A new bipartisan nonprofit called RAISE US is launching with more than $500 million to steer workers into new training programs as artificial intelligence accelerates job losses and reshapes the workplace around corporate and state priorities. Founded by former Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, a Democrat, and former Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb, a Republican, the group says it will pilot programs and incentives meant to help American workers pivot into new careers in an economy that will increasingly be automated by artificial intelligence.
Who Pays for the Machine Shift
The people at the bottom are the ones being told to adapt. RAISE US is focusing on partnering with states and major employers rather than the federal government, a choice that keeps the response inside the same institutional channels that are already driving the change. The nonprofit is initially partnering with officials in Arkansas, Connecticut, Maryland and Utah, along with several of America’s largest companies and charitable organizations. It says it wants to develop policies that connect schools more closely to employers, so layoffs can be replaced by the potential for new jobs with higher incomes. It is also exploring changes to corporate taxes and other incentives with the goal of keeping people working.
Raimondo, who was the former Democratic governor of Rhode Island and played a formative role in setting AI policy as the Biden administration’s commerce secretary, will be the nonprofit’s CEO. The advisory board includes former Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan, billionaire investment manager Stephen Schwarzman, AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler and the economists David Autor, Erik Brynjolfsson and Raj Chetty. The lineup shows the usual arrangement: political insiders, corporate power, and labor leadership all crowded around the same table while automation advances.
The Employers at the Center
Among the companies serving as anchor partners with RAISE US are Amazon, Microsoft, Anthropic, the OpenAI Foundation and Bank of America. Other employers involved in the project include UPS, General Motors, Eli Lilly, Mastercard, chipmaker AMD, Cisco and IBM. These are the same kinds of institutions that stand to benefit from AI-driven restructuring, now helping design the training and incentives meant to soften the blow.
Raimondo said in an interview, “We’re talking about a certain level of unemployment that could destabilize our country and our democracy. If you want to lead the world in AI, you have to take action to make sure our democracy doesn’t crumble.” Holcomb said, “Good things tend to happen when you convert have-nots into haves.” Their language frames the issue as a matter of preserving the existing order, not challenging the power that is producing the disruption.
An April analysis by the Boston Consulting Group estimated that roughly half of U.S. jobs will be reshaped by AI over the next few years. The analysis said that as many as 25 million jobs could be eliminated in the U.S. over the next five years. Goldman Sachs, in March, separately released an estimate that a quarter of U.S. work hours could be automated by AI. Those figures hang over the nonprofit’s launch like a warning label on a machine that keeps running anyway.
What the Bosses Call Adaptation
The article said AI could fill roads with driverless trucks, create factories staffed by robots and supplant office workers, lawyers and doctors. President Donald Trump has expressed little anxiety about the possibility of AI displacing human workers. Asked on Tuesday ahead of touring a Mack Trucks factory in Pennsylvania if AI could cause truckers to lose their jobs, Trump told a reporter, “Right now, they’re not.” Trump said, “We have, right now, so many jobs that are going to be available and the biggest problem we have is getting the people. So we’re really doing spectacular.”
While AI-related investments have helped the economy, manufacturing has shed 68,000 jobs and the trucking transportation sector has cut 28,300 jobs since the start of Trump’s second term, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The numbers undercut the cheerful talk from the top, where the people making policy and the people profiting from automation can afford to describe upheaval as opportunity.
AI experts have warned of gaps between the transformations that AI could create and a 20th century social safety net of unemployment insurance and four-year college that seems ill-prepared for the scope, scale and speed of the change. Vivienne Ming, a neuroscientist who has written the book, “Robot-Proof: When Machines Have all the Answers, Build Better People,” said, “AI is now disrupting multiple sectors simultaneously, faster than any institution can respond.” Ming said she agrees with an argument by economists that the wealth generated by AI could create demand for more workers that could offset any job losses, but said the skills that matter in an AI economy go beyond professions such as plumbing or construction and involve curiosity and intellectual flexibility. She said, “Neither our education system nor our labor policies are building the foundational human capital that AI-era work actually requires.”
Raimondo said the new nonprofit wants to use states as a vehicle for testing ideas that Congress can later embrace as policies, paving the way for the possibility of more profound changes to both the tax code and the educational system. She said, “I don’t have a lot of hope for bold action by Congress in the next few years on this issue, and I don’t think we can wait a few years. I also think there are many examples in history that when the federal government does take action, they will look around at what has been working in states. I feel pretty confident that they will look at the work that we’ve done.” The plan is not to break with the system that is producing the crisis, but to test its next patch in the states and hope Congress copies it later.