The AI Boom Is Real. The Question Is Who Gets to Ride It.

If you want to understand what artificial intelligence is doing to the economy around you, don't start with a chatbot. Start with a job posting.

In 2023, AI-related roles made up about 1.6 percent of all job postings in New Jersey. By 2025, that figure had more than doubled to 3.4 percent. That's not a headline about robots taking over — it's a quieter, more consequential shift. The tools are showing up inside ordinary jobs, and employers are quietly rewriting what "qualified" means. This month the New Jersey AI Hub marked its first year of operation, with Governor Mikie Sherrill on hand to announce an expanded push toward what the Hub calls an "inclusive AI economy." The word doing the heavy lifting there is inclusive — and whether it turns out to be true is a South Jersey story as much as a Trenton one.

The defining gap of the next decade

Here's the tension underneath the optimism. Employers say they want this technology, but they can't find people who know how to use it. In one industry survey, 52 percent of employers named the availability of skilled professionals as a top barrier to adopting AI. More than six in ten said the ability to work alongside AI tools was among the most important skills they were hunting for. Read those two numbers together and you get the defining economic gap of the next decade: the demand is here, the trained workforce isn't, and the region that closes that gap fastest wins.

That's exactly where the fear lives for a lot of people down here — the bookkeeper in Glassboro, the parts manager in Blackwood, the fifty-eight-year-old office administrator in Cherry Hill who has watched three "efficiency" waves already and wonders if this one has her name on it. It's a fair worry. It's also, importantly, not the whole story.

The technology is not the risk. The access is. New Jersey has decided to build the on-ramps. The open question is whether our neighbors ever find the entrance.Ethan Brooks

The on-ramp is the library

Alongside the Hub sits something less flashy and, to me, more important: the NJ AI Library Learning Network, a statewide pilot that puts AI literacy, jobseeker training, and small-business education inside the one civic building almost every town still has — the public library. In practice that means the retiree in Audubon can walk into a branch and learn what these tools actually do before deciding whether to be afraid of them. It means the owner of a two-person landscaping outfit in Williamstown can learn to let software handle the invoicing instead of losing Sunday nights to it.

The stakes for our small businesses are real. Researchers at Rutgers' Heldrich Center, working with the New Jersey State Policy Lab, are studying how the state's public AI programs can better line up with what small businesses actually need. South Jersey runs on those corner stores — the diner, the HVAC guy, the family accounting practice, the independent pharmacy. If AI adoption becomes something only the big warehouse operators along the 295 corridor can afford, the productivity gap between Main Street and the distribution center gets wider, not narrower. New Jersey has built the door — the Hub, the library network, the training dollars. Now somebody has to make sure our neighbors know it's unlocked.

Based on reporting from the NJ AI Hub, NJBIZ, the Rutgers Heldrich Center for Workforce Development, and the New Jersey State Policy Lab.