San Diego ranks 12th in AI. Here's the number that actually keeps us up at night

Brookings’ July 2025 Mapping the AI Economy ranks San Diego 12th of 387 American metros for AI readiness, a “star hub” trailing only San Francisco and San Jose at the top tier. That ranking is the good news. The bad news is what sits underneath it.

Local demand for AI and machine-learning talent runs more than twice the local supply: fewer than 3,000 AI/ML graduates produced in 2021, against over 7,800 regional job postings requiring those skills the next year. San Diego Regional EDC and Booz Allen Hamilton found that one in four local firms is already engaged in AI, and that every 1,000 jobs added in AI-concentrated fields generates roughly 1,400 jobs across other sectors. The leverage is real but the pipeline is not.

The U.S. Census Bureau’s May 2026 Business Trends and Outlook Survey puts firm-level AI use at 17 to 20 percent, but employment-weighted adoption at 32 percent. Large employers are pulling away while small and mid-sized businesses stall. Goldman Sachs’ 10,000 Small Businesses survey released in March 2026 found that 76 percent of small firms now use AI in some form, yet only 14 percent have embedded it in core operations.

The skills delta is widening, not closing. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 projects that 59 of every 100 workers will need reskilling by 2030, and 11 of those 100 are unlikely to receive it. Lightcast finds AI skills now appear in 2.5 percent of all U.S. job postings, up 55 percent year-over-year, and command a 28-percent salary premium of about $18,000.

This is not only a frontline workforce issue. Deloitte’s State of AI in the Enterprise 2026 reports that only 20 percent of organizations rate their talent as highly prepared for broad AI adoption, with insufficient worker skills the number-one barrier named by senior leaders. NACD’s 2025 public-company board survey found 62 percent of directors now setting board-agenda time for AI, while 32 percent flag uncertainty around AI return on investment as the top roadblock. McKinsey’s January 2025 Superagency research crystallizes the perception gap: executives believe 40 percent of their workforce needs AI training; 98 percent of employees say they will.

For women in STEM, the gap is sharper. Stanford HAI’s 2026 AI Index reports women hold 30 percent of data-science roles and 18 percent of machine-learning engineering roles, with no meaningful improvement in research representation since 2010. LeanIn.org and McKinsey find women 14.3 percent less likely than men to feel AI training prepared them for their careers. Unaddressed, AI accelerates existing inequities rather than narrowing them.

Brookings is direct about the fix. In The Coalition Imperative and Foundations of Regional Economic Transformation, the research consistently shows that regions with cross-sector coalitions, public, private, university, and nonprofit at one table, outperform fragmented regions on workforce and technology outcomes. Skills for Chicagoland’s Future, run with World Business Chicago, placed more than 1,200 people across 30 employer partners using exactly this model.

This is the case for the San Diego Regional AI Workforce Coalition, which Athena is convening alongside the San Diego Regional EDC, the Cyber Center of Excellence, San Diego State University, the North San Diego Business Chamber, Connect, and the Corporate Directors Forum Institute. Together these seven organizations represent more than 7,000 member companies, 1,800 life-sciences firms, 1,350 cybersecurity firms, and half a million university alumni. We are not building something new. We are integrating what already exists and measuring what it produces, starting with a public AI Workforce Readiness Index for the region.

San Diego cannot upskill its way out of a coordination problem one program at a time. No single employer, university, or nonprofit can. That is precisely why the coalition exists, and why your seat at this table matters.

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