The Fletcher School at Tufts University has highlighted 50 cities with the largest AI talent pools worldwide and evaluated them using their TIDE framework. TIDE stands for Talent pool; Investments; Diversity of talent; Evolution of the country’s digital foundations. These factors collectively give companies a way to prioritise their AI talent sourcing choices by scoring the different locations on the concentration, quality and diversity of the AI talent pool.

There are big gaps to close when it comes to improving the diversity of the talent pool. 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. 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.

The top 50 AI cities as measured by the TIDE framework are:

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.

In order to make the field more inclusive, 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.

While San Francisco leads in AI talent worldwide, there is a wider pool from which to draw. There is a global talent pool that extends well beyond the U.S., including in the developing world. For instance Bangalore, India — the fifth-ranked city for diversity among AI workers, as measure by our TIDE framework — has the world’s second-largest AI talent pool.

The AI landscape is dynamic, especially in the developing world, and these changes can significantly transform the hotspots list over time. Brazil and India, for example, have cities on this list of 50 and are hiring three times as many AI workers as they were in 2017. This is a rate of growth that matches or exceeds that in the U.S. Almost 30%of scientific research papers from India include female authors, double the proportion of female authors in the U.S. and UK.

Remote working can help spread AI activity more widely. With the growing acceptance of remote work, there are greater opportunities for cities that have a lower cost of living to become more important players in AI. Cities on our list of AI hotspots that are in the developing world, such as Hyderabad, Bangalore, Jakarta, Lagos, Nairobi, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, and Saõ Paolo, score favorably on cost of living, which could be a powerful draw for diverse talent, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds. A key consideration is that the potential of these cities is constrained by the state of their digital evolution and infrastructure.

There is no question that companies must extend their searches beyond the “usual” cities — the classic tech hubs — from which to recruit. There is good news: The search for AI talent is also a tale of 50 cities, and possibly even more. The hotspots noted here benefit from promoting their cities as the AI industry widens. But all of us as consumers of AI products and enabled services also benefit from a technology that draws on a breadth of sources to produce new tech applications that are free of bias, protect freedoms and work for everyone, everywhere.