Gina Raimondo’s new $500 million plan to help workers survive the AI economy

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 thei