What the AI Revolution Means for Rural Economies: What CORI is doing to ensure rural communities aren’t left behind

In February, I caught up with Catie McVey, the rural North Carolina entrepreneur who won our 2024 Small Towns, Big Ideas pitch competition.

I asked how things were going for her company, OsRostrum. She had just come back from a very successful CattleCon conference, and her genetic validation study was coming together rapidly.

Then she shared something I didn’t expect. Despite a few obstacles, she was ahead on her development roadmap, all from leveraging new AI tools. “I can sit down on a Saturday now and make as much progress on the code in one afternoon as what would have taken me a full week of dedicated slogging just last year.” 

Her comment gave me pause. A whip-smart technologist from a 6th generation dairy family, Catie was using new, easily accessible visual AI tools to build an app where a farmer can use a smartphone to grade dairy livestock to improve breeding and production. As an investor, I loved the product-market fit, use of emerging innovation, and the opportunity for positive disruption. But it was this other leverage point that made me realize there were broader changes afoot for innovation in rural America. 

Even as many of us, myself included, are watching the AI revolution unfold with both excitement and trepidation, there is no doubt that this technology is transforming our economy. 

From a rural economic development perspective, AI provides the platform for incredible opportunity. The rapidly evolving tools allow smaller teams to bring startup ideas to market much more quickly and much less expensively. Individuals with less training can build tech-enabled tools to accelerate their work on the job or help them manage or expand their business to new markets and scale at a fraction of the cost. At CORI, we are already seeing rural founders in our NetworkRural Innovation Network using AI to accelerate their roadmap to a minimum viable product by months and uncover market insights that a year ago would have taken hundreds of hours to access. The dependency on expertise, typically found in urban areas and hawked by expensive consultants, are now at a rural person’s fingertips. 

And now that many rural hubs have broadband that is on par with big cities, allowing these tools to be easily accessible, rural America should be on the cusp of something great. But we must be proactive to realize this opportunity. Too often, when a step function in innovation technology happens, the challenges of isolation have unnecessarily left rural people and places behind.

There is no doubt that the forces of AI will be disruptive. Even the traditional entry level tech jobs CORI has helped create are at risk, although Catie had thoughts on that as well. “I’ve also been finding that AI is making junior devs more feasible. I can help them with bigger-picture code strategy, and they can lean on AI to work through the more common bugs and issues on their own to implement – super helpful for what has always been such an expensive early hire.”

We must move quickly to ensure our programming allows every rural learner to leverage the latest AI tools to thrive in the emerging economy. The leaders in the Rural Innovation Network are in a prime position to ensure this inflection point becomes an accelerant for rural economic progress, and CORI is excited to work with our philanthropic and corporate partners to ensure the full potential of this moment is realized. We are working to ensure that the historical disenfranchisement of rural people and places during a time of significant technological change does not repeat itself.

We are ready to lean in. Please join us and the incredible group of rural innovation leaders as we seize this opportunity.  

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