A Heavyweight Coalition Around a Hard Problem
On June 26 a new national nonprofit called RAISE US went public, and its roster is hard to ignore. Former Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo is its CEO, former Indiana Governor Eric Holcomb is a co-founder, and the anchor partners are Amazon, Anthropic, Microsoft and the OpenAI Foundation. The mission is narrow and urgent: build workforce training and job-transition programs for the workers that artificial intelligence displaces. This is the labor-side counterpart to the model launches that dominate the headlines, and it carries unusual political and corporate firepower.
The framing came straight from Raimondo, who said America has a technology strategy for leading the global AI competition but does not yet have a people strategy, and cannot lead without one. We think that sentence is the whole pitch. The companies building the disruption are now helping fund the cushion for it, which is either enlightened self-interest or reputational insurance, and probably both. Either way it puts real money behind a problem that policy has mostly talked around.
The Money Is Real, the Target Is Bigger
RAISE US says it has secured more than 500 million dollars and is targeting 1 billion dollars in multi-year commitments. Beyond the anchor technology partners, the backer list runs through Bank of America, AMD, Autodesk, Cisco, Cognizant, IBM, Mastercard, ServiceNow, Workday and the Rockefeller Foundation. The breakdown between corporate and philanthropic dollars was not disclosed, which is the first thing a skeptical reader should flag. Half a billion announced is not half a billion deployed, and pledges have a way of stretching across years.
Still, the scale is meaningful for an edtech and workforce sector that has watched venture money drain out of consumer learning apps and rotate toward AI and reskilling. A billion-dollar reskilling vehicle backed by the largest AI vendors is a demand signal for training providers, community colleges and corporate-learning platforms. If RAISE US becomes a buyer and a distribution channel for workforce curriculum, it could shape which programs scale and which do not. That makes it a market mover, not just a charity.
Four States as the Proving Ground
The organization is starting with pilots in Arkansas, Connecticut, Maryland and Utah, a deliberately mixed set of states by geography and politics. The program menu is broad: reskilling and apprenticeships, career-navigation systems, wage insurance and short-time compensation, service-year routes into healthcare and education, advanced-manufacturing apprenticeships and entrepreneurship accelerators for displaced workers. That breadth is both a strength and a risk, because a coalition trying to do everything at once can struggle to prove any single thing works.
We would watch the wage-insurance and short-time-compensation pieces most closely, because those are the hardest to fund and the easiest to cut, yet they are what actually carries a worker through a transition. Training someone is the visible half of reskilling. Paying them while they retrain is the half that usually gets value-engineered away. Whether RAISE US protects those benefits under budget pressure will tell us how serious the people strategy really is.
An Advisory Board With Academic Weight
The advisory board lends the effort credibility that money alone cannot buy. It includes Khan Academy founder Sal Khan, MIT labor economist David Autor, Opportunity Insights director Raj Chetty, Harvard's Joseph Fuller and AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler. That is a rare combination of edtech, labor economics and organized labor at one table. Autor and Chetty in particular have spent careers measuring exactly the displacement and mobility dynamics RAISE US claims to address, which raises the bar for honest evaluation.
The presence of serious researchers cuts both ways. It signals that the group intends to measure outcomes rather than count enrollments, and it creates witnesses who can call out theater if the programs underdeliver. For executives and policymakers tracking AI's labor fallout, RAISE US is now the most concrete, best-funded attempt to build the safety net the technology arguably requires. The test is not the launch. It is whether the four pilots produce evidence anyone can trust by this time next year.
The Conflict-of-Interest Question
There is an obvious tension that RAISE US will have to manage in the open. The companies funding the cushion for AI displacement are the same companies building the technology that causes it. That is not disqualifying, and arguably the disruptors are the parties best positioned to pay, but it does create an incentive to define success narrowly and to favor training in the funders' own tools. A reskilling program steered by AI vendors can quietly become a customer-acquisition funnel dressed as workforce policy.
This is where the academic advisory board earns its keep. Independent economists and a labor leader at the table are the natural counterweight to vendor capture, provided their evaluations are public and binding rather than decorative. We would judge RAISE US over the next year on a single test of integrity: does it report outcomes that are inconvenient to its funders. If it does, it is a serious institution. If every result happens to flatter Amazon, Microsoft, Anthropic and OpenAI, the skepticism will be earned.
