AI is increasingly understood as an emerging enabling technology with potentially far-reaching implications for regional development. As both an industry in its own right and a technology increasingly integrated across incumbent sectors, AI has the potential to reshape production systems, innovation dynamics, regional governance, and the organisation of economic activity across space. Its growth raises important questions about technological change, the spatial organisation of new industries, the evolving practices of regional development, and the transformation of existing sectors.
AI may also be understood as a technology that influences how knowledge is produced, legitimised, and acted upon. In this sense, its significance extends beyond industrial transformation alone: AI may also affect how regions are governed and planned. This perspective resonates with long-standing debates in Regional Studies on technological change, digitalisation, and place-based adaptation, where innovation has been shown to reshape both regional economic trajectories and the institutional capacities through which development is pursued.
There is growing interest in Regional Studies in identifying the regional implications of new technologies, such as AI as a platform technology integrated across incumbent industries. Recent scholarship has begun to engage some of these issues, including its role in green technology specialisation, global innovation systems and industrial rise, new path creation, and the role of system-building agency in new path creations. Yet these discussions remain fragmented across literatures, empirical domains, and scales of analysis. This Special Issue seeks to advance a more coherent research agenda that examines AI simultaneously as an emerging industry, as a tool and infrastructure of regional development governance, and as an enabling technology whose diffusion may alter the spatial organisation of existing sectors.
The Call for Papers invites conceptually robust, empirically grounded, and methodologically rigorous contributions that examine the regional development implications of AI as an emerging enabling technology. Contributions may address the economic geography of the AI industry, the effects of AI on the governance, administration, and planning of regional development, and the ways in which the diffusion and adoption of AI across incumbent sectors may reshape patterns of agglomeration, dispersion, and regional economic change.