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.”
The data backs him up—and the geography surprised even him.
Texas comes out ahead of California
The report—which tracks AI user share across all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and more than 3,100 counties—puts Texas fourth nationally at 35.4%, ahead of California at 34.1% and New York at 32.9%. The top of the leaderboard belongs to the District of Columbia (40.6%), Maryland (36.5%), and Utah (35.9%). Leaders cluster in the mid-Atlantic corridor, the Mountain West, and the Sun Belt; laggards sit in Appalachia, the Northern Great Plains, and rural New England, where West Virginia brings up the rear at 20.8%.
