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As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowIndianapolis is among the metro areas that is seeing meaningful artificial intelligence adoption, even as AI business activity overall remains concentrated in the nation’s traditional coastal tech hot spots, a new Brookings Institution report says.
The Brookings report, “Mapping the AI Economy,” ranks the Indianapolis metro area 47th overall in AI readiness among the nation’s 195 large metro areas.
“It’s a solid showing,” said report author Mark Muro, a senior fellow at Brookings, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit research organization.
The overall rankings are based on 14 different factors related to what Brookings describes as the three pillars of AI readiness: talent, innovation and adoption.
Of those three pillars, Indianapolis scored highest in adoption, which generally measures the degree to which businesses have adopted—or are prepared to adopt—AI. The study showed that 33% of Indianapolis-area jobs are exposed to generative AI and 28% of firms have adopted cloud-based technology.
Indianapolis was not as strong in the talent and innovation pillars, which measure things like the number of residents with degrees in computer science, engineering and math, and the amount of research, patent and federal contract activity in the field of AI.
Muro said he believes the recent IUPUI split could help Indianapolis gain ground in AI activity going forward. Purdue University, in particular, is actively beefing up its Indianapolis presence since it and Indiana University established their own independent city campuses last year. Both Purdue and IU offer AI-related degree programs in Indianapolis.
Universities play a huge role in bolstering a metro area’s AI activity, Muro said, because they produce and attract AI talent—people who can then go on to generate research, publications and patented technology in the field.
“Almost nothing is as defining as the presence of a university in anchoring AI activity at this early stage [in the development of the AI industry],” Muro said.
Indianapolis was among 29 metros that Brookings classified as “Focused Movers,” or metros that are strong in one of the three readiness pillars. The South Bend-Mishawaka metro area, which includes portions of Michigan, also ranked as a Focused Mover.
Across the U.S., the Brookings report identified San Francisco and San Jose, California, as the top hot spots for AI activity, putting these two metro areas into a “Superstars” category of their own. The nation’s other large metro areas fell into one of five categories:
- Star Hubs include 28 metros with overall strong AI activity
- Emerging Centers include 14 metros with strengths in two of the three pillars
- the Focused Movers group that includes Indianapolis
- Nascent Adopters, made up of 79 metro areas with moderate performance in all three pillars
- 43 metro areas classified as “Others” that lag in AI activity.
The Star Hub metro areas in the Midwest include Chicago; Columbus, Ohio; Ann Arbor, Michigan; and the Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington area in Wisconsin and Minnesota.
Among Indiana metros, Indianapolis and South Bend had the strongest showing in the report.
Elsewhere around the state, Fort Wayne fell into the “Nascent Adopters” category and Evansville was in the “Others” category.
Bloomington, Columbus, Elkhart-Goshen, Lafayette-West Lafayette, Michigan City-La Porte, Muncie and Terre Haute all fall into the Small Metros category. The Brookings study included individual AI metrics for the small metros, but those areas were not ranked like the 195 larger metro areas were.
The report also suggests strategies that metros might use to advance their AI activity. Those strategies include things such as investing in tech education, prioritizing tech transfer and commercialization efforts, and promoting broad AI literacy.
Taking the broad view, Muro said AI matters because the technology has the potential to transform both individual companies and regional economies.
“Not to take anything away from the Bay Area or Boston, but it would be better if more places in the Sun Belt, more places in the Upper Midwest and industrial areas were also participating [in AI activities],” Muro said.
Find the full report, including details on all metro areas, here.
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