Maryland is leading this fight, which seems like it goes against common sense. There is a local study from earlier this year that says Maryland has the highest risk of losing jobs to AI of any state in the country. That’s a strange difference, and it looks like the state decided to take it personally.
Governor Wes Moore announced on June 25th a partnership with RAISE US, a national nonprofit backed by some of the biggest names in tech, like Microsoft and OpenAI. AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler is also a part of this unusual alliance. It’s the group’s clear, if not simple, goal to create the tools and systems that will help American workers survive and, ideally, thrive in an economy that is changing quickly because of AI, faster than any retraining program was designed to handle.
The goal of the initiative is something to think about for a while. In simple terms, Gina Raimondo, co-founder of RAISE US and former U.S. Secretary of Commerce, said that the U.S. has a technology strategy for AI competition but not yet a people strategy. She says that gap is not a small mistake. This is the kind of structural failure that gets worse over time, taking years to become obvious.
In Maryland, the partnership wants to come up with new ways to help people transitioning between jobs, come up with new ways to encourage companies to retrain and re-hire workers who have lost their jobs, and create an accelerator to help those workers start their own businesses. It is planned to make Service Year Option pathways available in more fields, like healthcare and education. There will also be a competition for career transition models that are worth keeping an eye on. The big question is still whether or not all of it actually starts up and grows to the right size.
It’s hard not to notice that the timing seems planned. Moore has been getting ready for this. The government announced earlier this year that it would spend $4 million to increase hands-on training in cybersecurity and other areas it calls “lighthouse industries.” Beginning in February, the Lighthouse Industries and AI Internship program put college seniors and recent graduates in touch with opportunities to learn by doing in the fields of technology, manufacturing, aerospace, life sciences, and more. All of these actions together don’t seem like random policy announcements, but rather like the government is trying to put together something that makes sense.
Former Indiana governor and co-chair of the RAISE US board Eric Holcomb makes a point that goes beyond the words in the press release: this work is done at the state level, with employers’ help, not because the federal government says it has to be done. That observation is true in the real world. Federal AI policy has stayed scattered, with contracts going to different agencies and no single plan for how to deal with the workforce side of the problem. The states that act quickly and clearly now might be ahead years from now.
Maryland’s bet here seems to be both a financial and a symbolic one. Making a name for yourself as the state that took AI disruption seriously and did more than just talk about it can help you get employers, talent, and federal attention. The most important test is whether the programs actually help real workers—the kind of people who will go to retraining classes and hope that the next job is still open when they finish.
The honest answer is that none of this is fully known yet as to whether it will be enough. The change that Raimondo talks about is already happening. The programs are just getting started. But the speed with which Maryland is acting makes it seem like someone is at least paying attention to the issue, which is more than most states can say right now.
