AI's biggest names are pooling resources to help U.S. workers survive the transition. Here's what employers need to know
America’s AI industry has never quite done anything like this before. On Thursday, a group of competing technology giants announced they’d set aside their rivalry to co-fund one of the most ambitious workforce transition efforts the country has seen in decades.
RAISE US, a new nonpartisan nonprofit, launched with more than $500 million raised and a goal of reaching $1 billion. It’s backed by Amazon, Microsoft, the OpenAI Foundation, Anthropic, Bank of America, General Motors, IBM, and Eli Lilly, among others. The organization is co-chaired by Gina Raimondo, former U.S. commerce secretary and Rhode Island governor, and Eric Holcomb, former governor of Indiana.
The coalition is built on a premise that’s hard to argue with but difficult to act on: artificial intelligence will disrupt the American workforce at a scale and speed that neither Congress nor most employers have adequately prepared for.
“We’re talking about a certain level of unemployment that could destabilize our country and our democracy,” Raimondo said. “If you want to lead the world in AI, you have to take action to make sure our democracy doesn’t crumble.”
“This is an independent effort,” she added. “It’s the first one I know of where competitors in the tech industry have put aside their competition to say, ‘We’re going to write big checks and, in the service of our country, do what we can to figure out this transition.’”
What employers are already doing
The launch matters because it puts a spotlight on a challenge that HR leaders are already managing inside their own organizations, with or without outside help.
Microsoft has been testing a retention model that’s worth attention. Rather than eliminating entry-level legal roles as AI changes the function, the company has been cross-training those workers across different parts of the organization and building their AI skills so they can be repositioned as the technology evolves.
“You can think of doing that with almost any job we have,” said Brad Smith, vice chair and president of Microsoft. “It creates an opportunity to transfer people from jobs that are being eliminated to jobs that are being created.”
That thinking is gaining traction more broadly. According to EY’s U.S. AI Pulse Survey, 38% of employers that have invested in and benefited from AI are reinvesting those productivity gains into upskilling and reskilling their existing employees, rather than simply cutting headcount. The data behind how employers are managing AI-driven workforce change tells a more nuanced story than the headlines suggest.
The picture from SHRM’s 2026 State of AI in HR report adds useful texture. Among organizations where AI has been deployed, 57% of HR professionals reported frequent upskilling or reskilling opportunities for employees, 39% reported shifts in job responsibilities, and just 7% reported job displacement. At the same time, 92% of CHROs anticipate AI will be further integrated into the workforce this year, with 87% forecasting greater adoption within HR processes, up from 83% in 2025. The pace of change is putting real pressure on workforce planning at every level.
A state-by-state strategy
RAISE US will work with governors in Arkansas, Connecticut, Maryland, and Utah as a starting point, a deliberately bipartisan mix of states. The theory is straightforward. States control community colleges, credentialing systems, and business incentives, and those levers most directly determine whether employers retrain workers or let them go.
In Arkansas, the group is backing an AI-powered career navigation platform called Arkansas LAUNCH. In Maryland, the initiative will expand a “service year” for recent high school graduates to build experience in fields with labor shortages, including health care. A lean team of roughly 15 staff and consultants will oversee the pilot programs.
The organization also runs a policy lab funded by philanthropies rather than corporations, a structural choice designed to keep its recommendations independent from its corporate sponsors. Full details on the structure and anchor partners are in the RAISE US launch statement via the Rockefeller Foundation.
“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,” Raimondo said. “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 harder question
Workforce retraining has a troubled track record. Raimondo has called past federal efforts “ineffective,” and research consistently shows that long-term outcomes are constrained by the limited availability of high-paying positions for workers without college degrees.
Jack Clark, co-founder and head of public benefit at Anthropic, didn’t sidestep the uncertainty.
“AI is going to change the economy in ways that are hard to anticipate,” Clark said. “RAISE US is going to build some of the infrastructure we’ll need to navigate AI’s economic impacts, giving us the tools needed to take advantage of its benefits and see and deal with its potential disruptions.”
The scale of the challenge is already visible in the labor market. The Bipartisan Policy Center’s AI Skills Dashboard, powered by Lightcast, found that U.S. job postings requiring AI skills grew 144% year over year as of April 2026. That’s a data point worth sitting with.
There’s also the question of whether AI will create jobs at the rate it displaces them. The debate playing out in Washington ranges from Senator Bernie Sanders’ proposal to redirect stock value from top AI firms into a public fund, to calls for shifting tax burdens from payroll to computing power. RAISE US is staking a more measured position, one that emphasizes pathways to new work over income support, and keeps organized labor at the table through AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler’s seat on its board.
Understanding why more managers are now open to replacing employees with AI is one piece of the puzzle. Knowing what AI upskilling programs actually look like in practice is another. RAISE US is trying to answer both at once.
Raimondo has drawn a historical parallel that’s hard to dismiss. She’s pointed to the Committee for Economic Development, a business coalition formed in 1942 to plan for the reabsorption of American soldiers into a peacetime economy, as a model for what private-sector coordination can achieve when government is too slow to act.
Whether $500 million and a handful of state pilots can blunt a disruption of this magnitude is the question RAISE US now has to answer. But the launch itself sends a clear message: the companies building this technology aren’t willing to leave the workforce transition entirely to chance.
