Former Governors Raimondo and Holcomb Launch RAISE US, Focused on AI Economy

Former Governors Raimondo and Holcomb Launch RAISE US, Focused on AI Economy

Gina Raimondo, the 40th U.S. Secretary of Commerce and 75th Governor of Rhode Island, and Eric Holcomb, the 51st Governor of Indiana, on Thursday announced the launch of RAISE US, a nonpartisan national organization that will partner with governors, employers, workers, and training organizations to help the American workforce make a successful transition to an AI economy. 

RAISE US will design and pilot new corporate incentives to retrain and redeploy workers, new approaches to support people through job transitions, and new training models tied to changing employer demand.

The organization will leverage private and philanthropic capital to scale what’s most effective and measure success by whether workers land and keep good jobs. RAISE US launches with more than two dozen of America’s largest companies and philanthropies behind it and with initial state partnerships in Arkansas, Connecticut, Maryland, and Utah.

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“America has a technology strategy for leading the global AI competition. It does not yet have a people strategy — and we cannot lead without one,” said Raimondo, who will serve as CEO of RAISE US. “If we build the best AI systems in the world and leave millions of Americans behind, we won’t have won anything; we’ll have automated our own decline. I believe AI will create new jobs and industries over time, but the transition could be disruptive, and it’s already underway. We shouldn’t fearmonger, but we can’t pretend our training and worker support systems are ready either. It’s time for innovative and practical solutions. This moment demands ambition, urgency, and creativity. We’ve assembled the country’s top companies, best economists, and bipartisan governors at a scale rarely seen — all to advance new ideas and incentives, pilot them with governors and business, and scale what works.”

According to the announcement from the Rockefeller Foundation, “AI is beginning to reshape work across nearly every industry, region, and level of education, while the country’s main tools for helping workers adapt were built for a bygone economy. The U.S. spends hundreds of billions of dollars a year on higher education, workforce training, and unemployment insurance, but too little of that funding is tied to outcomes. Our postsecondary system remains expensive, built largely for traditional college-aged students, and is only loosely tied to employer hiring.”

Eric Beane is the President & Chief Operating Officer. He previously served as Deputy Under Secretary at the U.S. Dept. of Commerce, and as Rhode Island COO and Secretary of Health and Human Services. 

Corporate incentives, too, need to change to encourage companies to retrain and redeploy the workers they already have. Promising local models have shown some success but have yet to scale nationally, and new models are needed.

“This isn’t red versus blue; it’s an all-hands-on-deck moment,” said Holcomb. “As governor, I made workforce development the centerpiece of my administration that helped train Hoosiers in every corner of the state. I learned this work gets done at the state level, in partnership with employers. RAISE US gives state leaders a playbook that connects more Americans with the skills and careers needed in the years ahead.”

Most efforts to help workers focus on singular pieces of the puzzle: a training program, a policy change, or an employer commitment. RAISE US is built to move all of them at once, working across government, employers, and education and training to design new models, pilot them with governors and employers, measure outcomes, and scale what works. It also puts AI to work directly, powering teaching, coaching, career navigation, and labor-market analytics. In doing so, RAISE US will help American workers exposed to technological disruption navigate transitions, find good jobs, and prosper.

RAISE US will serve as a national hub, backing and connecting with other efforts underway, rather than duplicating them. The organization operates across four core areas:

• State Partnerships: States largely control workforce policy and programming — the funding, credentialing, and oversight — as well as the corporate tax policy and business incentives in their states that shape whether employers retrain their workers or let them go. That makes them the right level of government to initiate action. RAISE US partners with governors to reorient public workforce and education infrastructure for a shifting labor market. In practice, that means earn-and-learn apprenticeships and short-term credentials mapped to real employer demand, public funding that rewards job outcomes rather than enrollment. It also means creating incentives that give employers a reason to retrain and redeploy workers rather than lay them off, and providing modern transition supports — from wage insurance to career navigation — so changing jobs no longer means financial ruin.

RAISE US is launching with initial partnerships in Arkansas, Connecticut, Maryland, and Utah — states that are out front nationally in preparing for the AI economy.  Neither of the former governor's home states was included in the initial launch. This bipartisan group of states will serve as the first proving grounds for outcome-driven pilots. Additional states will join in the months ahead.

• Employer Coalition: The companies deploying AI are also the ones with the most direct line of sight into where jobs are changing — and they need a workforce that can move into the new roles that AI creates. The RAISE US employer coalition asks something specific of its members: to be vocal public champions for workforce transition and to co-design the pilots that build a shared understanding of what effective worker transition looks like in practice. Crucially, the companies building AI sit at the table alongside the companies adopting it — the first time the technology’s leading developers have joined an independent effort to design and fund worker transition.
• Education and Training: AI is breaking the old tradeoff between cost and quality in education. RAISE US’ education and training partners are built to seize that moment. RAISE US will deploy flexible capital to scale AI-enabled, work-based training models that expand access to affordable, high-quality alternatives to traditional education. It will target the systemic gaps state and employer partners identify, back proven and emerging providers, and measure success by real outcomes: employment, earnings, and advancement.

Policy Lab: RAISE US will design new strategies that both support workers through career transitions and encourage employers to retrain and redeploy them. It will test these ideas, study what works, and promote proven solutions that help workers of all backgrounds succeed. The Policy Lab turns data-driven insights into actionable recommendations to scale policy innovations from ideas to national practice. The work of the Policy Lab will not be funded by any corporate contributions.