Insights & Research

America is not entering the AI economy as one country. It is entering as two.

One economy is concentrated in a handful of metropolitan corridors where AI capital, talent, research, infrastructure, and policy influence reinforce one another. The other is made up of rural towns, small cities, tribal nations, agricultural communities, and resource regions that sit largely outside the institutions now shaping AI's future. The gap between them is not mainly about who can use a chatbot. It is about who is present in the systems that govern how AI is trained, deployed, procured, financed, and commercialized.

There's an ice cream shop near where I live in Durango that's been around quite a long time. On a summer Saturday, the line runs out the door and halfway down the block.

When you get to the front, you pay on a register that looks like it was salvaged from a 1940s soda fountain. Cash only. No receipt unless you ask. The owner has been running it this way for decades and sees no reason to change.

Rural Americans represent roughly 17% of the U.S. population — over 60 million citizens. According to Brookings Metro's July 2025 analysis of national AI activity, rural counties account for 0.3% of U.S. AI job postings, 0.3% of AI patents, and 1.5% of AI-related bachelor's degrees.

I started the Center for Rural AI because I believe this is one of the most consequential economic challenges in the country right now, and because I think the conventional framing around it is wrong. The dominant narrative treats rural communities as disadvantaged recipients who need urban tech companies to charitably extend their solutions outward. That framing gets the problem backward.