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Government spending on artificial intelligence (AI) has surged across the world. Quantifying the return on research investments is notoriously difficult, especially in newly emerging economic sectors. Here, we propose a novel way to describe and analyze where AI ideas are being used and how they spread—by tracing the people and academic communities involved in AI research as they transition from government-funded research labs to private sector companies, carrying cutting-edge “AI know-how” with them. Linking existing university administrative data with state employment records allows several quantifiable inferences about the value of AI research to be drawn from these academia-to-industry migrations. Here we describe a pilot implementation of this system, which is being developed in the State of Ohio. It offers a template for governments and policy makers all over the world. Importantly, the metrics discussed below offer a way to measure the economic impact of scientific research in general, with implications for critical and emerging technologies that go far beyond AI.