When technologists and investors imagine where artificial intelligence is taking root in America, they picture the usual suspects: San Francisco, Seattle, New York, Boston. The places with the venture capital, the university research labs, the engineering talent pipelines.
Microsoft’s U.S. AI Diffusion Report, released Tuesday, suggests that picture is badly incomplete. Juan Lavista Ferres, Microsoft’s chief data scientist and the lab director behind the report, said within his own company, lawyers are building tools—people who are not software developers are translating their ideas into applications. Now that’s a big tech company where people are being actively encouraged to adopt AI tools, but he told Fortune he was surprised by his AI map: “A lot of normal people are adopting AI.”
