TULSA — In a small building decorated with a colorful mural - which once served as a storage facility for block ice in the early days of Tulsa - a number of organizations work daily on helping craft the future of the city.

That includes Tulsa Innovation Labs, which helped lead a consortium of some 50 non-profits, schools, and businesses to win the official designation of “Tech Hub” from the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration.

[Hear the KRMG In-Depth Report on Tulsa’s designation as a Tech Hub HERE]

KRMG visited 3 N. Cheyenne Monday after learning of the Tech Hub designation for Tulsa, and spoke with Tulsa Innovation Labs’ managing director, Jennifer Hankins.

She said that the designation means the Tulsa Hub for Equitable and Trustworthy Autonomy (THETA) can now compete for $75 million in federal funding, which could potentially lead to a massive win for the local economy.

“Our proposal seeks to create 200,000 new jobs should we be funded,” Hankins told KRMG. “Sixty or so thousand of those will be women, and an additional 39,000 Black, Latino and Native American people will now have access to these jobs through the pathways that this funding can help create.”

Artificial intelligence and autonomous systems are already well-established, and the work force has to have the skills required to understand and utilize them, she said.

She doesn’t see autonomy as a job-killer, but admits that for many, the skills required to participate in the 21st Century workplace will involve a learning curve.

“A lot of our production workforce of today - machinists, advanced manufacturing - it’s not that those jobs are going to go away,” she said. “(But) a machinist will need to know ‘how do I deploy an autonomous system within the framework of my work?’ So it’s just that our workers are actually going to need new skills. Instead of trying to think about what’s an entirely new job, it’s about re-skilling and up-skilling in these technologies that we’re really going to be focused on.”

THETA now has until Feb. 29 of next year to complete its application for more federal funding, and Hankins seems confident that it’s possible Tulsa could bring that money home, though only five of the 31 tech hubs will get that funding.

“This is not a competition unlike we’ve been in before,” Hankins told KRMG. “This was also similar stats that we saw in our “Build Back Better” regional challenge that we won. So I don’t think this is out of reach for us.”