Angie Cooper was recently named president of Heartland Forward, a think-and-do tank headquartered in Bentonville, but doing work across a wide swath of middle America, including the Delta.
She has been with the organization for several years and is responsible for a lot of Heartland Forward’s impact. Some of the initiatives she has helped guide include elevating regional competitiveness with an emphasis on high-speed internet and harnessing the power of artificial intelligence (AI) in rural parts of the country. Cooper has also advocated for building a talent pipeline and training in non-urban areas to promote entrepreneurship and keep jobs in rural America.
Cooper and Northwest Arkansas Business Journal Editor-in-Chief Roby Brock recently caught up for a conversation.
Roby Brock: Let’s talk about high-speed internet and how important it is for rural America to have investments in that. What do you see happening on that front right now? Are you encouraged by the investments that you’re seeing?
Angie Cooper: You and I have talked about this issue before in the past, and I think we’re in a really great spot, specifically in Arkansas, to lead the way to ensure the federal funds officially come down to put high-speed internet across the state of Arkansas and across the heartland. The NTIA [National Telecommunications and Information Administration] did come out with some new rules that were required of state broadband offices. The good news is those new rules and things that they were asking for were due mid-July and NTIA has already approved all states and territories’ initial plans for them to move forward. So we’re enthused about the acceleration of getting the dollars and getting access to high-speed internet to Arkansas residents.
Brock: What do you do once you get high-speed internet? Is there a process and a need for educating communities as to what they can do with the broadband?
Cooper: We know around 108,000 people in Arkansas self-identify that they don’t have access to the internet. About 170,000 folks say that they only have access to the internet with their cellular device. So yes, we’ve got to get the infrastructure — and we are technology neutral — let’s just get people access to that internet. But once the infrastructure is in place, what is the adoption piece? What does that look like? How can we share that people are adopting?
We know through research if we were fully connected $160 billion would have been generated economically. It’s not enough just to get the infrastructure, we’ve got to have to have the digital skills. What’s amazing again about the leadership from the state broadband office, and many people across this community — nonprofits, business leaders, local ISPs — they all know that there’s multiple steps now to this process. When we talk about digital skills at Heartland, we’re also thinking forward as what does that mean for AI education? And really to ensure that we have affordable high-speed internet, but then also we have the opportunities to harness the power of AI to be competitive.
Brock: What do you see happening on the AI front? What should we keep our focus on to make sure that we are capitalizing on AI?
Cooper: We believe that the heartland has the opportunity to harness the power of AI and lead in this new age. It shouldn’t just be the coasts that are accessing and delivering and developing AI. When we talk about it, there are a few things that we need to focus in on. One, there are still a lot of questions and concerns about return on investment about AI because it is moving so quickly, but it’s here. So one of the things that Heartland Forward is focused on is how do we get AI education and start talking about the opportunities to learn how to use AI.
We’re specifically focused with an organization called Stimuli to build a tech platform to focus on rural high school students and rural entrepreneurs. That’s where we’re going to start. There are many other people looking at opportunities, but what’s really exciting about our program is we’re building the platform with those rural students and with the rural entrepreneurs. We want to build something that they’re going to be able to use and why it’s important to look even at the student starting in high school and K-12.
We did a report that looked at what do Gen Z thinks about AI. Well, 77% of Gen Zers are saying they’re using AI tools like ChatGPT, 43% of them are using it weekly, but only 10% are learning it in school and only 9% say they’re ready to use AI in the workforce. Then through some other polling, we know that 70% of people think their employers should teach them how to use AI. We really want to fuel that and provide tools and resources through this ed tech platform that we’re creating so people aren’t left behind.
We also are trying to pull together state policy makers to say, let’s not legislate in fear, but let’s think about the opportunities as it relates to education, workforce and health care, so the heartland can remain regionally competitive.
Brock: How does someone plug in with you guys on this initiative?
Cooper: We have an AI newsletter, so I highly encourage you to go visit HeartlandForward.org and sign up for our AI newsletter. It comes out once a week sharing information of not just what’s happening here in the state of Arkansas, but what’s happening across the heartland and the 20 states that make up the third largest economy in the world.