This Perham Focus profile traces VILAS co-founder James Holmberg's roots to Little Pine Lake in Perham, where he spent childhood summers before becoming a working artist with shows at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. He describes AI the way he'd describe any artistic medium — something to be shaped, not a threat to creative work — and traces VILAS's start to 2023, when he and co-founder Sarah Anderson began offering AI training separately before forming the company together.