Research

According to interviews and research from the Benton Institute for Broadband and Society, state broadband officers are exhausted by the challenges and shifting dynamics of implementing the $42.5 billion Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment program. Leaders from the Benton Institute have interviewed over 30 SBOs so far about what it is taking to implement BEAD. And Dr. Revati Prasad of the Benton Institute talked about the takeaways from those conversations in a recent Fiber Broadband Association webinar.

Regional innovation competitiveness relies not only on research, but on the effective deployment of technologies, proving that ideas can work beyond the lab. But in order to deploy technologies and scale economic growth, coalitions must tell a compelling story to funders about why investment in their communities is worthwhile. In this research paper, US Ignite, through the Supporting U.S.

For the first time, Democrats are now more likely than Republicans to be concerned about the growing role of artificial intelligence in daily life and its potential to take jobs. In a June Pew Research Center survey of U.S.

Does federal money for rural broadband change the economies of the places that receive it? Any answer rests on a comparison between funded places and unfunded ones, and the unfunded side of that comparison is this paper’s subject.

The DeepMind Institute seeks to provide a forum for Google, DeepMind, and outside researchers to tackle the biggest questions around artificial general intelligence's impacts on society, according to an announcement shared with Axios. The institute—led by Shane Legg as Managing Editor alongside Google SVP James Manyika and DeepMind Chair Demis Hassabis—aims to make complex academic research accessible to the public and highlight the diversity of perspectives.

In July 2026, All Tech Is Human and the Notre Dame-IBM Technology Ethics Lab convened paired workshops in New York City to examine how agentic and generative AI are reshaping work from two different vantage points: those of mid-level professionals and senior leaders. The groups were asked mirrored questions to enable comparison. Both described the same broad shifts: AI is not simply automating tasks, but reconfiguring the lived experience of work itself, with technical deployments currently outpacing organizational and human adaptation.

When Jessica Wachter, a finance professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, wanted to assess AI’s impact on the economy over the next few years, she faced a long list of business and technical uncertainties. So she started with what she calls a “remarkable fact” that is not in question: A handful of so-called hyperscalers are investing huge amounts of money to build AI data centers.

America’s broadband providers invested $92.6 billion in U.S. communications infrastructure in 2025—up 3.4% from 2024 and the third-highest annual total since 2002. Cumulative investment now approaches $2.3 trillion since 1996 as consumer and business demand for faster, more sophisticated networks grows. In 2025, broadband providers pushed fiber deeper into more communities, expanding modern networks to meet demand that is growing in scale and changing in character. Average monthly broadband usage reached 767.4 gigabytes per subscriber by year’s end, up 9.9% from 2024.

Researchers at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI and the university’s RegLab recently published a study demonstrating how large language models can help identify discriminatory local laws. The AI system helped human reviewers identify thousands of local statutes that could violate anti-discrimination laws by treating people differently based on race, gender, and citizenship. HAI fellow Daniel E. Ho, who helped conduct the study, said AI is well-suited for the task because of the sheer scale of local laws.

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