Greater Baltimore Committee partners with Sound Diplomacy to develop economic blueprint for Preakness. By audreyb | September 11, 2026 Global partnership will examine how one of American racing's Triple Crown events can generate greater economic activity for Baltimore and Maryland. (BALTIMORE, Md) - The Greater Baltimore Committee (GBC) today announced a partnership with Sound Diplomacy, a global culture and economic development consultancy, to develop a Preakness Economic Opportunity Blueprint examining how one of the most recognized events in American sports can generate significantly greater economic activity for Baltimore and Maryland. The Preakness Stakes, the second jewel of thoroughbred racing's Triple Crown, has more than 150 years of history, a national broadcast audience and an established place on the American sporting calendar. Maryland now controls the Preakness intellectual property and is making a generational investment in Pimlico and the future of the state's equine industry, while the Preakness Festival builds a larger statewide experience connecting the race to Maryland's culture, communities, businesses and destinations. GBC's work with Sound Diplomacy will build on that progress, focusing on the broader economic opportunity and the role of the business community. The blueprint will quantify Preakness's economic impact, benchmark leading national and international models, assess opportunities for greater corporate participation, and give companies and institutions a clearer picture of how to invest in and contribute to the larger Preakness experience. "Preakness is already one of the great events in American sports, and we strongly believe it can become a major economic driver for Maryland," said Mark Anthony Thomas, president and CEO of the Greater Baltimore Committee. "We are serious about that opportunity. Our partnership with Sound Diplomacy is about putting the economic analysis and global experience behind it and giving Maryland's major companies and institutions a clearer understanding of how they can participate, invest and support its growth. We want the business community to see Preakness as something they can help build." "We're excited to be working with GBC and the wider Baltimore community on the development of Preakness," said Shain Shapiro PhD, founder and chairman of Sound Diplomacy. "The opportunity to leverage this incredible history and the cultural and entrepreneurialism in the region is tremendous, and we are genuinely privileged to be a part of the effort." GBC has been advancing this opportunity for more than a year. The organization advocated for Maryland to take control of the Preakness intellectual property, arguing that state ownership would let Maryland retain the asset's future value and connect its growth to tourism, sponsorship, business participation, cultural activity and broader economic development. GBC has since worked with state leadership, the Maryland Jockey Club and other partners to help shape that strategy. The Sound Diplomacy partnership is the latest step in that effort and will complement work already underway by the Maryland Jockey Club, Preakness Festival, Oak View Group and other partners, with GBC focused on how businesses and institutions can build on that work. "Preakness is entering an exciting new era and the opportunity to think more broadly about what this iconic event can mean for Maryland and Baltimore is significant," said Bill Knauf, president of the Maryland Jockey Club. "With the return to Pimlico and Maryland's ownership of the Preakness brand, we look forward to collaborating with GBC and our partners to maximize its impact." The Preakness gives Maryland an extraordinary platform to showcase its rich equine industry, communities, culture, and businesses to a national and global audience," said First Lady Dawn Moore. "Our state is marking a new chapter in the Preakness legacy, and by working together Greater Baltimore Co can leverage its collective assets to build a more inclusive economy and create an experience that every Marylander can enjoy. GBC's confidence in Preakness is reinforced by broader momentum across Baltimore's sports, arts, culture and entertainment economy. The organization has identified nearly $2 billion in recently completed or planned investment in those assets across the region, including a successful multiyear run for the CIAA Basketball Tournament, CFG Bank Arena's strengthened position in the national entertainment market, M&T Bank Stadium's growing role hosting major events beyond Ravens football, and the upcoming Sail250 celebration on Baltimore's waterfront. That momentum aligns with All In | 2035, GBC's 10-year economic opportunity plan, which names creativity and culture as one of three major growth sectors for the region. Preakness is positioned to become a major annual anchor within that sector. "We are seeing nearly $2 billion in investment across Baltimore's sports, arts, culture and entertainment economy, and Preakness can be an important part of that momentum," said Dr. Mohan Suntha, chair of the Board of Directors of the Greater Baltimore Committee. "The opportunity now is to organize the business community around an asset with national reach and build a larger economic ecosystem around it. That is exactly the kind of work GBC was created to lead." GBC selected Sound Diplomacy for its experience helping major markets and destinations use culture, entertainment and major events to drive measurable economic growth. The firm has completed more than 150 engagements in 40 countries, including work measuring the economic impact of ABBA Voyage in London, an island-wide music, entertainment and cultural industries strategy with Invest Puerto Rico, and work with Pittsburgh's Andy Warhol Museum on the Pop District. That experience will help GBC and Maryland's Preakness partners examine how other markets have converted major cultural assets into greater economic activity and determine what can be applied in Maryland. The blueprint will examine what Preakness generates economically today, where additional value can be created and how more businesses and institutions can take part. That work covers visitor spending, hotel activity, sponsorship and corporate participation; opportunities for hotels, restaurants, cultural institutions and local businesses; benchmarking against major sporting and cultural events elsewhere; and aligning outcomes among the state, the Maryland Jockey Club, Preakness Festival, Oak View Group, GBC and other partners. The work will conclude in early 2027, when GBC will bring the finished blueprint directly to Maryland's public and corporate community. Nearly 300 companies and institutions take part in GBC's regional agenda, and the organization plans to draw on that network to engage CEOs, major employers, hospitality and tourism leaders, cultural institutions and local businesses around specific ways to support Preakness. The long-term goal is to help establish Preakness, one of three races in the Triple Crown, as Maryland's signature economic event and one of the country's leading annual sporting and cultural moments. ABOUT THE GREATER BALTIMORE COMMITTEE The Greater Baltimore Committee (GBC) is the leading voice for the private sector in the Baltimore region, providing insightful economic and civic leadership to drive collective impact. Comprising more than 300 organizations - including businesses, nonprofits, foundations, and healthcare and educational institutions - the GBC is dedicated to fostering the prosperity of the Greater Baltimore region. For more information, visit gbc.org. ABOUT SOUND DIPLOMACY Sound Diplomacy is a global culture and creative economy consultancy working with cities, regions, governments, cultural institutions and private-sector organizations to measure economic impact and develop strategies that use culture, entertainment and major events to generate economic growth. The firm has completed more than 150 engagements in 40 countries.

UpSurge Baltimore and Greater Baltimore Committee host Inflection Point Healthcare Summit. Baltimore poised to lead AI healthcare revolution. Jun 04, 2026. Suchi Saria (left), CEO of Bayesian Health, whose AI-powered tool to detect sepsis earned FDA approval (Courtesy Johns Hopkins University) By Katie Turner Healthcare is entering a new era in which AI-enabled technologies are moving from promise to practice, helping clinicians detect risk earlier, support faster decision-making, and improve patient outcomes. A recent Johns Hopkins breakthrough illustrates why Maryland sits at the center of this transformation: Bayesian Health's FDA-cleared AI system now detects sepsis up to 48 hours earlier than traditional methods, reducing mortality by 18% across dozens of U.S. hospitals - and it was built here, by Johns Hopkins scholar and Bayesian Health CEO Suchi Saria. The accomplishment underscores Maryland's power as home to the research, clinical, and innovation assets needed to test, refine, and scale technologies that can save lives. That advantage is amplified by Maryland's broader healthcare ecosystem. Anchored by world-class academic medical centers, a strong payer-provider infrastructure, and a long track record of healthcare policy leadership, the state offers a uniquely strong environment for turning emerging technologies into real-world clinical and economic value. As Maryland convenes leaders for the Inflection Point Healthcare Summit, the message is clear: the region is not just participating in the future of healthcare innovation - it is helping define it. "Healthcare is adopting AI nearly three times faster than other industries," says Nick Culbertson, who runs the AI Health accelerator, a local program backed by Techstars, Johns Hopkins Medicine, University of Maryland Medical System, MedStar Health, CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield, and University of Maryland Baltimore (UMB). The accelerator has invested in 25 AI-focused health companies and counting. "It's not replacing jobs," Culbertson says. "It's doing more with less. And that's exactly what healthcare needs." As Culbertson, a former Johns Hopkins medical student and exited founder of an AI-powered fraud detection company, explains, the urgency behind healthcare's AI adoption isn't primarily about cutting costs as in other industries. It's a response to a supply crisis that money alone cannot fix. "The only thing we've ever been able to do to treat more patients is hire more people," Culbertson explains. "We don't have enough physicians. We don't have enough nurses. We don't have enough schools to build the workforce we'd need. So right now, that means not everyone gets treated." AI, in his view, is the only lever available that meaningfully expands capacity without requiring a decade of medical training. When a physician spends less time on documentation, coding, and administrative overhead, that's another patient who gets seen. It's appointments that don't get pushed three months out, and access to preventative care that prevents emergency room visits. It means healthcare providers can spend more time providing healthcare. According to research from Menlo Ventures, healthcare organizations are now deploying AI at more than twice the rate of the broader economy. The share of health systems running domain-specific AI tools jumped sevenfold in a single year. Healthcare AI investment nearly tripled in 2025, surpassing the entire vertical AI market across all industries just one year prior. The applications already in use are not glamorous but are making an outsized impact. AI tools are now handling clinical documentation, billing and coding, prior authorizations, and patient scheduling at scale, freeing clinical staff to focus on the work that actually requires a human. One in four Americans now asks AI a health question at least once a week. The infrastructure to make that interaction safe, personalized, and connected to real medical records is being built right now - and Maryland has a unique advantage that positions the state to lead this innovation. "Maryland is the largest value-based care experiment in the country," says Chris Brandt, who spent 17 years building and scaling a Baltimore-born health technology company before turning to lead Upsurge, the innovation affiliate of the Greater Baltimore Committee. Under the state's unique all-payer model - the only one of its kind in the United States - every insurer reimburses hospitals at the same rate. The competitive dynamic that drives up costs and fragments incentives in other states is dampened here, allowing for a shared focus on outcomes per dollar: better population health, delivered more efficiently, with technology as a key part of the equation. That alignment has made Maryland an unusually productive testing ground for AI in healthcare. When Culbertson's fraud detection company launched at Hopkins, the Maryland Health Exchange became an early customer. From there, word traveled fast through the country's interconnected health systems. "They all go to the same roundtables," Culbertson says. "They all talked about what our product was doing, and everyone wanted in." From Hopkins, his company expanded to Yale, Duke, Penn, Stanford, Cleveland Clinic. The path out of Baltimore to national scale is well-worn. Add to that Johns Hopkins University's new Data Science and AI Institute (DSAI). This institute alone will recruit 110 new faculty researchers along with more than 30 software engineers and scientific staffers, and it will train hundreds of students each year, providing an academic anchor unparalleled in size to a growing local ecosystem. It is, by any measure, a serious institutional investment in this region's role in the future of AI - in health care and beyond - and in the role of AI in the future of this region. Maryland's leaders understand that the convergence of research, healthcare, and entrepreneurship around emerging technologies carries both promise and risk - and that getting it right will require intentional collaboration rather than improvisation. That is the driving idea behind The Inflection Point Healthcare Summit, June 4th in Baltimore. Organized by Upsurge Baltimore and the Greater Baltimore Committee, the summit broughtfounders, health system CEOs, investors, academic researchers, and policymakers into the same room around a shared challenge: ensuring that rapidly evolving technologies are developed and deployed safely, equitably, and effectively. The summit curated a diverse mix of stakeholders, including representatives from the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI), the federal center driving the national shift toward value-based care. University of Maryland Medical System's President and CEO, Mohan Suntha, gave the keynote. Kristen Valdes, CEO of b.well Connected Health, a Maryland-born company that has struck major AI partnerships with both OpenAI and Google to give patients secure access to their own medical records, also took the stage. Brandt wants this event to become a fixture on the national calendar for healthcare AI, the kind of annual gathering that shapes where investment flows and where policy gets made. And if Baltimore gets this right, the results could be significant healthcare wins within the next five years. "Quality life expectancy. Infant mortality. Maternal morbidity," Brandt says, ticking through the public health metrics that matter most. "If those are moving, and we're closer to par with the rest of the country on cost, then we've had success." "It feels like a very good, unique inflection point," Brandt says. "Maryland has a right to win in this space." I95 Content Marketing