Our Region's Business Features AI Strike Team and JLL Executive
As seen on “Our Region’s Business” with Bill Flanagan
The Pittsburgh region, a historic hub for innovation with AI roots stretching back nearly 70 years, is now at a critical juncture to lead the new AI-driven economy. In a recent "Our Region’s Business" episode, Joanna Doven, Executive Director of the newly formed AI Strike Team, discussed the strategic efforts to leverage the area's unique strengths in research, energy, and manufacturing to secure investment and translate its AI prowess into significant job creation and economic growth. The full clip can be seen here.
Full Transcript:
Bill Flanagan: Today on Our Region’s Business, the AI Strike Team sets out to secure investment in our region. A new leader takes the helm of sustainable Pittsburgh. What it's like to take the plunge and start a small business and the big dollars Juneteenth is bringing to our region. First, the A.I. strike team. It was just last fall that Bakery Square in Pittsburgh's East End hosted the first A.I. Horizons conference. Only a couple of years after the whole concept of generative A.I. burst into public consciousness with the release of Chat-GPT, but our region's long been a leader in AI, going back about 70 years to the very first AI software program at Carnegie Mellon. But local leaders say we can't take that early advantage for granted. Joanna Doven is executive director of the AI Strike Team. Dan Adamski is executive managing director of the Pittsburgh office of JLL. Welcome. Good to have you both here.
Joanna Doven: Thanks for having us Bill.
Bill Flanagan: Yeah, congratulations for getting this thing off the ground.
Joanna Doven: It had to be done. We have a small window of opportunity to take all of our research strengths, our historic steel roots of building things, making things, our natural gas energy, our next-gen energy and SMRs and nuclear, and lead in what I'm calling the new AI Economy. Because there is a new economy that is being built right now. Pittsburgh could lead and translate research into actual job creation at scale.
Bill Flanagan: And so, Dan, you're participating in this AI Strike Team effort. What's creating this opportunity all of a sudden? AI has been around for 70 years. We've had robots in Pittsburgh for 40. What's happening now that all of a sudden makes this a big deal for us?
Dan Adamski: Well, part of it is that agentic AI requires massive computing capabilities and many of the first tier cities around the country are tapped out as far as power and ability to accommodate. Whereas here in Pittsburgh, we have cheap, affordable energy. We have top tier research institutions. And we have plenty of land available for transformation due to our legacy Brownfield sites.
Bill Flanagan: Well, we've had a couple of deals announced just in the last few weeks. Homer City, the generating station up there to support data centers. Another one out by the airport that's being explored by Liberty Energy. So there are sites and there's opportunities kind of all around us right now.
Joanna Doven: And really how I see it, Bill, is we have to start thinking about not just job creation, but tax generation. So in many of these old industrial sites, you there's vacancy, there's school districts that really need revenue and communities that are desperate for investment. You can't get a higher return per acre than a data center. So for example, in Ohio, just last year alone, 2024, there was 931 million in paid local and state taxes just from data centers operating.
Bill Flanagan: Almost a billion dollars?
Joanna Doven: Almost billion dollars, right. Now that money gets reinvested into the communities. And then there's a flywheel impact where if you're open for business and you move quickly and you have data centers, then you also start to see downstream suppliers of data centers and tech companies conglomerate near those facilities, which is happening in Columbus.
Bill Flanagan: And you're seeing that an opportunity for companies to locate around those data centers as they're built?
Dan Adamski: Correct. Joanne always says there's a flywheel effect that once you get that started that ancillary companies come to the same area and they want to congregate. We're seeing the New Albany example in the past five years has been a hundred data centers developed there and they're tapped out on power in Columbus so this presents an opportunity where 175 miles east of there this does present a unique opportunity for our region to lead.
Bill Flanagan: Well, they're a little west of the Marcellus Shale and they don't have the nuclear expertise that we have up at Westinghouse either. But what is in our way? It sounds like an incredible opportunity. What do we have to do here as a community and I guess as a state to make this happen?
Joanna Doven: Well, I would say that we're doing it and we're making it happen. mean, so the strike team formed really two and a half years ago. I started something called the AI Working Group where I noticed in the East End on AI Avenue, which we call it that because there's 25 AI companies anchored between Duolingo's World Headquarters and Google's office at Bakery Square. 25 companies in a one-mile radius. We thought about how do we take that and leverage it, not just let things happen, but make things happen. So these researchers that have startup companies that are growing, oftentimes what's happened is venture capital comes from elsewhere, like Silicon Valley, and then we see headquarters move.
Bill Flanagan: We've seen that for the last 30, 40 years. get snapped up and they wind up on the coast.
Joanna Doven: So what we're doing is we're understanding what's happening. We have our eye on the ball. I mean, I can tell you, I'm probably reading two hours of just AI news every morning, right? I'm grabbing insights constantly and we're creating policies and investments that you'll soon hear about that anchor our researchers who have companies here that could be unicorns to the Pittsburgh region and also promote the development of AI infrastructure that is tax generating economic opportunities for areas outside of city centers. We have to connect the economies.
Bill Flanagan: All right, only a few seconds left, but if somebody wants to get involved and help, how do they find you? How do they do it?
Joanna Doven: The website is ai-strike-team.com, www.aistriketeam.com. There's a Contact us age, and we can keep you informed of events. But AI Horizons 25 is happening September 11th and 12th.
Bill Flanagan: Already on the calendar. AI Horizons, well, congratulations. It's great, and it's a opportunity for our region. Joanna Doven and Dan adamski from JLL, appreciate it.
