Nonprofit aims to help displaced workers as businesses adopt artificial intelligence

Key Concepts

• Raise Us: A bipartisan nonprofit coalition focused on managing the transition of the American workforce in the age of Artificial Intelligence.
• AI-Ready States: A pilot program involving Arkansas, Maryland, Utah, and Connecticut to test workforce transition policies.
• Workforce Redeployment: The strategy of retraining and moving employees into new roles within a company rather than resorting to layoffs.
• Incentive Alignment: The concept of restructuring economic policies (such as tax incentives) to make it more financially viable for companies to retrain workers than to terminate them.
• Planned Transition: A proactive, multi-stakeholder approach to economic shifts to prevent the social and political fallout associated with past industrial declines.

---

1. Main Topics and Objectives

The video discusses the launch of Raise Us, a bipartisan initiative co-founded by former Indiana Governor Eric Holcomb and former U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo. The organization aims to address the widespread anxiety—cited by a Reuters/Ipsos poll as affecting over 70% of Americans—that AI will lead to permanent job displacement.

Core Objectives:

• Ensuring the U.S. maintains global leadership in AI.
• Preventing the "left behind" phenomenon by facilitating a deliberate, planned economic transition.
• Creating an "all hands on deck" environment involving AI firms, major corporations, state governments, and policymakers.

2. Pilot Programs and State Involvement

Raise Us has launched in four pilot states: Arkansas, Maryland, Utah, and Connecticut.

• Strategy: By selecting states with diverse political landscapes and populations, the coalition aims to prove that AI-readiness is a non-partisan, national imperative.
• Methodology: The organization acts as a "startup," building a coalition of the willing to design, test, and scale new workforce policies.

3. Corporate Partnerships and Economic Incentives

The initiative includes major corporate partners such as Accenture, Anthropic, Bank of America, IBM, and UPS.

• The "Easy Button" Problem: Secretary Raimondo argues that current market incentives reward companies for layoffs, as stock prices often surge following workforce reductions.
• Proposed Solutions:
  • Implementing tax incentives for companies that prioritize redeploying workers over firing them.
  • Moving away from individual corporate decision-making toward a collective, planned transition to avoid the vulnerabilities seen in the semiconductor industry.

4. Historical Context and Personal Motivation

Secretary Raimondo draws a direct parallel between the current AI revolution and the decline of U.S. manufacturing.

• Case Study (Manufacturing): She notes that the U.S. lost its semiconductor manufacturing edge because the market failed to "price in national security." This resulted in a reliance on foreign supply chains (China/Taiwan) and the eventual need for massive taxpayer-funded subsidies (the CHIPS Act) to recover.
• Personal Impact: Raimondo shares the experience of her father, who lost his manufacturing job in his late 50s. She emphasizes that the failure to provide a "bridge to another chapter of work" for workers like her father led to the erosion of community pride, confidence, and the current state of political divisiveness in the U.S.

5. Notable Quotes

• "We want to do our part to make sure that the US leads the global AI competition, but without leaving America's workers behind." — Gina Raimondo
• "It is too easy to hit the easy button of layoffs. Companies need different incentives. Quite frankly we need a new system where it's more expensive to abandon workers than to retrain them." — Gina Raimondo
• "I don't want to allow every company to act individually and we wake up in 5 years wishing that we had had a planned transition." — Gina Raimondo

6. Synthesis and Conclusion

The primary takeaway is that the U.S. is currently unprepared for the structural shifts caused by AI. Existing systems, such as unemployment insurance (designed during the Great Depression) and traditional college education models, are outdated. Raise Us seeks to bridge this gap by fostering a collaborative environment where the government provides the policy framework (incentives) and the private sector commits to human capital investment. The ultimate goal is to avoid the historical mistakes of the manufacturing era, ensuring that technological progress does not come at the cost of social stability and worker dignity.