touch happening in historic Greenwood across the street from the middle school (Carver) I went to in full view of tech children of the future.”

The meeting closed with a recap of Tulsa’s Route 66 Capital Cruise, held earlier this month. With an official count of 3,596 classic cars, it set the Guinness World Records™ title, bettering the previous mark by 1,105 cars and putting a stamp on the nation’s signature Route 66 Centennial celebration. 

Renee McKenney, the Chamber’s senior vice president of Regional Tourism and president of Tulsa Regional Tourism, talked about the event with two members of the Tulsa Route 66 Commission: Tulsa City Councilor Chris Bengel (chair) and Lobeck Taylor Family Foundation CEO Brian Paschal (vice chair).

The parade amassed $23.57 million in advertising value equivalency and drew national media coverage from outlets in cities such as Chicago and Los Angeles.

“You should be proud of the people who did all this work,” Bengel said. “… I would have never imagined it to become the event that it became.”