AI READY ROANOKE – MAKING AI WORK FOR THE REGION

In the Roanoke, Virginia region, local governments, Carilion Clinic, Google, and higher education leaders are coming together around an ambitious question: how can the businesses and workers already here benefit from AI?

Their partnership, AI Ready Roanoke, brings biomedical research, manufacturing experience, and workforce education into a shared regional effort. It recognizes that access to new technology is only part of the challenge. Businesses need help deciding where it is useful. Workers need opportunities to learn as their jobs change. Entrepreneurs need connections that can help turn an application into a business.

CivicSol has been selected to help the coalition develop the case for a regional AI Center of Excellence. We will help determine what it should offer, who would use it, and how the partners could deliver and sustain it.

THE MOMENT

Roanoke brings considerable strengths to this work. Carilion Clinic and Virginia Tech connect health care with biomedical research. Manufacturers across the broader region serve demanding markets in transportation, energy, and advanced materials. Colleges and universities prepare people for those industries, while organizations such as the Roanoke-Blacksburg Innovation Alliance support entrepreneurs bringing new ideas to market.

AI creates opportunities to connect those capabilities in new ways. It also raises immediate questions about how work will change and whether employers and workers can get the help they need.

The Virginia AI Landscape Assessment estimates that approximately 115,300 jobs, about 32% of employment across GO Virginia Region 2, are exposed to AI under its all-jobs scenario. That geography includes the Roanoke Valley, New River Valley, and Lynchburg area. Exposure describes the potential for AI to affect work tasks; it does not predict that those jobs will disappear. The scale makes preparation a regional economic priority.

The AI Ready Roanoke effort brings together Botetourt County, the City of Salem, the City of Roanoke, Roanoke County, Carilion Clinic, Google, Virginia Tech, Radford University, Roanoke College, Virginia Western Community College, the Roanoke-Blacksburg Innovation Alliance, and the Roanoke Regional Partnership, with support from GO Virginia.

The significance is in what those partners can do together. An employer can help a college understand which skills are needed. A researcher can help a business assess a possible application. Local governments can help connect those efforts to the places and resources needed to deliver them. AI Ready Roanoke gives the region a way to organize that work around shared priorities.

THE CIVIC SOLUTION

Our work begins with the businesses a future center would serve.

CivicSol will conduct conversations with 40 companies across the region’s technology, manufacturing, and life sciences clusters. We will hear from employers already using AI and those still deciding where to begin. Working with Lightcast, we will connect those experiences to industry and workforce analysis to understand where practical support is needed.

For a small manufacturer, that could mean finding the expertise to test whether an application improves quality before committing money to it. For an employer introducing new tools, it could mean training that fits employees’ responsibilities and schedules. These are possibilities to investigate with businesses, and their answers will shape our recommendations.

The coalition’s proposed locations make the range of possibilities tangible. Greenfield in Botetourt County, the Historic Salem Post Office, and RoVa Labs in Roanoke offer very different settings for industry support, education, and biomedical innovation. We will assess their fit alongside existing partner facilities and ways to deliver services across the region. Employer needs will guide the recommendations for programs and space.

We will also examine how people find their way into those services. Our work on the Austin Infrastructure Academy reinforced the importance of making a system with multiple training providers easier to navigate. Roanoke’s partners bring substantial expertise of their own. Part of this assignment is determining how to make that expertise easier for businesses and workers to access.

The resulting business plan will connect the recommended services to partner responsibilities, costs, funding, and governance over five years. It will help the coalition decide what to launch first and what it can sustain beyond initial grant support.

THE IMPACT

AI readiness is becoming a practical responsibility for communities. Employers need trusted advice about where to invest. Workers need a chance to build skills before changing expectations leave them behind. Regional institutions have an important role in making that support available.

Roanoke is bringing those institutions together while there is still an opportunity to shape the response. The coalition is asking what its economy needs and how its partners can meet those needs together.

We are proud to help lead that work. Success will mean a regional approach that a business owner can navigate and a worker can use, backed by partners with clear responsibilities for making it last. That is the ambition behind AI Ready Roanoke.

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