James Mol

I work with artificial intelligence every day in my consulting practice. I have watched it go from overhyped fad to dismissed gimmick to genuinely useful tool. That is why I come at this as neither a booster nor an alarmist. AI is real, it is useful, and it is not a replacement for people.

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Connecticut acted on the AI side this year and deserves credit for it. The law signed in May 2026 is among the broadest in the country: notice before an automated tool is used in a hiring, firing or promotion decision, discrimination law extended to those tools, notice when AI drives a layoff, and rules for the companies building the most powerful systems and for platforms used by minors. Most of the employment protections do not take effect until October 2027, workers have no right to bargain over how these tools are deployed, and a federal executive order directs agencies to challenge state laws like it. The work now is defending it and finishing it.

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On data centers, the state has done nothing. They are the physical footprint of AI, and they consume electricity, water and land. Connecticut's 2021 incentive law still offers twenty- to thirty-year tax exemptions with no requirement to bring their own power, source clean energy, or report what they use. A bill to require energy and water reporting died on the Senate calendar in 2025, and two bills in 2026 were never called. That is the link between these two pages: a data center that draws from the existing grid raises the bill of every household around it.