On June 25, former U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo launched Raise Us, an initiative to confront what she calls America’s missing piece: a people strategy to match its technology strategy. Raimondo explains how she built a $500 million war chest, secured bipartisan backing, and signed up launch partners from Bank of America to Anthropic before the ink was dry.
The problem of AI displacement is a serious one, and Raimondo’s solution is nothing short of a collective reinvention of how America trains, transitions, and values its workers. The window, she warns, is narrower than most people think.
This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by former Fast Company editor-in-chief Robert Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with today’s top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode.
So you’ve launched a new organization called Raise Us, an initiative partnering with governors, employers, and higher education to redesign how America helps workers in the age of AI. You’ve been talking for a while now about the need for a new approach. You wrote a New York Times op-ed about it. So what is it that Raise Us will actually do?
Raise Us is an independent, nonprofit, bipartisan, nonpolitical organization. We’re going to work with governors to see if we can change policies and experiment with new ideas around how we train employees, while also working with employers to get creative about how we can ensure an economy powered by AI is also an economy in which everyone can thrive.
Our fundamental thesis is that AI is an exciting technology. We want the U.S. to lead in the global AI competition, but I do think there’s a good chance there will be a transition. And in that transition, as jobs change, millions of Americans may have to change jobs, or their jobs may be eliminated. What we want to say now is: Employers, governors, colleges, training partners, labor unions—everybody in the boat—let’s innovate so that we can manage this transition without the bottom falling out for millions of Americans.
Do we know yet what AI-resilient jobs and skills are when the tech is moving so fast? Some people think we have to reframe the whole idea of work.
I don’t think we do. One thing I want to point out is that a lot of U.S. companies have excellent job-training initiatives. Maybe they sponsor credentials, or maybe they have initiatives to help small businesses get started. That isn’t what this is.
This is some of America’s best companies, including tech companies, and some of America’s best governors of both parties saying, “We’re not completely sure how this is going to roll out, but we are committed to making sure that we take care of American workers and that everyone is brought along in an AI economy.” And that means innovating, changing, and iterating as we go.
AI companies are raising billions, even trillions. You’ve raised around $500 million. Where did that come from, and how much do you need?
I look at this through the lens of, as former secretary, what does America have to do to lead this global AI competition vis-à-vis China, vis-à-vis the rest of the world? And we definitely need a tech strategy. You just pointed that out. These companies are investing tons of money in chips, compute, data centers, talent, models—the whole thing.
That’s our tech policy, and we need to win. We also need a people strategy that says, “Hey, I’m a call center worker. Hey, I’m a midlevel accountant, and I understand maybe an agent will do my job, but I deserve a chance to get another job. I deserve an opportunity in this country to have another chapter of work, even if AI changes my job.”
That’s what Raise Us is designed to do. We’re starting with, as you said, half a billion dollars. It’s going to require much more than that, but I’m pleased with where we’re beginning.
We want to run a series of experiments and pilots and see what works. A lot of the money has come from companies. Amazon has stepped up considerably, as have Anthropic and OpenAI. These companies are really forward-leaning. Bank of America, UPS—these are companies saying, “Hey, we’re in it. We are in it to work with you to make sure there’s a place for every American worker in an AI economy.”
When you talk about experimentation and pilots, it’s a very Silicon Valley, entrepreneurial approach, not something we often associate with government. . . . There’s been a lot of back-and-forth over whether we have a clear tech strategy. We can’t really wait for that to be solidified before we deal with the people side of it.
Look, I’ve been a governor. I’ve been a secretary. Government moves slowly. There’s very little incentive for an elected official to take risks. That’s why I think we need a new kind of organization like this one. And that’s also why I think we need a significant amount of philanthropy.
Because if I go to a governor and say, “Let’s pilot a new form of apprenticeship. Let’s pilot a new form of tax incentives for companies so they retrain and redeploy people instead of laying people off. Let’s pilot a form of wage support so workers can take a job at a lower wage but get topped up,” a governor is going to say, “I’ll try it because it’s good for our people,” but you’re going to have to provide a good deal of the risk capital, if you will, before any governor or any state legislature is going to open the public kitty and try something new.
Because ultimately the dollars are going to have to come from the government, but you’ve got to prove it first using philanthropic and, I guess, corporate money.
That’s our theory of the case. We think if we wait—certainly if we wait for the federal government to do something—gosh, we’ll be waiting a while. And even states, I think, will take too long. It’s just the way democracies work, especially today. We don’t have the highest-functioning form of democracy. Things take too long to get done.
So we are saying let’s use private capital and private industry, working with governors one at a time, to innovate, then see what works, and scale what works.
I don’t have a crystal ball, Bob. I have spent most of my time the past year or more talking to the best economists in the world, and to the CEOs and tech leaders of these AI companies. You ask everybody, “How’s this going to play out?” And the honest answer is, I don’t think anyone knows.
But every single time we’ve introduced a technological shock, there’s been disruption. I would like to use this moment of change to change the way we use our public money, like I said, to incentivize companies to train people so that we have a better system for training and transitioning workers who, no matter how you slice it, are going to have to transition more frequently in an AI economy.
Your partner at Raise Us is Eric Holcomb, the former Republican governor of Indiana. How conscious were you about needing a partner from the other side of the aisle?
Highly. Very conscious. First of all, I love Eric. I worked with him closely when we were both governors. Also, truth be told, of all the governors, including myself . . . his apprenticeship and community college and job-training initiatives were really the best in the country, and he had a phenomenal track record of working with business.
But yes, I wanted a Republican. By the way, [former House] Speaker [Paul] Ryan is an adviser to Raise Us, and we’re going to be working together with his foundation. I’m sure some CEOs of companies supporting us are themselves Republicans. I don’t know. I don’t really care. I just want to come together to solve problems for America.