A $1 Billion Fund Just Named the Real AI Problem: Your Workforce

A Republican and a Democrat. More than half a billion dollars committed toward a $1 billion goal. Anthropic, Microsoft, OpenAI Foundation, IBM, and Cisco behind it. And a founding partner headquartered right here in Indianapolis: Eli Lilly.

Read that list again. The biggest names in AI just agreed on where the hardest part of AI really sits. It lives with the people who have to work alongside the technology. The technology itself was the easy part.

That is the part worth your attention if you run a company or manage a team. A billion-dollar fund does not form around a problem that is already solved. It forms around one that is real, large, and unhandled. The workforce transition is that problem, and the fund just confirmed it at national scale.

The good news sits inside that hard fact. You do not have to wait for the fund to reach you.

What is RAISE US and what did it launch?

RAISE US is a national nonprofit co-chaired by Holcomb and Raimondo. It works with states, companies, and academics to fund and pilot policies and programs that reorient workers to an AI economy and help them keep their jobs.

The launch carried two signals worth holding onto.

First, the money. Over $500 million raised toward a $1 billion goal, in multi-year commitments. The backers span the AI builders themselves (Anthropic, Microsoft, OpenAI Foundation), the enterprise-tech world (IBM, Cisco), and at least one company whose product has nothing to do with software (Eli Lilly, the Indianapolis pharmaceutical maker, a founding partner).

Second, the posture. Holcomb described the work plainly. "This isn't red versus blue; it's an all-hands-on-deck moment." The fund treats the transition as a shared problem that needs many hands, rather than a side to pick in a culture argument about AI.

Four states signed on as initial partners: Arkansas, Connecticut, Maryland, and Utah. The programs in each are early. The fund describes them as pilots, places to test what really helps workers make the jump.

David Ricks, the CEO of Eli Lilly, put the stakes in one line. "RAISE US is tackling a defining challenge of the AI era: ensuring workers have the skills they need to succeed in a rapidly changing economy."

That one line is the whole thesis. The work is about the skills and the people, not the software.

Why is a fund this big aimed at the workforce and not the technology?

Here is what the fund is built on. The technology is already here. The hard part was never getting the model. The hard part is the human transition that has to happen around it.

A company can buy the most capable AI on the market on a Tuesday afternoon. By Wednesday, nothing has changed unless the people know what to do with it. The bottleneck moved. It used to be access to the tool. Now it is the readiness of the people using it.

The chatbot is the easy part. The transition is the work.

That is why a half-billion-dollar fund describes its work as reorienting workers and helping them keep jobs, rather than handing everyone a chatbot. The chatbot is the easy part. The transition is the work.

We have been operating on that thesis for a while. The problem a business faces with AI is rarely the software. It is the workforce that has to absorb it, one role at a time, without losing the judgment and the institutional knowledge that made those people valuable in the first place.

The fund is the national version of that idea. The human stays in the loop. The work is helping people make the jump and keep their jobs through it.

What does The 7 Levels of AI Proficiency have to do with a national fund?

A fund this size is proof of demand. It tells you the workforce transition is real enough that two former governors and the biggest AI companies will put a billion dollars behind it. What a fund cannot do, at least not for a single business, is tell you where your own people stand today and what the next step looks like for each of them.

That is what The 7 Levels of AI Proficiency measures. It is the standard for where a person sits on the climb from first awareness to running AI across a whole operation.

It starts with simple awareness. Someone at the first level can see that AI is changing their work and has started paying attention. A few levels up, a person can write clear instructions, think critically about what the AI gives back, and catch the moments where it is confidently wrong. Higher still, a person can design the workflow first and then build an AI agent to run it, manage that agent the way they would manage a new hire, and eventually coordinate AI across an entire team.

The point of measuring it is simple. You cannot transition a workforce you have not measured. The fund is financing the macro version of that transition across four states. The same transition is sitting inside your own building right now, and you can measure where your people stand on it today.

What should a business owner do about this now?

The fund is years and several policy cycles away from any given employer. The pilots are in four states. The programs are early. None of that helps you this quarter.

So do not wait for it. Start the workforce-transition work inside your own walls, one role and one workflow at a time.

Here is the smallest honest version of the move.

1. Pick one role and one workflow. Not the whole company. One job, one repeatable task that person does every week. The weekly report. The intake summary. The follow-up sequence. Choose the one that eats the most time for the least judgment.
2. Sit with the person who does it and watch how it really works. Not how the process is supposed to work. How it really runs, with the workarounds and the institutional knowledge they carry in their head. That knowledge is the part worth keeping. Design the workflow around it before you build anything.
3. Build one small AI assist for that one workflow, and keep the person on top of it. The human stays in the loop. The AI drafts; the person decides. You are not removing a role. You are giving one person a faster way to do the part of their job that drained them, and you are learning what the transition takes when it is small enough to manage.

That is it. One role, one workflow, one win. Then the next. The national fund will spend a billion dollars learning the same lesson across four states. You can learn it this month, in one building, for the cost of an afternoon's attention.

A former Indiana governor is co-chairing the national effort. An Indianapolis company helped fund it. The transition the rest of the country is now financing is the same one already underway inside your own company. The only question is whether you measure where your people stand and take the first step, or wait for a fund that was never going to arrive in time.

The climb starts with one level. The first step is always within reach, and a team is often further along than it feels.

Sources

1. Indiana Capital Chronicle: Holcomb launches group to ease workforce transition to AI with $500M backing (fetchable mirror via Indiana Public Media: ipm.org)
2. Yahoo Finance: Holcomb launches group to ease workforce transition to AI (carries the David Ricks / Eli Lilly statement)

Related reading: Level 5: The Captain (Design Thinker).

Harrison Painter

Executive AI Advisor. Founder, LaunchReady.ai and AI Law Tracker.

Harrison is an Indiana AI Advisor who helps business owners and executives get their time back by building AI systems that run the work for them. Nearly 20 years in business and author of You Have Already Been Replaced by AI. Creator of The 7 Levels of AI Proficiency.

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