Just how many jobs will AI upend? A new coalition of companies and policymakers said it is time to ready the U.S. workforce for major disruption, no matter the ultimate scale.
Business groups and lawmakers have said more must be done to prepare the workforce for potential upheaval.
To that end, the bipartisan consortium, which includes state governments, philanthropic groups and employers ranging from Amazon.com and Microsoft to Bank of America and Eli Lilly, is coming together to develop a new “people strategy” for the artifcial-intelligence era. Called RAISE US, it launches Thursday and will be led by former Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, who served under President Joe Biden, and former Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb, a Republican.
Its mandate, they said, isn’t just to build retraining programs but to reconsider decades-old policies such as unemployment insurance and act as a working lab for testing the most effective ways to transition workers to new fields. The group will explore corporate incentives for employers to hold on to workers whose jobs are disrupted by AI and prep them for new roles.
With AI “there’s an enormous amount of money and focus right now on winning the technology: the chips, the models,” said Raimondo, the group’s chief executive. “There’s not enough attention on securing the future for the American worker.”
U.S. workforce-development efforts tend to be highly fragmented across state governments and federal agencies, which can be confusing for job seekers. Some business leaders said a more-comprehensive approach is necessary, particularly for white-collar roles most vulnerable to AI.
“We’re going to need to scale, and scaling can never be done by single institutions,” said Brad Smith, vice chair and president at Microsoft.
The mission of the group is to “pull all the levers at once,” Raimondo said. That means teaming up with employers to find ways to help workers gain skills or new roles and joining with educators to roll out different types of training. It also plans to propose policy changes such as tweaking unemployment benefits to let displaced workers continue to get them while they, for instance, start new businesses with AI.
Business groups and lawmakers have warned that more must be done to prepare the U.S. workforce for potential upheaval. The Leadership Now Project, a group of more than 400 current and retired business executives, devoted several sessions at its annual spring meeting to AI’s potential threat to jobs, comparing it to the effects of globalization and offshoring in recent decades.
This time, though, “The scale of change and reshaping of jobs and careers is different—and more so than it has ever been, I think, in human history,” Holcomb said.
The RAISE US work will vary by state. In Maryland, the group plans to expand a service-year option in the state to help people gain exposure to such growing fields as healthcare. An effort in Arkansas will focus on supporting “an AI-powered career navigation platform.”
Holcomb and Raimondo said that they believe much good will come of AI but that it could still leave plenty of workers behind.
“I personally don’t believe there’ll be nothing for humans to do, so we’re just going to sit around and take up leisure time,” Raimondo said. “But I am worried—obviously, I wouldn’t be doing this if I weren’t worried.”
