Welcome to Curated Morning. A compendium of news, information, and stories that economic development professionals, community development leaders and elected officials read every week to stay in touch with what is happening in our economy.

The Main Thing:

I didn’t live in Indianapolis for long, but I really enjoyed my time there. There’s a lot to like about the city, from the famous race each May to its deep roots in auto history, which go beyond just racing.

For many years, automakers such as General Motors and Ford built cars in Indianapolis. International Harvester also had a big plant nearby that made truck engine blocks. All of these factories have closed now.

Indianapolis also had a strong tradition of high-end custom car manufacturing. The Duesenberg Model J, once one of the world's most luxurious and powerful cars and often more expensive than a house, was made there. The well-known Stutz Bearcat was built in Indy, too. Today, the old factory has become a center for entrepreneurs and offices.

These days, Indianapolis is known more for technology than manufacturing, though some factories remain. The city is home to Eli Lilly, a major pharmaceutical company, and Salesforce.com also has a presence there.

This week, I’m focusing on why locally owned companies are so important and how they drive economic growth in your community. It’s not only about keeping and growing existing businesses—it’s also about attracting new ones.

​Read the post here. ​

Focus On AI

Beyond Silicon Valley: How One State Captured $90 Billion in AI Investment

Pennsylvania is emerging as an unexpected AI powerhouse, with major technology companies committing more than $90 billion in artificial intelligence-related investments to the commonwealth. Leading firms, including Amazon, Anthropic, and Google are funding infrastructure projects and educational initiatives across Pennsylvania, drawn by the state's combination of abundant energy resources, significant water access, and world-class academic institutions. The Pennsylvania Chamber of Business and Industry is partnering with Google to host training seminars across the state, helping small businesses and their employees understand practical AI applications. Industry leaders emphasize that communities and companies that delay AI adoption risk being left behind in an economy rapidly transforming across nearly every sector.

Why This Matters: This transformation illustrates that success in economic development in the AI era requires a fundamental shift from traditional tech hub strategies to leveraging existing regional assets in unexpected ways. Pennsylvania's success demonstrates that the competitive advantages for AI investment aren't limited to established technology centers; rather, they stem from infrastructure fundamentals such as reliable power generation, water resources for data center cooling, and proximity to research universities.

The emphasis on workforce training and education highlights that communities facilitating AI literacy across all age groups and skill levels will create more resilient local economies as businesses throughout their regions modernize operations.

Take Action: Inventory your region's infrastructure assets that support AI deployment, particularly power generation capacity, water availability, fiber connectivity, and proximity to research institutions, then develop messaging that positions these resources as competitive advantages for AI-related investment. Convene sector-specific roundtables with local business leaders in healthcare, financial services, legal, manufacturing, and other industries to identify AI adoption barriers and develop targeted solutions.

ngage with state economic development agencies to coordinate regional AI infrastructure planning, particularly around energy and water resource allocation for potential data center development.

Read Pennsylvania businesses are all in on AI by Justin Sweitzer | Managing editor, City & State Pennsylvania

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​Washington's Power Play: Federal Government Threatens to Strip States of AI Oversight Authority

Federal efforts to preempt state artificial intelligence regulations have resurfaced after a similar proposal died in Congress this summer, placing economic development officials and state policymakers on edge about losing local control over technology governance. A leaked White House executive order proposed withholding federal funds for programs, including the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment initiative, from states with AI regulations deemed too onerous. At the same time, separate reports suggest House Republicans may attempt to insert AI preemption language into the must-pass National Defense Authorization Act.

Although President Trump has not formally signed the executive order and it may be paused, the recurring threat has galvanized opposition from nearly 300 bipartisan state lawmakers, the National Conference of State Legislatures, and the National Association of State Chief Information Officers, all arguing that federal preemption would undermine democratic processes and eliminate states' ability to respond to constituent concerns about AI-related harms in employment, healthcare, education, and consumer protection.

(Note: As this gets published, the President has signed an executive order limiting individual states’ powers to regulate the use of AI. Like many of the executive orders signed by the President, this will likely be challenged in the courts)

Why This Matters: This federal-state power struggle over AI regulation creates significant uncertainty for economic development professionals seeking to position their communities competitively in the technology sector while protecting local interests and workers, as in Pennsylvania in the story above. The threat to withhold BEAD broadband funding based on AI regulatory postures directly affects infrastructure investments that many communities are counting on to enhance connectivity and attract digital-economy businesses, potentially forcing economic developers to choose between securing federal infrastructure dollars and maintaining state-level consumer protections or workforce safeguards.

Linking AI regulation to critical infrastructure funding, such as BEAD, sets a troubling precedent that could extend to other economic development programs, constraining local officials' ability to craft incentive packages or regulations tailored to their communities' specific needs and values.

Take Action: Monitor federal developments closely and engage your state legislative delegation to communicate how preemption would impact your community's economic development strategies and ability to protect local interests, particularly if your region has pending BEAD-funded broadband projects at risk.

Work with state economic development agencies to document how existing or proposed state AI regulations attract responsible companies rather than deter investment, building an evidence-based case against blanket federal preemption.

Engage proactively with AI companies considering your region to understand their genuine regulatory concerns versus lobbying positions, using these insights to help state policymakers craft effective frameworks that provide needed protections without creating unnecessary barriers to innovation and growth.

Read Threat of AI law preemption has states on edge again by Chris Teale | RouteFifty

When Silicon Valley Made the Cover: TIME Crowns AI's Power Players

Time magazine has named "The Architects of AI" as its 2025 Person of the Year, recognizing the tech industry leaders whose creations have fundamentally reshaped the global economy in a single year. The honor went to the collective force behind artificial intelligence's explosive mainstreaming, including Nvidia's Jensen Huang, Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI's Sam Altman, Anthropic's Dario Amodei, and others whose companies turned AI from a futuristic concept into an everyday business necessity.

Time's editor-in-chief Sam Jacobs described 2025 as the moment when AI's full potential "roared into view" with no possibility of turning back. The recognition featured two dramatic covers—one homaging the iconic Depression-era "Lunch Atop a Skyscraper" photograph with AI leaders perched on a steel beam, symbolizing their role in building a new economic foundation.

The timing underscores how quickly AI has moved from technical innovation to economic imperative, with Huang noting that "every industry needs it, every company uses it, and every nation needs to build it."

Why This Matters: This recognition from one of America's most influential publications signals that AI infrastructure has reached the same level of economic importance as electricity, highways, or broadband—and that communities that treat it as optional risk falling permanently behind. The designation comes as AI is driving unprecedented infrastructure investments in data centers, energy production, chip manufacturing, and telecommunications networks, creating location decisions worth billions that economic developers can actively compete for.

More critically, the "every industry needs it" framing means your existing businesses—from manufacturing to healthcare to logistics—are making AI adoption decisions right now that will determine their competitiveness and future workforce needs. Communities that understand AI not just as a technology sector but as a fundamental business infrastructure layer can position themselves as implementation partners rather than spectators.

The emphasis on nation-building capabilities also highlights how AI readiness is becoming a core competitive advantage in business attraction, as companies increasingly evaluate locations based on their capacity to support AI-dependent operations through reliable power, skilled talent, and forward-thinking policies.

Take Action: Inventory your region's AI readiness across three dimensions: infrastructure capacity for energy-intensive computing, existing workforce capabilities in data science and machine learning, and regulatory frameworks that either enable or obstruct AI adoption.

Convene roundtables with your largest employers to understand their AI implementation timelines and identify common barriers you can help address through workforce programs, infrastructure investments, or policy reforms. Develop relationships with data center developers and AI infrastructure providers to understand site requirements for AI-optimized facilities, positioning available properties that meet power, cooling, and connectivity specifications. Create AI literacy programs for local businesses, tiny and medium manufacturers, to help them identify practical applications and implementation pathways before competitors force their hand.

Audit your economic development marketing materials to address AI infrastructure questions explicitly—prospective companies now assume they'll need AI capabilities and want to know if your community can support them. Commission a regional AI impact assessment to identify which local industries face the greatest AI disruption and which have the most immediate implementation opportunities, allowing you to target support where it matters most.

Read The Architects of AI Are TIME’s 2025 Person of the Year by TIME

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Other Articles of Interest this week:

Economic Development -- What Spanberger’s win in Virginia means for the data center-energy debate by Catherine Boudreau | Trellis -- The state hosts the world's largest concentration of data centers — more than 600 facilities — and decisions made there will influence how others manage the collision between AI ambitions and energy costs.

Green Economy -- N.C. Regulators Say Trump’s Proposed Repeal of the Endangerment Finding Would Increase ‘Criteria’ Air Pollutants by Lisa Sorg | Inside Climate News -- The endangerment finding allows the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases—the primary cause of climate change—under the Clean Air Act. If the finding is repealed, Charlotte’s annual air pollution could increase by as much as 940 tons.

Leadership -- The Leadership Test No One Wants: Delivering Bad News Well by Nancy Duarte | MIT Sloan Management Review -- Good communication in tough times requires grappling with where responsibility for the problem lies and whether the situation is salvageable.

Technology -- Altman describes OpenAI’s forthcoming AI device as more peaceful and calm than the iPhone by Sarah Perez | Tech Crunch -- “When people see it, they say, ‘that's it?… It's so simple.'” That’s how OpenAI CEO Sam Altman describes how he thinks people will respond to seeing the company’s forthcoming AI hardware device for the first time.

Something You Should Read:

This World Economic Forum piece by leaders from the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia-Pacific and the World Health Organization reframes one of the most significant demographic shifts of our time.

By 2050, around one billion people aged 65 or older will live in the Asia-Pacific region—nearly double today's 503 million. Rather than treating this as an economic burden, the authors argue that older people represent a "silver dividend" by contributing a lifetime of skills, experience, care and resilience to their communities.

The article outlines three essential shifts to realize this vision: extending universal health coverage with community-based, prevention-focused care that enables aging in place; recognizing and professionalizing care work (much of it currently unpaid and performed by women) as essential economic activity; and designing communities that enable older people to remain active contributors through flexible work arrangements, accessible infrastructure, and digital inclusion.

Key Takeaways are:

1. Aging as Economic Asset, Not Liability: The authors argue that "ageing is not socioeconomic decline" and that "with the right policies and investment, longer lives can be healthier, more productive and fulfilling."
2. Care Economy as Infrastructure Investment -- The article emphasizes that care work "must be seen as a productive, skilled job that keeps societies going," with governments investing through competency frameworks, fair pay, and mixed models integrating home and community-based services.
3. Participation Over Patronization-- The authors stress that "older people are not passive recipients of support—they should be active contributors, co-designers and

Communities that successfully make these three shifts will have competitive advantages in attracting and retaining talent across all age groups. They'll also be building the kind of resilient social fabric that allows communities to weather disruption and seize opportunity.

The alternative, treating aging as a problem to be managed rather than an asset to be leveraged, means watching your most experienced talent exit the productive economy decades before they need to, while simultaneously failing to develop the care infrastructure that younger workers increasingly demand as they balance career and family responsibilities.

Read Building a future-ready society so people can live long and age well by Lin Yang and Saia Ma’u Piukala in the World Economic Forum.

Overheard:

The Rabbit Hole:

The Coffee Paradox: When Doing the Right Thing at the Wrong Time Makes It the Wrong Thing

I'm a three-cups-a-day coffee drinker. Always have been. First cup is about an hour to 90 minutes after I wake up. Research shows this is the best time to have coffee. When you first get up, it doesn't help much. My second comes around 9:00 or so when I'm hitting my stride. Sometimes that second cup goes cold, so I have to go at it again. The third at 2 p.m. because that's when the post-lunch fog rolls in, and I've got another four hours of pretending to be productive.

Turns out that third cup is killing me. Or at least negating any health benefits from the first two.

New research from the Nurses' Health Study followed 47,000 women for three decades and found that coffee drinkers who consumed 3-4 cups in the morning had a 13% higher chance of reaching age 70 in good health. Another study of 40,000 adults found morning coffee drinkers were 16% less likely to die and 31% less likely to die from cardiovascular disease. But here's the kicker: people who drink coffee all day or only in the afternoon have the same mortality risk as non-coffee drinkers. The magic only works if you drink it between 4 a.m. and noon. After that, you're disrupting your circadian rhythm and canceling out all the benefits.

So I've been doing the right thing (drinking coffee) the wrong way (all day long) and getting zero credit for it, which feels like a pretty solid metaphor for how we practice economic development somne days. We know the right moves—invest in existing businesses, build workforce pipelines, create genuine community wealth. But we do them at the wrong time, in the wrong sequence, with the wrong urgency. We chase the flashy headquarters relocation when we should be strengthening our supply chain relationships.

We're drinking coffee at 3 p.m. and wondering why we're not getting healthier.

Timing isn't everything, but it sure as hell isn't nothing.

​Read more about when to drink your coffee

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The Catalog That Had Everything Except Vision: A Sears Story

I still remember the ritual. Sears Wish Book arrives. I fold down corners on every page with something I want. Put my initials next to each item like I'm establishing a legal claim in a property dispute. Hand the catalog to my parents, who flip through 47 dog-eared pages and calmly explain that Santa has a budget.

The Wish Book was essentially pre-Internet Amazon, except it weighed five pounds and required you to fill out an order form by hand. Sears had figured out the entire game: remote ordering, nationwide distribution, customer trust. And they turned sports merchandise into an art form. In the 1950s, you could buy a baseball glove, and that was about it. By 1979, the NFL was slapping team logos on bicycles, trash cans, bedding, lunch boxes, and shoes. Joe Montana and Walter Payton were modeling NFL sweaters in the catalog. The league had become a licensing juggernaut, and Sears was the vehicle.

(I am really digging the NFL bicycle)

Then the internet showed up, and Sears looked at it like my grandfather looked at his first microwave. Suspicious. Unnecessary. Probably dangerous. They had the catalog business, the distribution network, and millions of customers who already trusted them to deliver stuff to their houses.

They could've been Amazon. Instead, they spent the '90s perfecting the art of the department store while Jeff Bezos was building the thing that would eat them alive.

The Wish Book died in the mid-'90s. Sears filed for bankruptcy in 2018. Turns out having all the right ingredients doesn't help if you refuse to bake the cake.

​Read about the rise and fall of the Sears Wish Book​

Let me search for this article:Perfect! Let me write this one with some actual personality:

Pizza Becomes a Luxury Good: A Working-Class Tragedy

My first real job was at a pizza restaurant run by two brothers, Vito and Dominic, who were married to two sisters, Jeanette and Phyllis. The family dynamics alone could've powered a sitcom. Vito would argue with Dominic about sauce ratios. Jeanette would say with Phyllis about who was a better busboy (the answer was me, of course). And I'd be in the back earning minimum wage, learning that the secret to good pizza is surprisingly simple: decent ingredients, a hot oven, and don't overthink it.

Back then, in the mid to late ‘70s, pizza was working-class food. A large pie could feed a family of four for under ten bucks. You'd order extra breadsticks because why not? Thursday night, nobody feels like cooking, so call the pizza place. It wasn't fancy. It was fuel.

Now the New York Times reports that the average large cheese pizza costs $17. People are ordering smaller pizzas with fewer toppings. They're hesitating before adding an extra appetizer or a drink. Lower-income consumers have been under pressure for years, and now it's creeping into the middle class. A 25-pound box of pepperoni that cost $110 two years ago now costs $170. Independent shops are paying 15-25% of their sales in fees to third-party delivery apps. And Blaze Pizza's marketing officer is "kicking around the idea of a GLP-1-friendly pizza" with cauliflower crust to appeal to people on weight-loss drugs.

Vito and Dominic would've lost their minds. Not because their restaurant couldn't charge $17 for a large pie—they probably would've loved that margin. Somewhere along the way, we turned comfort food into a luxury good, and nobody seems to think that's a problem worth solving.

​Read about pizza's pricing crisis

Note: I wrote about Vito in my blog a while back. Read it here. Also, the company I worked for still exists, although it has moved locations. The place is called Capri, and if you are ever in Rockford, I highly recommend it.

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