Last week I attended the ABNY Power Breakfast with NYCEDC President & CEO Anthony Shorris where he discussed how we can prioritize economic justice with economic growth, and EDC’s responsibility to make sure all New Yorkers benefit from the growth the city’s experiencing. He gave those remarks a few days after the City Council’s 10-hour hearing on AI.
To me, the economic justice and economic growth tension coupled with the major investments AI companies are making in the city beg the question: how do we not only focus on job retention and worker protections, but also ensure that New Yorkers are benefiting from the billions of dollars that artificial intelligence companies have already committed to the city.
I think a potential solution lies in New York City’s failed Amazon HQ2 bid.
Let’s dive in.
Jared Giles
Founder, SquareOne
[email protected]
ABNY Chairman Steven Rubenstein and NYCEDC President & CEO Anthony Shorris
Lessons from HQ2
If you worked in New York City politics in 2018, it was impossible to miss the debate around Amazon's HQ2. Amazon had launched a national effort to determine where its second headquarters would be located, and New York City was a finalist.
The deal included 25,000 jobs in exchange for roughly $2.8 billion in state and city benefits (or $3.5 billion if 40,000 jobs were created). After a months-long public, and largely political, fight over the tradeoffs between tax incentives, gentrification, and the yet unrealized benefit of Amazon’s expansion into Long Island City, the deal fell through and Amazon walked away in February 2019. But even though HQ2 didn’t work out, Amazon still ended up with a significant footprint in the city. By 2023, Amazon had created more than 18,000 jobs in New York City, working out of several offices including the historic Lord & Taylor building it purchased in 2020.
Losing the HQ2 bid didn’t prevent Amazon from establishing itself in the city, but it did remove any leverage EDC and city and state governments had to hold the company accountable to the job growth and job quality metrics outlined in the HQ2 proposal.
One lesson we should have drawn from that effort was not whether Amazon deserved the tax incentives, but how New York City can negotiate economic development packages that track a company’s progress over an extended period of time. HQ2 showed us that the deal doesn’t end once a company agrees to establish itself in the city. If a major corporation is poised to invest in the city for decades to come, we can institute checks along the way that protect communities and ensure economic gains are shared by every New Yorker.
With AI, the same negotiations never happened. Companies leased more than 2.2 million square feet in the first half of this year, more than double their total for all of 2025. Google has more than 14,000 employees in the city, Meta holds 1.2 million square feet of office space, Anthropic took a sixteen-story building on Hudson Street, and OpenAI is in the historic Puck Building.
So when people say New York has no AI incentive structure, it is because there was no negotiation to attach one to. Instead we have:
Investment: New York AI startups raised a record $16.7 billion in venture capital in 2025, second only to the Bay Area.
Jobs: The city added 33,400 private-sector jobs in 2025, roughly half the prior year’s gain. And since ChatGPT’s 2022 release, entry-level postings are down 41% in design, media and writing, 31% in administrative work, 27% in business management, and 23% in finance. Postings asking for AI skills are up 55%.
Mandated Disclosure: New York became the first state in the country to require employers to state on a WARN notice whether layoffs came from AI or automation. Since March 2025, 162 filings covering about 28,300 workers. Not one cited AI.
And right now we have three groups all trying to address the same problem from different angles: EDC is building the infrastructure to support AI investment, the City Council is developing a regulatory framework, and workforce agencies/organizations are tasked with ensuring economic mobility reaches New Yorkers (even though the organizations hold zero leverage over tech companies).their diploma.
By what metric do we judge whether AI investments are benefitting New Yorkers?
To start closing this gap, we need to track what matters, and one of those metrics should be entry-level job postings by sector, measured quarterly against commercial AI office absorption. We have to watch entry-level jobs because we need viable pathways to economic mobility for young New Yorkers. If companies don’t have entry-level jobs, we track what jobs they do and plan to have available (which is why it is important to have workforce organizations at the table so training needs can be determined).
Anthony Shorris has already set the standard for inclusive economic development. In his first major address, he noted that “for too long, economic growth has fueled inequality,” pledging that EDC would champion growth, but “not unbridled growth—not growth at the expense of communities or opportunities or equity.” Ensuring New Yorkers actually share in the upside of the AI boom will be one of the defining tests for this administration, and one step to make sure we pass it will be to bring the disconnected stakeholders—EDC, the City Council, and our workforce agencies/organizations—to the same table to define how we judge whether AI investments are delivering for our communities, and to build the accountability infrastructure needed to ensure they do.
National Spotlight: Washington D.C.’s Unified Economic Development Budget
How do you hold a city accountable for what its economic development spending produces? Look at what DC has been doing since 2010.
The Problem: In many cities, economic development subsidies are scattered across agencies, programs, and tax expenditures that can’t be found in one place. A company gets an abatement from one body, a credit from another, and a grant from a third. No single document shows what the public spent or what it got in return. That makes the question “did this work” difficult to answer.
The Intervention: The Unified Economic Development Budget Transparency and Accountability Act of 2010 requires the District’s CFO to publish an annual report of every economic development dollar, organized by incentive type, by the agency that granted it, and by ward. Reporting by ward means you can see whether the benefits landed in the neighborhoods that were promised them.
The Takeaway: Transparency gave DC the ability to grade itself. Because it publishes what it spends, who received it, and which ward it landed in, its own CFO could go back and review the work, and found that some of its major incentives were paying companies that were already operating in the city and subsidizing supermarkets that never opened where they were needed most. And even DC’s report contains no jobs figure, which tells you how far we still have to go.
ICYMI
[REPORT] Office of the New York City Public Advocate: The most complete accounting yet of AI’s footprint in the city, including the finding that wholesale electricity costs near data centers have run as much as 267% higher in a single month than five years ago.
[REPORT] Partnership for New York City: The Partnership for New York City’s data on leasing, venture capital, and the entry-level postings collapse, which supplies most of the numbers above.
[REPORT] Office of the New York State Comptroller: New York City passed the nation’s first AI hiring law and then received two complaints in two years.
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