Israel and AI: a Conversation With Nathan Tsror
On Tuesday, October 6th, Nathan Tsror (Economic Minister, North America, and Head of TradeIL – Israel Economic Mission to the USA – East Coast) joined the Philadelphia-Israel Chamber of Commerce to discuss how Israel’s Artificial Intelligence boom has affected the country’s business and tech spheres.
Israel has enabled AI growth and development through the Israel Innovation Authority's launch of the Israeli National AI Program. This collaborative, holistic, and cross-ministerial effort for securing Israel’s long-term leadership in AI, is working on creating a long-term strategy, providing massive investments for AI infrastructure, and promoting an AI supportive environment.
This program was established alongside the National AI Directorate—headed by Erez Askal, a retired IDF brigadier general who previously led the military’s Digital Transformation Directorate and commanded Unit 9900, its visual intelligence unit—with the goals of ensuring that the State of Israel is a global superpower in the field and guaranteeing the prosperity of the Israeli economy and public. These goals focus on infrastructure, talent, public-sector adoption, and governance.
According to Stanford's 2024 AI Index, Israel ranks among the highest in AI talent concentration per capita globally. This summer, 10D Ventures published their “Israeli Physical AI Map” breaking down 125 Israeli startups in the different segments for AI use-cases across the application and infrastructure layers of Physical AI. In 2025, Remagine Ventures published an updated version of their Israeli Gen AI map, painting the picture of where 325 startups sit in this novel ecosystem and which have been acquired.
Noting that Israel’s contribution to global AI began well before the recent generative AI boom, Mr. Tsror highlighted how companies such as Mobileye helped bring computer vision into everyday driving; Aidoc brought AI into clinical workflows; Gong made AI analysis part of how businesses understand customer conversations; Wix made AI-assisted website creation accessible to small businesses; and Run:ai helped organizations manage the computing resources needed to develop and deploy AI.
More recently, Nvidia just launched the Applied AI Architecture Group, a research team based at the Nvidia Israeli Development Center which will focus on AI research for science and medicine. Together, these companies illustrate Israel’s longstanding role in turning AI research into practical technologies used around the world.
Mr. Tsror ended his presentation with a slide proclaiming how "Israeli tech delivers, no matter what". We at the PICC couldn't agree more.
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