Former U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo launched Raise Us on June 25 with a $500 million war chest, aiming to give Americans a people strategy to match the U.S. technology push in the AI race. The independent, nonprofit, bipartisan, nonpolitical initia
On June 25, former U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo walked into a problem that’s becoming harder to ignore: the speed of AI change. She said the United States needs a people strategy that can keep up with its technology strategy—before the economic fallout from job transitions hits “the bottom” for millions of Americans.
Raimondo’s answer is Raise Us. an independent. nonprofit. bipartisan. nonpolitical organization she launched as a coordinated push with governors. employers. and higher education to redesign how the country trains and transitions workers in the age of AI. She paired the launch with a signal of scale: she built a $500 million war chest. secured bipartisan backing. and signed up launch partners that include Bank of America and Anthropic.
Raise Us says it starts from a simple premise: AI is an exciting technology, and the U.S. should lead in global competition. But Raimondo also argues there is a realistic chance that—alongside new opportunities—many jobs will be reshaped or eliminated. In that transition. she said. millions of Americans may need to change jobs. and employers. governors. colleges. training partners. and labor unions have to “innovate” to manage the shift without destabilizing livelihoods.
The group’s plan, Raimondo said, is not another general-purpose job-training program. A lot of U.S. companies, she noted, already have initiatives that sponsor credentials or help small businesses start. Raise Us is framed differently: it brings in “some of America’s best companies. ” including tech companies. alongside “some of America’s best governors of both parties. ” to test new ways to ensure an AI-powered economy remains an economy in which “everyone can thrive.”.
Central to the effort is experimentation. Raimondo described Raise Us running “a series of experiments and pilots and see what works.” The money. she said. is meant to be used first to prove approaches before scaling them. Many ideas—she argued—will involve risk that governments are unlikely to take quickly on their own.
Her rationale is blunt about how public institutions behave. Raimondo said she has been a governor and a secretary, and that government often moves slowly. She also said there is “very little incentive for an elected official to take risks.” In her view. if a governor is asked to pilot apprenticeship models. new tax incentives for companies to retrain and redeploy workers instead of laying them off. or wage support that tops up pay when someone takes a lower-wage job. the state will only do it if outside risk capital helps cover the uncertainty.
That is where philanthropic and corporate backing, she argued, come in. Raimondo said the theory is that if Raise Us waits for federal action—or even relies on states moving on their own—the delay could be long enough to miss the moment. She described democracies as systems that take too long to get things done. especially now. and said the transition pressure from AI does not pause.
Raimondo put the stakes in economic terms, too. While AI companies have raised “billions. even trillions. ” she said her $500 million effort is designed to support both sides of a competition the U.S. cannot afford to treat separately: the tech side—chips. compute. data centers. talent. and models—and the people side. which she described as making sure a worker who faces displacement still gets “another chapter” of work.
She spoke directly about the uncertainty at the heart of her project. “I don’t have a crystal ball,” she said, and added that she has spent the past year or more speaking with top economists and AI CEOs. Everyone, she said, offers the same honest answer: nobody really knows how it will play out.
What she wants, then, is to use the disruption of technological shocks as an opportunity to change how public money is used—specifically by incentivizing companies to train people, improve systems for transitioning workers, and prepare for more frequent job changes in an AI economy.
The politics of the coalition are also part of the design. Raimondo said her partner in Raise Us is Eric Holcomb. the former Republican governor of Indiana. and that she was “highly” conscious of the need for a partner from the other side of the aisle. She said she loves Holcomb and worked with him closely when both were governors. She also pointed to Holcomb’s apprenticeship and community college and job-training initiatives. calling them among the best in the country and citing his “phenomenal” record of working with business.
Raimondo also named former House Speaker Paul Ryan as an adviser to Raise Us. saying the effort will work together with his foundation. She did not frame the coalition as a test of ideology. She said she expects CEOs supporting the initiative could include Republicans. and then added she “doesn’t really care” about party label—only about solving problems for America.
Behind the planning language and the big funding number, the core tension in Raise Us is simple: the U.S. is pouring resources into AI technology, but Raimondo believes the worker side has been treated like an afterthought. The organization’s bet is that pilots funded by private industry and philanthropy can bridge the gap—fast enough for the transition to be managed. not suffered.
Gina Raimondo Raise Us AI economy worker retraining job transition bipartisan organization Eric Holcomb Paul Ryan Bank of America Anthropic Amazon OpenAI UPS philanthropy