Working in the age of AI

If there's one thing I hear consistently, whether it's DR or independent, folks who don't even vote, it's that they understand the system is broken. They may not use words like Jerry Mandarin specifically, but they get the Congress seems to have stepped back from their day-to-day lives. They feel it.

“So as we think about our post-Trump future, I think it's important to see things from”

a 360 lens, because changes in business, philanthropy, technology, they matter more than ever. And are driving the societal shifts that will eventually manifest itself in electoral politics. In that spirit, this episode is presented by the Rockefeller Foundation, and digs into $100

million grant they made to connect American workers with good jobs.

But what does that actually mean and how will that look for folks on the ground? That's the questions I put to them, and I think you'll enjoy it. Let's dig in. We now welcome to the stage, the Senior Vice President of U.S. program and policy at the Rockefeller Foundation, Derek Kilmer, with COO and Executive Vice President of Strategy at Greater

Washington Partnership, Marissa Flowers, and Moderator, Astette Herndon, the host and editorial director at Vox. Hello. I'm so excited to be here. Thank you all for being here.

And thank you to our panelists. We are going to have a conversation today about something deeply important, not just jobs in the economy, but the economic anxiety that is getting golfing. A lot of folks across the country and what Rockefeller Foundation specifically is going to do or plans to do about it.

I wanted to start though with that kind of question of anxiety, because it does feel as if it comes up a lot right now for folks who are worried about the kind of future of work. Is that the right place to start? I mean, if I was a customer sales rep, a paralegal, a radiologist, a journalist, how concerned should I be about kind of the future of this work economy?

“Are things like the rise in AI and I think the causes of these stressors are those legitimate?”

So we have always seen change in our economy.

I say that as someone whose first job was at something that no longer exists, I worked at a video store, westside video in Port Angeles, Washington. And I think what people are seeing now is a more rapid change, a sense that things are going to move quicker and be more disruptive. Part of the work that the Rockefeller Foundation has focused on, part of what leaders like

Governor Moore have focused on, is trying to figure out how do we ensure that we empower people to navigate that change rather than to be victimized by it. To make sure that we're providing more economic opportunity for more people in more places. And that's part of the reason that we're here, celebrating some of the good work that's happening in the state of Maryland.

It's part of the reason that the Rockefeller Foundation is announcing a $100 million bet on

trying to connect more people to work to good jobs throughout this country.

“Can you explain more about that bet, $100 million, $250 communities, three pillars?”

How does it work? Yeah. So let's go back and talk about why this problem matters. The headlines are very positive. Employment by and large nationwide is actually pretty good.

What's called primage employment, 25 to 54, hovers around about 80% for our country. And yet, we see economic opportunity that's concentrated in very few places. And you contrast that with about a third of America's counties qualify as economically distressed, meaning that they have a primage employment that lags the national average by more than 5%.

That matters to the people who live in those communities, to the family that struggles to keep the lights on, to put food on the table, and it matters to those communities because their tax-based erodes public health is worse, but it also matters to our country. You see in places left behind a less trust in democracy, less trust in institutions. And so the bet that the Rockefeller Foundation is making is on trying to connect more

Americans to good jobs, to work in communities, to understand that communities are trying to drive innovation. And our goal is to support some of that work that's happening in communities. Some of it is working with organizations that are also working, already working nationwide, working in multiple states, and trying to connect people to good jobs. And that's really our North Star. It's trying to, over the course of this program,

And most importantly, to try to restore hope, will people have economic opportunity, no matter

what zip code they live in, and that's really where we're going to focus. Maurice, your career has run through city planning, real estate, and now regional economic strategy across Baltimore, to rich and corridor. When you hear people talk about good jobs, or particularly when we think from like a national perspective, what is that conversation

“often miss from maybe where you see from a regional perspective, what does good jobs mean?”

And what's the difficulty in getting folks connected to that? Sure. I appreciate the question. And I think, you know, we have to be realistic in this in this region. And you started a question about anxiety across this region in the last

year and a half, 100,000 folks have actually lost their jobs, whether they were connected

with the federal government or otherwise. And so that is a real cause of anxiety. But I think what we see are some innovative models across the regions where we work, where folks are doing some really transformative things. You know, one thing that we chatted about, we work with folks, again, from Baltimore down to Richmond. And in Richmond, there's a company called Flow that does advanced manufacturing for pharmaceuticals. They decided

to really be focused on the Richmond St. Petersburg community, which has been economically

“depressed, particularly in St. Petersburg for a long time. They connected with the community”

colleges there, created programs that were specifically aligned to the kinds of work that they could get within that advanced manufacturing. Based on that, they have aggregated

other advanced manufacturing firms. Over $3 billion in private investment in the last five

years from advanced manufacturing has gone into this community. This raised people from minimum wage jobs to living wage jobs, connected them very directly with skills that would translate into work and created work-based learning opportunities. And so I think what folks really need to see is that there is hope, but it requires innovation, it requires partnership across philanthropy, public sector, and the private sector to really make substantial investments.

But those investments pay dividends because those companies are going to continue to attract private sector investment. Folks are learning transferable skills. And it is at an access point where somebody who has finished high school still has the opportunity to grow within our

“economy. I think it's critically important that we look at those models.”

I'm going to propose to both of you. Sometimes we hear these kind of splashy top line numbers, but folks have some skepticism about how that reaches the ground. What are the sum of the barriers that often come up in implementation and how are you all thinking about that in this moment? Part of what excites me about the program that we're launching is it recognizes that communities

are doing the work, that there are innovative models to connecting people to work. And they look like different things. So it's the communities like just illustratively, Alan Town Pennsylvania, that has a whole bunch of healthcare jobs and a whole bunch of people who are out of work. And they are working actively. And there are communities across the country that are working actively to try to create a pathway into those healthcare jobs to speed the path

to good jobs. It's places like Birmingham, Alabama, who are working on a model of childcare acceleration, trying to improve licensing of childcare, training for childcare, and recognizing that childcare is economic infrastructure for too many working-age Americans that can't get into work unless they have something to do with their kids, right? It's places like Maryland that, and you heard the governor talk about this, that are using artificial intelligence

to remove barriers, whether it be improving benefits access or improving permitting, streamlining the permitting process. That's not just wonky back-end government stuff. That's about jobs. If someone can get stabilized with good benefits, it makes it more likely that they're able to get into good work. If someone is able to get a development permit to build affordable housing, to build an economic development project, that speeds their process to a paycheck.

So what the Rockefeller Foundation is focused on is not presuming that all the answers exist in one place, but appreciating that the answers exist in communities throughout this country and betting on that. Marisa, you've led the region that you work in has been critically affected in the last year or so, 100,000 jobs lost, and mentioned the impact of federal workers specifically

in this area. That just leads me to think about how government has sort of stepped back from doing some of this work, how have you all tried to wrestle with the fact that it doesn't often feel like maybe the public sector has done it's part of the job when it comes to lifting folks up in the changing worker economy?

If the Greater Washington Partnership itself is an organization, CEO, led the largest employers,

private sector employers and university presidents in the region, collectively responsible for 647,000 jobs between Baltimore down or Richmond.

“And I think our approach is that we can no longer work in silos, that the public sector really”

needs to be informed by what the private market is saying are those skills, are those abilities that they are looking for in a workforce? We talked a little bit about AI. We recently issued a report called Talent Transformed, which was informed by these leaders to say, as you are looking at AI and the way that it is changing your workforce, what does that mean? And what we learned was that it is really impacting entry-level jobs, but the thing that they are looking for now

are those intangible skills. What is rising to the top for private employers are the interpersonal

skills, our communication, because they know that those are the things that are going to transcend some of this technological change. It's what cloud can't replace. Exactly, right? And so really important that those are the areas, and that kind of communication between what is happening at the public sector, what the universities are training for, and then

“what the private employers are looking for, opening up those lines of communication, I think,”

get to your point of how does each sector, private, philanthropy, private, and public step up to meet the moment. I would also also pose that to you. I mean, 12 years in Congress, you have seen the kind of ability for impact and the brokenness of that institution of close, from your perspective, like, is there an ability to make a big dent in that modernizing our work economy without the government leading that role? So, when I came into philanthropy,

it was not with the perspective that philanthropy can replace what the public sector does. I think what's required to Maurice's point is a cross-sectoral movement for good jobs. Recognizing that the public sector has a role to play, philanthropy has a role to play. Private industry, most assuredly, has a role to play. What philanthropy can do is a provide risk capital to make some bets on innovative models that

“improve attachment to jobs, to do some things that maybe government can't do, but to actually”

prove them out, to show what works, and then maybe provide a roadmap for what the public sector can make investment into. The other thing that philanthropy has is an approach that's based on hope. I work for a foundation for whom among its ethics is that the world's toughest problems are solvable. That was not the ethic when I was a member of the United States Congress. So, it's exciting to work every day appreciating that some of these questions are hard. We are

seeing massive disruption at scale. I mentioned working at a video store. The words "be kind, please rewind." Nothing to my children. Yet, they have this mass of information at their fingertips. Not all of that change is bad, but it was bad if you were the guy who owned that store. Right? And so part of what we're trying to figure out, working with communities, working with leaders like Marissa, is to figure out what are those models that are ensuring attachment to good

jobs? How do we make sure that more people have those opportunities? And that's exciting and it's hopeful. Hey, I'm Matt Bishel, comedian, writer, and floating head you may or may not have seen on your four-year page. And I'm starting a brand new podcast. Wait, wait, don't swipe away. It's called that sounds like a lot. As in, that feeling when you check your phone in the morning, you read three headlines and you immediately think, "Oh, that sounds like a lot. I can't deal with all this,

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follow the long game wherever you get your podcasts. I like that flow example you gave earlier. Is there any more specific examples about when we see this work and that when we have a when there are opportunities to connect people to the right type of job? What does that look like in practice? Sure. One of the other things that we've developed over the years is something called an employer signaling system which really is about skills mapping and so we have a system,

digital system that is set up that gets the skills that are needed from our private sector employers feeds that into our community of practice with a number of the university president's community college presidents around our region and creates sort of this flywheel of information that is then accessible as you are developing curriculum, as you are developing certification programs. We have been able to prove that it is replicable so folks in Rhode Island have taken this model

adapted to Rhode Island and are utilizing it there now. We're able to refresh those skills and

“abilities as the market changes. And again, I think these are to your point about how we have to”

identify where do we take those bets? Where do we find ways to better communicate across curricula, private sector, public sector? And this is one thing that has proven itself to be replicable. We're using it in the Greater Washington region. They're using it in Rhode Island and I think those are the kinds of things that if we can remove the, oh, I'm going to do a certification program finished in a year and a half and now the job market has changed or what they were training me for

isn't where I can actually get a job for in my region and we close those gaps, we can create those opportunities. You mentioned that a lot of your work has been based in, you know, your own experience coming from a community that you felt was, you know, not kind of represented or was economically left behind. Can you explain more how that personal lens is informed or working Congress and now at Rockefeller? I grew up in a logging town in Washington state

that used to export wood products all around the world. And now there's real concern that the main export is going to be young people. And that is not a unique experience. It's a challenge

that faces communities all around this country. It's what motivated me to run for office in the first place.

I was, I worked in economic development. I was just a grumpy economic developer and finally some of my friends said, well, you seem to have a lot of good ideas and to sure complain a lot, why don't you go do something about it, pal? Part of my enthusiasm for coming to work at the Rockefeller Foundation is it views things through the slans of, we can solve for that, right? We can actually working with communities, working with other leaders in philanthropy, working with the

public sector, you know, working with, with innovative governors like Governor Moore, working with the private, with private industry, we can try to ensure that there's more opportunity for more people in more places. Some of that work is happening in communities, right? Working with innovative leaders like Marisa, who are really trying to find those models of what works. Some of it's working

with national organizations, not only are we announcing today a $100 million bet for jobs, but we're

“also announcing a commitment to one of those national organizations that are doing really important”

work. So back in 2023, an organization called Invest in our Future was created really looking at clean energy as an engine for economic opportunity. That was a pooled fund where Rockefeller committed $20 million, and it has now secured more than $20 million in commitments, but it leveraged more than $24 billion of public sector support really focused on these clean energy jobs. And so one of the things we're excited to announce today is renewing of that commitment to invest in our future

12 million dollars over the next three years, committed to invest in our future, and committed to good jobs in the clean energy sector. Yep. You know, I, I mean, spaces like this are here from elected officials, and there seems to be a certainty about the way the economy's changing, that the speed of change, that feels like a kind of inevitable train moving. And then you're

it where folks don't necessarily know why that change has to be thrust on them. How do you fix

that kind of trust gap, or what feels like a growing distance between the speed in which the

“economy's changing and the general workforce that is kind of resentful of it? So I will say, I think,”

you know, just again, from my personal experience, I think two things are missing just in our overall discourse. We are moving further and further away from facts and data and objective information, as we talk publicly, we're moving away from civility. And I think that all of those things matter when we are then asking people to trust somebody up here on the stage, or somebody

else about where the economy may be going, or where their opportunities are, because on a

day-to-day basis, there are many people today who are making tough choices between paying their utility bills, figuring out how they're going to pay their rent, figuring out how they're going to pay for child care. And so to have a theoretical conversation about how the economy is moving when they feel like it is moving past them, doesn't make a ton of sense, grounding in facts, grounding in opportunity, and moving past again, I think some of the hyperbally that is dominated

“are public discourse. I think it's critically important. It sounds sort of, you know, a little”

pie in the sky, and maybe not the opportunity right now. But I think if we don't do that, that we will continue to have different conversations happening. And we are not all in the same conversation, we're not going to feel at the same way. And so I don't know exactly how you get there, but I do think that's what needs to happen. No, I mean, the breakdown of share reality, big problem needs for facts come back. You're speaking the journalist language. I appreciate that.

I would like to end on a kind of forward looking or more optimistic question for you both. Besides the big announcements we've heard today, what's something else that keeps you optimistic about the future of work and the future of workers in America? And both of you can ask that as we

end. Well, you know, we've always seen change in our economy. And so what excites me is that

we've got leaders like Marisa communities all around this country that are trying to make sure there's an old saying that change is inevitable, but progress is optional. What we're seeing by community leaders like Marisa and communities like Birmingham and Alentown and the Wind River Reservation of Wyoming and rural and urban and tribal communities all across this country is a desire to make progress for the people who live there, to drive innovation and to appreciate that

while the economy is going to change, it's up to us to make sure that that change works for people. The last work. Yeah, I think what inspires me, you know, in addition to some of the work that we do related to skills and talent, we support entrepreneurs. We've got a current cohort of eight CEOs who are all doing something that I 100% do not understand. Not related to any way that I grew up. And the fact that they are creating these businesses, that there are opportunities for investment,

that they are going to be in a position to hire people, gives me hope, because I don't really, I don't need to understand it. I don't even need to be here when it comes to fruition. But there are good ideas being generated every single day. And what we need to do is to create those opportunities and pathways for people to pursue their ideas. Thank you all and thank you for your time. Thank you.

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