Amna Nawaz:

As businesses rapidly adopt artificial intelligence to boost productivity and economic growth, parallel fears of a wave of job displacement continue to grow.

One Reuters/Ipsos poll last year found over 70 percent of Americans fear A.I. will lead to permanent job loss, raising questions about what's being done to prepare workers, companies, and local economies for what's to come.

A new nonprofit called RAISE US aims to bring together states, major businesses, and A.I. firms to do just that. It's a bipartisan effort co-founded by Republican Eric Holcomb, the former two-term governor of Indiana, and Democrat Gina Raimondo, former secretary of commerce under President Biden and former governor of Rhode Island.

I spoke with Gina Raimondo all of this yesterday.

Secretary Raimondo, welcome to the "News Hour." Thanks for being with us.

Gina Raimondo, Former U.S. Secretary of Commerce: Thank you. Nice to be with you.

Amna Nawaz:

So tell us what's already in the works when it comes to this new effort called RAISE US. You're working with four pilot states, Arkansas, Maryland, Utah, and Connecticut, to roll out initiatives. What does that look like?

Gina Raimondo:

Yes, thank you.

So we have a single mission. We want to do our part to make sure that the U.S. leads the global A.I. competition, but without leaving America's workers behind. And, to do that, I think we need like a deliberate, planned transition. And so that's what this is about.

So -- and also it has to be an all-hands-on-deck moment, right? We need the A.I. companies to be part of the solution. We need America's biggest and best companies to be part of the solution. We need policy changes to support workers, to provide incentives for companies, not just to lay folks off.

And we need very significant changes in the way we do work force training. So we don't have the solutions. I'm sorry to say I'm not launching this with a solution. But we believe it's a time in America to do something big and bold, so Americans aren't left behind. And we're bringing everybody together to get to get that done.

Amna Nawaz:

So why these four states in particular? Very different states, different populations, different politics, for sure. Are you trying to show that this can work and should work everywhere?

Gina Raimondo:

Yes, exactly.

So, like any start-up, which is what we are, we begin with the coalition of the willing, and these are four states, two Democrats, two Republicans, all over the country. These governors have raised their hand to say they want to work with us to make sure that their states are A.I.-ready and the people of their states don't get left behind.

These are just the first four. You know, I hope, a year from now, we have many more. This isn't a Democrat-Republican issue. This is an American issue. I don't think that this country is prepared for this transition. Unemployment insurance was created 100 years ago in the Great Depression. It hasn't been updated since. It needs to be updated.

College is largely the same as it was 50, 60, 70 years ago. So what we are trying to do here, it's ambitious, but we're trying to, like I said, have an all-hands-on-deck effort. We want to design some new policies and then pilot them in these states with a coalition of companies to see what works and scale what works.

Amna Nawaz:

I want to ask you more about those companies and their involvement, because you have some foundation support, but some big-name corporate partners already on board, and I know the list continues to grow.

We see a few here, including Accenture, Anthropic, Bank of America, IBM, UPS. You have talked recently about the need for companies to be invested in the transition. I just want to play a little clip of what you had to say in a recent TED Talk. Take a listen.

Gina Raimondo:

Right now, the incentives are such that a company lays a lot of people off today, and their stock price surges tomorrow. It is too easy to hit the easy button of layoffs. Companies need different incentives. Quite frankly, we need a new system where it's more expensive to abandon workers than to retrain them.

Amna Nawaz:

So, Secretary Raimondo:, for companies who are worried about their bottom line, how do you incentivize them to be involved in this transition?

Gina Raimondo:

Yes.

So, again, this is exactly what we want to do, work with employers, work with states, figure out new ideas. But you could imagine it's productive for a state to give a tax incentive of some kind to companies that redeploy workers, instead of laying them off.

We have to find a path whereby companies can both implement A.I. so they're innovative, but also continue to employ Americans in these companies. I'm somebody who spent four years getting the CHIPS Act passed and working to get semiconductor manufacturing back in the U.S.

Why did we lose it in the first place? Because the market did not price in national security. And so company after company after company shut down manufacturing, sent those jobs to China or Taiwan, and 20 years later we woke up massively vulnerable, and now we are spending tens of billions of dollars of taxpayer money to incentivize companies to manufacture again.

Let's not make that mistake now. I don't want to allow every company to act individually, and we wake up in five years wishing that we had had a planned transition, which is in everyone's interest. Quite frankly, it's in every company's interest.

So this is an effort to get ahead of it before we regret not having a deliberate transition.

Amna Nawaz:

If I can ask too, I know some of this mission is more personal for you. You have known what it's like to live through that job loss that your father went through during a different period of American economic transition.

Tell me how that informs this work you do now and what you're trying to avoid in terms of history repeating.

Gina Raimondo:

In many ways, I think that what this country did when it just allowed manufacturing to wither, and millions of Americans, including my dad and all of his friends, they just lost their job, precipitously one day lost their job, and those jobs went overseas.

And at that time, my dad was in his late 50s, ironically, about the age that I am now. And he always said -- he always said, "I understand the economics of why we want to become more of a services country," but he would say, "I deserved a bridge to another chapter of work."

And millions of Americans felt that way. And it hurt, hurt our family. And it isn't just a paycheck. It's pride. It's confidence. It's communities. And I would argue that, today, still, decades later, this country is reeling from the mistakes we made by not having a proper plan to transition workers from manufacturing to something else, right?

It still plays out today in our divisive politics, increasingly violent politics. Whole communities were left behind. It did not have to happen that way. And we have to do better now.

Amna Nawaz:

That is former U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo joining us tonight.

Secretary Raimondo, good to speak with you. Thank you so much.

Gina Raimondo:

Thank you.