As AI expands into more and more facets of our lives, there is also more scrutiny on who is developing it. Building ethical AI that works for everyone will require a diverse workforce that brings a broad range of perspectives. To achieve this, however, companies will need to look outside of the usual hubs, such as San Francisco. To aid in that effort, the authors have compiled the top 50 cities for AI talent and analyzed how diverse the population of developers is in each. This can help companies direct their recruiting and hiring as they try to build a broader, more diverse AI workforce.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has crossed a threshold. “In the past five years, AI has made the leap from something that mostly happens in research labs or other highly controlled settings to something that’s out in society affecting people’s lives,” says Michael Littman, chair of the One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence, hosted at Stanford.
It’s easy to see what he’s talking about: The technology’s impact can be seen introducing automation, driving efficiency gains and enhancing productivity, creating new jobs, and reducing risks associated with cyber-threats and fraud. During the pandemic, AI enabled more effective testing for Covid-19 and faster vaccine development, and helped manage grocery supply chains and tailor lessons for individual students affected by remote schooling.
As AI expands into more and more facets of our lives, there is also more scrutiny on who’s developing it. To ensure that AI is built and deployed in ways that are ethical, work for broad and diverse populations, and protect civil rights and freedoms demands that its development is not captive to the ethical judgments, design choices, and application priorities of a narrow population of developers. It’s understandable that AI developers are influenced by theirown world views, which, in turn, guide them in their selection of applications, datasets, and training of algorithms. These world views are shaped by factors such as gender, race, ethnicity and geography; therefore, it is even more critical in AI than in other tech fields that the talent pool is diverse and inclusive as it has such a profound impact on the product itself.
We know that there are big gaps to close when it comes to improving the diversity of the talent pool. Research done by our Digital Planet team at Tufts University’s Fletcher School shows that 17% of the AI talent pool is female as compared to 27% in STEM overall. Black workers constitute only 11.8% of the AI tech workforce, according to the Center for Security and Emerging Technology at Georgetown University.
A major barrier to addressing this problem is that skilled workers and other key resources cluster around a small number of urban hubs. This causes a “de-democratization” of AI research and development, limiting it to a handful of elite companies and universities and, therefore, geographies. For example, as a Brookings study points out, the San Francisco Bay Area is so highly concentrated in AI-related activity that about a quarter of all U.S.-based AI conference papers, patents, and companies are there — and it has four times the AI activity of other top cities with AI clusters.
For all the reasons we highlight above, companies that develop and apply AI need to recruit from a wider set of sources. This might require opening offices in multiple locations to ensuring that recruiting teams know where to go to find diverse talent. The good news is that, while not as large a cluster as the San Francisco area there are other AI-rich urban clusters for companies to consider.
In this article, we highlight the 50 cities with the largest AI talent pools worldwide and evaluate them using a framework that we have developed at Digital Planet: TIDE (for Talent pool; Investments; Diversity of talent; Evolution of the country’s digital foundations).
