Image: courtesy: HBR Staff; Source Images: Brian Kostiuk/Luke Stackpoole/Unsplash
January 5, 2022: 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 at the  Fletcher School at Tufts University:  Bhaskar Chakravorti, Ajay Bhalla, Ravi Shankar Chaturvedi, and Christina Filipovic 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.
They highlight the 50 cities with the largest AI talent pools worldwide and evaluate them using a framework that they  developed at Digital Planet: TIDE (for Talent pool; Investments; Diversity of talent; Evolution of the country’s digital foundations). These factors collectively give companies a way to prioritize their AI talent sourcing choices by scoring the different locations on the concentration, quality and diversity of the AI talent pool. The  data on talent derives from the SeekOut database and location analyses of AI professionals active on social media, while investment data derives from venture capital data by city. The diversity measure combines several factors: the proportion of female AI workers, racial diversity and migrant acceptance along with the cost of living in a city.
The top 50 AI cities as measured by the TIDE framework are shows in the graphic above. For Indian cities in the list see our story:Four Indian cities on global ranking of AI hotspots (indiatechonline.com)