A non-profit organization has been launched in the US to retrain workers amid the threat of mass layoffs due to AI

A new bipartisan non-profit organization, RAISE US, has been created in the United States to retrain workers amid the accelerating automation of jobs with artificial intelligence, reports the Associated Press. The organization was founded by former US Secretary of Commerce, Democrat Gina Raimondo, and former Indiana Governor, Republican Eric Holcomb. RAISE US has more than $500 million to start with to fund new forms of education and training, focusing on partnerships with states and large employers rather than the federal government.

The organization will launch pilot programs in Arkansas, Connecticut, Maryland and Utah, together with local authorities and a number of the largest companies and charitable organizations in the United States. RAISE US is committed to developing policies that would better link schools with employers so workers displaced by automation can move into new, higher-paying positions, and is also considering changes to corporate taxation and other incentives to retain employment. Key company partners include Amazon, Microsoft, Anthropic, OpenAI Foundation and Bank of America, as well as UPS, General Motors, Eli Lilly, Mastercard, chipmaker AMD, Cisco and IBM.

Raimondo, who previously served as the Democratic governor of Rhode Island and shaped U.S. AI policy as secretary of commerce during the Biden administration, will lead RAISE US as CEO. The advisory board includes former House Speaker Paul Ryan, billionaire investor Stephen Schwarzman, AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler, and economists David Autor, Erik Brynjolfsson and Raj Chetty. Raimondo said:

“We are talking about a certain level of unemployment that could destabilize our country and our democracy.”

She added that if the US wants to remain a leader in AI, authorities need to act to prevent the collapse of democratic institutions. Holcomb, for his part, said that good things happen when “the have-nots are turned into the haves.”

The Boston Consulting Group estimated in April that AI will change the nature of about half of all U.S. jobs in the next few years, and that up to 25 million jobs could disappear within five years. Goldman Sachs separately estimated in March that artificial intelligence could automate a quarter of all work hours in the country. It was previously reported that, according to a study by MIT and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, AI is already technically capable of replacing 11.7% of US workers with a total annual salary of $1.2 trillion.

Since the start of President Donald Trump's second term, the US manufacturing industry has lost 68 thousand jobs, and the freight transport sector has lost 28.3 thousand, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports. Trump himself, answering a journalist’s question about whether AI could lead to truck drivers losing their jobs, said: “Not right now,” and added that the economy now, on the contrary, does not have enough workers to fill the available vacancies.

Neuroscientist Vivienne Ming, author of Robot-Proof, noted that AI is simultaneously disrupting multiple sectors of the economy faster than any institutions can respond, and that neither the US education system nor labor policies are teaching workers the skills that will actually be needed in an AI-driven economy. Raimondo hopes that RAISE US's state-level experiments can become a model for future federal solutions. According to her, she does not expect quick and bold steps from Congress on this issue, but she is confident that the federal authorities will, over time, be guided by what has worked in the states.