Metro Milwaukee continues to hover near the bottom of a ranking of 50 markets for tech talent in the U.S. and Canada as demand for workers skilled in artificial intelligence ramps up.
The Milwaukee market ranked No. 49 — down from No. 48 last year — in CBRE Group Inc.'s latest Scoring Tech Talent report, which it has produced for over a decade. CBRE describes the report as a comprehensive analysis of labor market conditions, costs and quality in North America for highly skilled tech workers designed to help decision-makers fulfill critical business and innovation objectives.
The rankings take into account metrics like labor costs, rent and the concentration of tech talent in a given market.
The top three markets remained the same from 2023: San Francisco Bay area; Seattle; and the New York metro. Toronto moved up a slot to No. 4 followed by Austin, Texas. Washington, D.C., slipped two spots to No. 6 because of slower job growth, according to CBRE.
The report specifically noted the growing demand for AI-specialty jobs, with the overall share of U.S. tech job postings growing to 14.3% in June 2024 from 8.4% in late 2019. About one-fifth of AI talent in the U.S. resides in the San Francisco Bay area, and about a quarter of new office leases in downtown San Francisco were from AI companies, according to data the report cites from LinkedIn Talent Insights and CBRE Research.
"AI-related job growth will likely spread across North America as further development and deployment occur," the report said, "boosting economic and real estate activity in many tech talent markets."
AI talent growth is more limited in the Milwaukee area, although local efforts are now underway to build the AI workforce and demand. Waukesha County Technical College and the WCTC Foundation have launched a $6 million fundraising campaign to support the much-anticipated WCTC Applied AI Lab: Wisconsin Center for AI Development and Implementation that will help train a future AI workforce.
WCTC also partnered with Wisconsin startup accelerator gener8tor to establish programming that will help entrepreneurs working with applied artificial intelligence build their companies and workforces.
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But wouldn't the expansion of AI lead to layoffs? That was the topic of a recent report by TechEd Media Group of Mequon. The company's leader, Matt Kirchner, believes AI has reached an inflection point in Wisconsin, spurring his interest in taking the pulse of industry, educators and others on how they’re approaching the technology.
In the firm's survey of 53 leaders from across Wisconsin, respondents largely agreed that implementing AI won’t take away jobs.
And to be sure, several startups in the Milwaukee area are tapping AI as significant elements of their business model. 7Rivers, the latest startup from tech entrepreneur Paul Stillmank, is a tech-based consulting firm that focuses on using data technologies, including artificial intelligence, to boost a company's competitiveness. It recently completed a $6 million funding round in the first quarter of this year, according to PitchBook.
Of the 50 markets, 19 are categorized as "small," defined as having tech workforces of less than 50,000, and the other 31 were categorized as "large." Both Madison and Milwaukee are in the small category.
Milwaukee employed 34,160 tech workers in 2023 and saw a 2.5% increase between 2018 and 2023, adding 840 tech jobs. In comparison, Madison — which ranks No. 29 on CBRE's tech talent scorecard — employs 23,950 tech employees, losing 280 jobs, a minus-1.2% change, within the same time frame.
