RAISE US, a new bipartisan nonprofit led by former Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and former Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb, launched Thursday with more than $500 million already committed to help U.S. workers adapt as artificial intelligence changes jobs across the economy.
The group is backed by major AI and technology companies, including Amazon, Anthropic, Microsoft, and the OpenAI Foundation, and plans to work first with Arkansas, Connecticut, Maryland, and Utah. Its stated goal is not simply to fund more training courses. RAISE US says it will test state-level workforce policies, employer incentives, career-transition supports, and AI-enabled education tools, then scale the approaches that lead to durable jobs and higher earnings.
The launch gives the AI industry a more organized answer to a question that has grown harder to dodge: if companies are racing to automate office work, customer service, software tasks, operations, and parts of professional services, who pays for the transition when workers need to move into new roles?
What RAISE US Is Testing First
According to the launch announcement published by The Rockefeller Foundation, RAISE US will work across four main areas: state partnerships, an employer coalition, education and training, and a policy lab. The practical work begins in states because governors and state agencies control much of the funding, credentialing, unemployment support, and employer incentive policy that shape workforce programs.
In Arkansas, RAISE US is supporting Arkansas LAUNCH, an AI-powered career navigation platform meant to connect students and job seekers with personalized learning and employer-linked pathways. In Maryland, the partnership will expand service-year pathways into fields such as healthcare and education, create a competitive fund for career-transition models, and build an accelerator for displaced workers who want to pursue entrepreneurship.
Maryland Gov. Wes Moore’s office separately described the partnership as part of the state’s effort to prepare workers, employers, and community organizations for an economy shaped by AI and other emerging technologies. The Maryland announcement says the RAISE US pilots will focus on corporate incentives to retrain and redeploy workers, transition support for people changing jobs, and training models tied to real employer demand.
Why the Tech Backing Matters
RAISE US is notable because it brings together both the companies building AI systems and companies adopting them. Amazon, Anthropic, Microsoft, and the OpenAI Foundation are listed as anchor partners, while a wider group includes AMD, Autodesk, Cisco, Cognizant, Deloitte, General Motors, IBM, Infosys, Mastercard, ServiceNow, UPS, Workday, Bank of America, and several philanthropies.
That mix matters because AI workforce disruption will not come only from frontier model labs. It will show up when banks automate back-office review, manufacturers redesign maintenance workflows, software teams change coding practices, hospitals adopt AI-assisted administration, and enterprise software vendors add agents to ordinary business systems. A training program that is disconnected from employer demand risks producing credentials that do not map to actual hiring.
The group says it will co-design pilots with employers and academic researchers, including tests of short-time compensation and wage insurance. Those ideas shift the discussion from generic reskilling toward a harder policy question: whether workers can afford to move between roles without absorbing the full financial shock themselves.
The Risk Is Execution, Not Awareness
There is no shortage of AI workforce warnings. The harder problem is building programs that can prove they work. Workforce initiatives often struggle when they reward enrollment instead of job outcomes, when credentials are too loosely tied to hiring, or when support ends before a worker has actually landed in a stable role.
RAISE US is trying to address that weakness directly by measuring employment, earnings, and advancement. It also says its policy lab will not be funded by corporate contributions, a useful separation if the group is going to evaluate policies that may affect the same companies backing the broader initiative.
The effort still faces obvious tests. Its first pilots need to show more than political buy-in and big-company logos. Workers will need clear pathways into jobs that are actually growing, employers will need incentives to retrain existing staff instead of cutting them, and states will need systems that can move faster than traditional education and unemployment programs usually do.
For the AI industry, the launch is also a reputational marker. OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, Amazon, and other backers are effectively acknowledging that the labor-market effects of AI cannot be handled by productivity rhetoric alone. The next question is whether a $500 million-plus coalition can produce models that states and employers will keep using after the first round of announcements fades.
