RAISE US Launches With $500 Million to Retrain American Workers for the AI Economy

RAISE US Launches With $500 Million to Retrain American Workers for the AI Economy

America has a plan to win the race to build artificial intelligence. It does not yet have a plan for the people the technology leaves behind. A new bipartisan nonprofit unveiled June 25 wants to close that gap before the layoffs already rippling through offices and factories turn into something harder to reverse. It is a bet that the companies building AI can also blunt its fallout.

RAISE US, launched by former Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and former Indiana Governor Eric Holcomb, opens with more than $500 million in commitments and a target of $1 billion in multiyear pledges. Its purpose is narrow but enormous: help workers move into new careers as AI automates the ones they hold now. Raimondo, who helped shape federal AI policy in the Biden administration, will serve as chief executive; Holcomb, a Republican, is co-chair.

"America has a technology strategy for leading the global AI competition," Raimondo said. "It does not yet have a people strategy, and we cannot lead without one." In an interview she was starker: "We are 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 does not crumble."

The paradox at the center

The most striking feature of RAISE US is who is paying for it. Amazon, Anthropic, Microsoft and the OpenAI Foundation are anchor partners — the same companies racing to build the models economists warn could displace millions of workers. More than two dozen additional firms and philanthropies have signed on, including Bank of America, IBM, Cisco, General Motors, Eli Lilly, Mastercard, AMD, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Schwarzman Foundation and Pivotal.

That the builders of the disruption are financing the cushion is the effort's central paradox. OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman put the rationale plainly: "Helping people through the shifts that AI may bring to the economy is one of the most important things to start thinking through now." Amazon legal chief David Zapolsky was blunter about the timing: "The transition to an AI-driven economy will create enormous opportunity, but only if we invest now in helping workers develop the skills to seize it."

The threat is not hypothetical. A Boston Consulting Group analysis in April estimated that roughly half of U.S. jobs will be reshaped by AI within a few years, with as many as 25 million eliminated over five. Goldman Sachs has projected a quarter of U.S. work hours could be automated. Anthropic's Economic Index found that 35 percent of workers expect AI to do most of their job within 12 months. AI has been cited in roughly 88,000 U.S. job cuts in 2026 alone.

Critically, RAISE US is betting on labor's cooperation, not just capital's. AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler sits on the advisory board alongside former Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan, investor Stephen Schwarzman and economists David Autor, Erik Brynjolfsson and Raj Chetty — a coalition that spans party and picket lines.

A states-first approach

Rather than wait on Washington, RAISE US is starting in four states with bipartisan governors — Arkansas, Connecticut, Maryland and Utah. Each will serve as a testing ground for what the group calls outcome-driven pilots — programs judged by whether workers actually land better jobs, not by how many enroll.

In Arkansas, the group is backing LAUNCH, an AI-powered career-navigation system that connects students and job seekers to personalized training and employer-linked pathways. Maryland plans to expand service-year routes into healthcare and education and build an accelerator for displaced workers who want to start businesses. Across the pilots, the group is exploring wage insurance, tax incentives for companies that retrain workers instead of laying them off, and short-term credential programs tied to real employer demand rather than four-year degrees.

Microsoft says it has already been running a version of this playbook, cross-training entry-level lawyers and equipping them with AI skills so they can be redeployed. "It creates an opportunity to transfer people from jobs that are being eliminated to jobs that are being created," Microsoft President Brad Smith told The New York Times.

Do these programs work?

Here the optimism collides with an uncomfortable record. A study of more than 23 million participants in federal workforce programs found that retraining rarely moved workers into jobs less exposed to automation; they often ended up in roles just as vulnerable as the ones they left. Neuroscientist Vivienne Ming argues the problem runs deeper than curricula: "Neither our education system nor our labor policies are building the foundational human capital that AI-era work actually requires."

RAISE US is betting that tighter links between employers and training — and a focus on demonstrated skills over credentials — can beat that track record. Raimondo is notably skeptical of universal basic income, favored by some in Silicon Valley, preferring to keep people working rather than paying them not to. She sees the states as laboratories whose successes Congress might later adopt. "I do not have a lot of hope for bold action by Congress in the next few years on this issue, and I do not think we can wait a few years," she said.

What to watch

The launch capital buys time, not results. The real test is whether the four pilot states can produce hard evidence that retraining tied to employer demand actually lands workers in durable, less-automatable jobs — the outcome decades of federal programs failed to deliver. Watch, too, whether the corporate backers keep writing checks once their own products start eliminating the roles RAISE US is trying to backfill, and whether a coalition holding both the AFL-CIO and Stephen Schwarzman can hold together when the pilots force hard choices. For now, RAISE US has answered the easy question — whether anyone would fund a people strategy. The harder one, whether such a strategy can work, is still open.