Lack of human capital prevents U.S. AI leadership.

To assess the winners and losers in the fulfillment of national AI aspirations, we first assembled a country-level dataset that contained a myriad of details on each country’s technology infrastructure, public and private investments, the number of AI-related patents and conference papers it has produced, and the number of technology-savvy STEM graduates within the country. We determined that the data could be grouped into two overarching factors: a technology-related factor and a people-related factor. We then arrayed each country by its relative achievement on those dimensions (see Figure 1).

As shown, the U.S. is positioned in the lower right quadrant—the Technology Prepared quadrant—which reflects the combination of its world-leading technology infrastructure (in the 95th percentile) and a relatively dismal people readiness (45th percentile). While the U.S. leads the world in the technology infrastructure dimension, a number of countries, among them India (92nd percentile), Singapore (88th percentile), Germany (85th percentile), China 72nd percentile) and Russia (48th percentile), score better on the people dimension.

In our analysis of the technology dimension of our scoring, we noted a very strong relationship between the size of a country’s economy and its grade on the technology infrastructure dimension. Simply put, countries with larger economies are more capable of investing substantial sums into the technology necessary to utilize AI.

The relationship between any single factor (e.g population) and the score on the people dimension is less clear. While the two countries with the largest population, China and India, score highly on the people dimension (at 72nd percentile and 92nd percentile respectively), smaller countries also score highly (e.g., Singapore in the 88th percentile, and Germany in the 85th percentile). Larger countries also do not necessarily score well (e.g., the U.S. score in the 45th percentile). Hence, we view the people issue as more of a motivational issue within the U.S. rather than a population size issue.

As such, the U.S. has a people problem—not a spending or technology problem—and in the next section, we offer three options for the U.S. to achieve a position of prominence in AI.