Post & Courier: Tech’s annual $52B statewide impact revealed in North Augusta during SC Decoded conference
By Elizabeth Hustad | ehustad@postandcourier.com
Sep 27, 2024
South Carolina’s tech sector produces an almost $52 billion annual economic impact, according to new research released this fall.
North Augusta hosted the SC Decoded tech conference Sept. 10-11, and it was during this conference that it was revealed just how much — and just how quickly — South Carolina’s tech sector has grown since the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic.
About 6.5% of South Carolina’s employment base can be traced back to tech.
For another metric, employment in South Carolina’s tech firms has grown twice as fast as total employment in the past decade, according to data compiled in SC Competes’ 2024 Economic Impact of SC Tech study.
“We’ve seen dramatic growth in recent years, and the tech cluster overall is continuing to expand its footprint in South Carolina,” Dr. Joey Von Nessen said.
Von Nessen is a research economist at University of South Carolina’s Darla Moore School of Business and author of the SC Competes study.
The 2024 study presented in North Augusta as part of SC Decoded is only the second of its kind, the original research having been published in 2020 and using data that only went up to 2019. In other words, using data that didn’t capture the impacts of the pandemic on the tech industry in South Carolina.
“This is a fairly new cluster; it’s one that’s evolving and it’s one of those exciting ones to really look at because it is new and evolving,” Von Nessen said.
Von Nessen contrasted tech with South Carolina’s already well-established industries, notably manufacturing, agribusiness and tourism. These industries, he said, “aren’t evolving in the way that tech is.”
Except in ways that trace back to tech: agriculture in South Carolina saw the largest annual percent increase in its reliance on tech during the 2019-2022 period, according to the study, with this industry being 27% more reliant on tech each of those four years versus the annual 8% of the preceding decade.
Most of the state’s industry sectors have seen a greater annual percentage increase in reliance on tech since the pandemic, except manufacturing and finance, two sectors that already heavily relied on it.
And the data, the trends, captured in this study are ones that workforce professionals and tech insiders have repeatedly said are here to stay.
In part because of the steady refinement in Artificial Intelligence. In part because of the booming activity of e-Commerce.
This year’s SC Competes study shows that growth in e-Commerce is a permanent shift in purchasing activity since the pandemic. Online sales accounted for about 10% of all sales in the U.S. at the end of 2019 and surged to just over 16% in the first half of 2020.
A short-lived blip following the pandemic saw the share of online sales drop to 14% in 2022 before bouncing back to that 2020 peak of 16% this year.
Tech is “at a really good transition position where I think the trajectory is up,” said Jamie DeMent, director of SC Tech at the South Carolina Council on Competitiveness (SC Competes). “The passion and support of it is on the rise as well.”
SC Decoded, the conference that SC Competes just hosted at the Crowne Plaza in North Augusta, had about 220 attendees and a dozen exhibitors.
SC Decoded acts as a forum for the free flow of communication: presenters and vendors show what they’re doing. Businesses learn how they might gain a competitive edge. Economic developers seek out partnerships that might move South Carolina forward. Education leaders gain insight into how they can promote workforce training that brings the next generation up to meet the demands of business.
That diversity of professionals — and the fact that more than 40 students got to bend the ears of C-Suite pros, entrepreneurs and academia this year — contributes to an energy that DeMent said is needed to get traction in economic development.
And having this year’s conference in North Augusta was an added boon, she said. Many didn’t know about the “relationships that were happening across borders between Georgia and South Carolina when it comes to the development of cybersecurity, defense, military work… which all intertwines with how tech is growing,” she said.
So much so that North Augusta received through South Carolina’s 2020 settlement with U.S. Department of Energy $15 million for building infrastructure that could help support Fort Eisenhower and the Georgia Cyber Center in Augusta.
DeMent stressed that all the hype for tech doesn’t necessarily mean being “stuck in a room doing 0’s and 1’s,” and that the tech sector “is a bigger conversation than just those pieces.”
That nearly $52 billion that is tech’s annual economic impact in South Carolina (and the 143,000 South Carolinians employed in tech) isn’t a limited representation of tech workers at tech firms or direct economic activity by these same tech firms.
It’s project managers and sales, and other “non-tech” workers who are employed at tech firms. It’s also the data scientists and support specialists at non-tech firms.
So, while the “data implies that tech workers now comprise a greater percentage of the average company’s workforce,” according to the study, there’s still plenty room for other occupations that might have some tech background but that are more reliant on soft skills that DeMent said can take a person from entry level to the mid- or senior level.
And about Artificial Intelligence: don’t be spooked, she said.
“AI isn’t necessarily taking jobs, it’s dispersing them,” she said. “it’s going to be a different pipeline of jobs with the value of AI.”