Over 10,000 Philly-area job listings required AI skills last year
Some aspects of AI adoption are strong in Philly, says a new report by Brookings, and strategies to scale up should consider "basic worker security."
The Philadelphia metro area is ready for AI.
That’s according to a recent report from Brookings, a Washington-based nonprofit research organization, which says the Philly area is one of the top metros in the country for AI adoption and AI skills in the workforce.
“AI has the possibility of transforming economies, creating new productivity gains — so it matters who has it and who doesn’t, who is ready and who not,” said Mark Muro, a senior fellow at Brookings Metro and the lead author of the report, who acknowledged the technology can also disrupt the workforce.
Philadelphia ranked 14 overall among 195 metros, and “rates very impressively,” Muro said. He pointed to the many computer science, engineering, and mathematics Ph.D. graduates living in the area and noted Philly-area firms are adopting cloud based-technology.
“You have a strong academic and university base. That’s no surprise,” he said.
The top metros in the country for AI readiness are San Jose and San Francisco. Philadelphia is among a group of 28 metros that “forms a second echelon of uniformly strong AI ecosystems, balancing top‑tier talent, research, and enterprise uptake,” the report notes. That group also includes New York, Chicago, Boston, and Los Angeles.
“It’s encouraging that we’re seeing more places like Philadelphia that are emerging as really strong AI centers in their own right,” Muro said.
Researchers looked at factors including the number of local AI patents; how many computer science, engineering, and mathematics graduates there are; how many startups are creating AI products; and job listings featuring AI skills. They used data from the U.S. Census Bureau, labor information provider Lightcast, and USAspending.gov, which tracks federal government spending, among other sources.
Philly’s less strong areas included commercial patenting, federal contracts dedicated to AI, and funding raised by AI startups from venture capital.
For this region, said Muro, “the next step ... is to be moving to embed this into more entrepreneurial behavior, more startups, more business activity.”
What about AI’s impact on jobs?
The country has the potential to benefit from AI’s future, the report says, but its authors also point to a set of priorities to consider as it adopts the technology. Among them: helping workers adjust to the new reality.
“Any national platform for regional AI scale-up needs to include strategies to provide basic worker security,” the report reads. “Such provisions are necessary because successful AI adoption will involve both gains for many workers and dislocation for others. Minimizing disruption will speed adoption.”
Last year, 5,166 Philly-area workers with AI skills started new jobs, the report notes. Some 10,815 Philly job postings required AI skills.
Nationally, more jobs have required AI abilities in recent years, the report notes. Job listings with this requirement grew from 3,780 in 2010 to 82,980 in 2025, it said.
“It could run from a super high-end Ph.D. researcher developing a new model, to somebody in marketing just using ChatGPT to crank out another advertising or marketing product,” Muro said. “There’s all kinds of uses. Maybe it’s a radiologist who’s using AI to verify scans from X-rays.”
The report comes as recent U.S. college graduates face a higher unemployment rate than has been seen in the last decade excluding the pandemic, which can in large part be attributed to slowdown in hiring. At the same time, companies are using AI more for tasks that could have been carried out by entry-level workers in computer science in the past, creating more competition for these college grads, the Wall Street Journal reported in June.
Muro noted that some workers might see their positions eliminated in the future because the work has been automated, or they may struggle to find jobs if they don’t have AI skills.
“There’s no doubt that AI will be disruptive at times and we think regional readiness needs to take that into account,” Muro said. “Places need to be ready to adopt it, but they also need to be ready to protect their workers, to make sure that it plays out in a equitable and healthy way for workers.”