Neal K. Shah: North Carolina's greatest tech opportunity isn't what the governor's proclamation says

A few weeks ago, Gov. Josh Stein proclaimed May 11, 2026, as Technology Day in North Carolina, our state formally celebrating its emergence as a technology hub. I read the proclamation with hope and gratitude, but also observed what's missing and thought hard about how it could be improved. It celebrates “advanced manufacturing, IT, fintech, software development, life sciences” - the usual suspects in any pitch deck about North Carolina's future. What it doesn't mention, anywhere, is the demographic transformation already remaking our state in real time.

I think that omission is the central story of life over the next 20 years, in our state and across the country - our population is rapidly aging and that is the biggest opportunity in technology innovation. Every day, more than two million North Carolinians spend at least fifteen hours a week providing unpaid care to an aging parent, spouse, or relative. By 2031, older adults in our state will outnumber children for the first time in our history. The 65-and-older population will grow from 1.8 million to 2.7 million by 2040; the 85-and-older population will grow 114 percent. Dementia cases here are projected to rise more than 50 percent in the next five years. As a participant in the state's Master Plan on Aging, I sit through briefings on these numbers regularly. As a CEO running a large caregiving platform, I see the families dealing with it, so to me, the numbers are not abstractions - they are the citizens of our state, our parents and our spouses.

Here is the contrarian thesis I'd offer every tech executive and employee in our state: the largest, most underserved, most defensible tech market of the next quarter-century is not “enterprise AI” or the next fintech category. It is the silver economy.

The global market for products and services tailored to people 60 and over is now valued at $4.2 trillion, the U.S. share alone is $1.6 trillion, and Harvard projects 4.6 million unfilled care-worker jobs nationally by 2032. It is an enormous unmet need, and an opportunity for innovation focus.

And, no state is better positioned to lead it than ours. We rank #4 nationally for the fastest increase in tech occupations and #1 for the share of women in our tech workforce. Duke, UNC, NC State, and NC Central produce healthcare and AI talent in adjacent buildings. We were the 11th state to join AARP's Network of Age-Friendly States, and the All Ages, All Stages NC plan is already in motion. We have every ingredient of a category-defining cluster - all except a coordinated decision to build one.

Three modest changes would reset the trajectory. First, NC TECH and the Governor's office should add aging and AgeTech as a named focus area in next year's proclamation and the State of the Technology Industry Report - naming a sector matters more than people think. Second, the One North Carolina Small Business Program should explicitly carve out an AgeTech track. Third, our research universities should formalize industry pipelines connecting healthcare and computer science students to elder-care innovation. The talent supply is here and I think we need to build the on-ramp.

On May 11, the tech community gathered to celebrate what North Carolina has built. We should. The growth is real and so is the talent. But somewhere in that room was an engineer whose mother was just diagnosed with Alzheimer's, a founder whose father moved into assisted living, and a CIO whose wife quit her job to become a full-time caregiver for an aging parent. They are the future of the silver economy, whether we plan for it or not. Will North Carolina choose to lead it, or watch another state realize the opportunity? A decade from now, it will be clear that the most important technology market of our era was sitting in our own living rooms the entire time.

I hope we are the ones who saw it first.

Neal K. Shah is a healthcare researcher focused on caregiving for the aging population. He is an NIH-funded Principal Investigator on the YayaGuide AI for Dementia Caregiver Training project that he started at Johns Hopkins. Neal is the CEO of CareYaya, a social enterprise providing affordable eldercare, and serves on North Carolina’s Steering Committee on Aging.