Ross DeVol
Chairman Emeritus and Distinguished Fellow

As part of our Pulse of the Heartland series exploring the AI readiness of heartland cities, this piece evaluates Madison, WI, whose core strength as an AI center is anchored by one of America’s premier research universities: the University of Wisconsin, Madison (UW-Madison), and its ability to link academic research with domain expertise in health care (electronic health records, EHR) and genetic-based diagnostics. This ecosystem is further strengthened by the American Family Insurance Data Science Institute (DSI), which is also based at UW-M.

UW–Madison ranks sixth nationally in research activity, seventh in doctorates granted, and twelfth in patents awarded among U.S. universities.[i] The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) was an early innovator in supporting UW-M’s commercialization efforts and remains a key accelerator and provider of capital for local AI startups. UW-M’s Research, Innovation and Scholarly Excellence Initiative (RISE) has made AI its first area of focus. In addition to the AI talent supplied by the university, applied AI training programs are also available at Madison College and through the Wisconsin School of Business.

Often working in concert with Madison’s academic institutions, the city’s private sector is also responsible for recent growth in AI capacity. Both AI research and deployment expertise are evident at Epic Systems, the nation’s largest electronic health records vendor, through its integration of generative AI and predictive models in health care workflows, and at Exact Sciences, who is a leader in machine learning for cancer diagnostics and operational analytics. Madison has deep talent in STEM fields, but the key differentiator is the emphasis on providing applied AI training to professionals across fields for a continuous talent pipeline. As Wisconsin’s capital, Madison benefits from a strong state-level focus on AI workforce development, with public agencies encouraged to pilot AI adoption programs. Many bioscience startups in the region have integrated AI into their research and additional startup capital is being deployed by the Wisconsin Investment Fund. Madison is sixth among heartland metros based upon key metrics in AI talent, innovation and adoption.[ii]

Talent

Madison benefits from a deep pool of technical talent, with high-tech employment representing more than double the national share. Software publishing employment in Madison is nine times more concentrated than the U.S. average, anchored in part by companies like Esker, a worldwide leader in AI-driven process automation software.[iii] At 49%, the Madison metro area ranks among national leaders in the share of adults age 25 and older holding a bachelor’s degree.There are 55,000 graduates with a bachelor’s degree in computer science, engineering, and mathematics (CSEM), representing 7.7% of the population in Madison. One of Madison’s strongest talent metrics is its 1,440 PhDs in computer science, engineering and mathematics, placing it among the nation’s leading metros relative to population size.

UW-M offers multiple on-ramps into AI education and training. These include AI, machine learning and data science programs spanning undergraduate majors and certifications, graduate degrees, professional certifications and continuing education. Some programs are domain-specific (such as geospatial, engineering, and business) while others are broadly interdisciplinary. There is a B.S. in Data Sciences offered through the Statistics Department, which provides a strong foundation in computational and statistical thinking and allows students to embed themselves in AI and Machine Learning work. A data science certificate is also available for students pursuing another major who want to develop AI skills.

Taken together, these academic pathways ensure that AI training is not limited to a single discipline but embedded across fields where applied impact is most immediate.

For students pursuing AI training in the health field, UW-M is widely recognized for its expertise in biostatistics, bioinformatics and computational biology, and these strengths are increasingly integrated with the RISE-AI program and network. There is an M.S. in Data Science with the option of concentrating in ML as well as a professional certificate that is available called AI for Engineering Data Analytics. UM-W provides a continuing education program on Foundations of AI and machine learning, alongside a number of other AI professional programs offering short courses on AI topics.

This breadth of offerings reflects a deliberate strategy to align AI education with workforce needs, rather than treating AI as a narrow academic specialization.

The Wisconsin School of Business has an “AI Hub for Business,” which integrates AI into business curricula and industry-aligned projects. This approach complements technical programs and helps create AI-literate managers who can translate technical capability into operational and strategic value. This program is one of the most advanced efforts nationally to train the next generation of managers with applied knowledge of AI.[iv]

While university-based programs anchor Madison’s AI talent pipeline, workforce-focused institutions play a critical role in expanding access and accelerating adoption.

Madison College, sometimes referred to as Madison Area Technical College, provides several AI- and AI-adjacent training programs designed for workforce readiness, upskilling and entry into analytics or technology roles. Their programs combine hands-on skills, flexible delivery formats and industry relevance to new learners and working professionals. The final semester of the program requires an industry internship for acquiring practical knowledge. It has short courses available on AI for Business: ChatGPT & Copilot covering prompt writing and integration with Microsoft 365.

Innovation

The talent pipeline is reinforced by a research and innovation ecosystem that is scaling rapidly across the Madison metro.

UW-M’s RISE AI initiative is a massive undertaking for the university that is pushing AI campus-wide. It includes new faculty hiring of between 120 to 150 over the next three-to-five years and cross-disciplinary collaboration. WARF committed $15 million over the next three years to extend the UW-M’s strength in artificial intelligence research and education by funding the RISE AI initiative.[v] UM-W has top-10 departments including Computer Sciences, Statistics and Biomedical Engineering.

RISE-AI will advance core technical areas including deep learning, foundation models, natural language processing, signal processing, learning theory and optimization will be the core technical focus areas. On the human-centered side, RISE-AI emphasizes the importance of AI trustworthiness, bias mitigation, privacy preservation, fairness and the development of AI policy and legal frameworks.

This focus on both technical excellence and human-centered design differentiates Madison’s approach from purely technology-driven AI clusters.

American Family Insurance Data Science Institute (DSI) is another key component of the innovation milieu based at UM-W. It is a collaboration between UW-M and American Family Insurance that connects academic research to industry use cases. It funds applied AI research, hosts fellowships and supports open data infrastructure.[vi]

Combined with private-sector AI research, these assets translate into measurable research output and computing capacity. The Madison metro has recorded 79 papers published at top AI conferences, exceeding levels in Dallas and Houston, both with substantially larger populations. Madison had 72 AI patents granted, slightly below Ann Arbor, Michigan, but Madison’s strongest performance is in high-performance computing (HPC) usage, with over 118.1 million HPC hours logged by academic users through the NSF ACCESSS program, eclipsing Ann Arbor and exceeding those in Chicago, Austin, Dallas and Houston.

Adoption

Research strength and talent density have translated into meaningful AI adoption across Madison’s core industries, particularly health care and biosciences.  Madison’s health care ecosystem is anchored by Epic Systems, a global player in the electronic health records sector. Roughly 60% of U.S. patients are served by Epic and it is the largest private-sector employer in the metro area. Epic is at the forefront of embedding AI into its EHR systems and related modules, and incorporated features that reduce physician time devoted to documentation, administration and transversing charts using a generative AI assistant. AI is being assimilated into operations such as automated suggestions for diagnosis, procedure coding and prior authorizations. Through a partnership with Microsoft and Nuance, Epic announced a push to embed more than 100 AI-powered tools across clinician, patient, and system layers.[vii]

UW Health and other Madison local health systems benefit from their proximity to Epic through deployment of AI in their care systems. They are among the first to test and integrate those AI functions into their operations. Exact Sciences is another critical player in Madison’s ecosystem as a molecular diagnostic and biotech company. They have expanded hiring significantly, demonstrating their commitment to embedding AI into biomarker discovery, predictive diagnostics, translation research, pipeline automation and model oversight. Through the American Family DSI, AI is also being embedded in underwriting, risk prediction and customer engagement in insurance, finance and health care. CUNA Mutual and TruStage are deploying AI throughout their operations, as well.

Beyond health care, infrastructure investment and startup activity are shaping the next phase of adoption. Meta is investing $1 billion in a data center as part of its AI technology expansion in central Wisconsin, just outside of the Madison metro area.[viii] On measures of adoption such as firm AI use, firm data readiness and firm cloud readiness, Madison performs below the top five heartland metros. However, on the share of jobs exposed to generative AI, Madison ranks just one 1 percentage point lower than the national leader, San Francisco.

Most AI or AI-adjacent startup activity is concentrated in health or biosciences. Redox has raised several rounds of venture capital and uses its health data platform to power analytics in digital health. Nordic Global, with annual revenue estimated at $500 million, offers AI enablement for providers and payers in the health care sector. EnsoData is a Madison-based clinical AI company focused on sleep diagnostics and has received FDA approval for its use cases.[ix] Outside of health care, Convergent Science provides engineering software using machine learning for use in simulation and optimization. Gener8tor plays a dual role as an accelerator and seed investor, providing funding to local AI startups. The Wisconsin Investment Fund is a public-private venture capital initiative targeting $100 million in startup investment, much of it AI-related.[x]

Strengthening startup formation and venture capital deployment remains a critical opportunity for accelerating AI adoption and scaling Madison’s position in the heartland AI landscape.

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[i] https://excellence.wisc.edu/

[ii]Muro, M., and Methkupally, S. (2025). Mapping the AI Economy: Which Regions are Ready for the Next Technological Leap? Brookings Metro. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/mapping-the-ai-economy-which-regions-are-ready-for-the-next-technology-leap/

[iii] https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/finding-a-job/software-companies-in-madison-wi

[iv] https://business.wisc.edu/ai/

[v] https://news.wisc.edu/rise-ai-gets-15-million-boost-from-the-wisconsin-alumni-research-foundation/

[vi] https://dsi.wisc.edu/

[vii] https://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/epic-microsoft-partner-use-generative-ai-better-ehrs

[viii] https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/meta-plans-nearly-1-billion-data-center-project-wisconsin-bloomberg-news-reports-2025-04-04/

[ix] https://www.ensodata.com/press/latest-ensodata-fda-510k-clearance-enables-ai-powered-sleep-diagnosis-using-pulse-oximetry-devices/

[x] https://wedc.org/wisconsin-investment-fund-invests-in-12-wisconsin-companies/#:~:text=Over%20the%20first%20years%20of,%2C%20manufacturing%2C%20and%20other%20areas.