This article originally appeared on the Cleveland Fed’s website and is republished with the author’s permission.

The American workforce stands at the edge of a “profound transformation” that will likely impact us all, says Brent Orrell.

He’s talking artificial intelligence (AI) and the workforce, and while he’s no “AI doomer,” he notes that the growth of AI is reshaping the knowledge economy in an echo of how automation changed middle-skill factory jobs in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s.

“AI is forcing the redesign of middle-skill office jobs, the routine information-focused jobs that we see in finance, insurance, consulting, government, and many other sectors and industries and businesses that have really served, especially in the last 40 years, as the pillars of middle-class opportunity,” said Orrell, senior fellow with the American Enterprise Institute who specializes in job training and workforce development. He was one of two speakers in a workforce-focused plenary this summer at Policy Summit 2025, a biennial national community development conference hosted by the Cleveland Fed.

During the session titled “Workforce Development: Which Programs and Policies Are Moving the Needle on Economic Mobility?” Orrell pointed out AI’s potential benefits, citing an Amazon executive who said that AI use had saved the company 4,500 years of coding time in the last year.

“I am actually one of the most optimistic people I know about AI,” Orrell added. “I think it’s going to be a huge win for American society and for our economy and for our communities. It’s going to boost productivity, which we know is the only way to get incomes up in a non-inflationary manner. But in the short and medium term, we are going to experience some adaptation challenges and some disruption and some turbulence, and it’s going to cause and it is already causing, I think, quite a bit of anxiety in the workforce.”

Learning AI

The future belongs, Orrell asserted, to those who can combine AI fluency with their distinctly human capacities such as critical thinking, ethical reasoning, emotional intelligence, and leadership.

“Unfortunately, I think our current workforce systems are largely unprepared to meet this challenge,” Orrell said. “They are underfunded, they’re very slow to adapt, and they’re poorly aligned to labor markets.”

Meanwhile, the speed of change spurred by artificial intelligence is “off the charts,” Orrell said. “Changes in information technologies have profound social effects, [and] what makes this moment different is that the delivery network for artificial intelligence is already in place. It’s in place via the phones we have in our pockets, the computers that we use at work, the broadband internet that we have. We already see that the adoption rate of the [AI] technology is way ahead of even the internet because that required us to build an entire infrastructure just to deliver the service.”

Because of that pace of change, it’s important that workers have agency, he continued.

“I keep telling people with AI, ‘No one is going to rescue you on this,’” Orrell said. “‘No one is going to come and make it okay. You have to learn the technology.’”

He next polled the room of 600-plus people, asking how many of them had ever used AI. Almost everyone raised their hand. His second question was how many were using it daily or hourly. Many fewer people put their hands in the air. “We need more people on the daily–hourly side of this,” he continued. “You need to figure out how it’s working in your own jobs so that you’ll have both higher productivity for yourself and be able to empathize, I think, with the workers [and] colleagues who are having to make this change.”

Workers must take responsibility, and employers and others need to equip them with the information and financial resources they’ll need to chart their upskilling and reskilling pathways, Orrell said. He cited tools like enhanced individual training accounts and lifelong learning accounts modeled on existing retirement savings plans. He also urged a “serious, in-depth national strategy around AI literacy.” “It needs to start in elementary schools, and it needs to reach all the way up to the boardrooms,” Orrell said.

“It’s changing … rapidly every day—new systems, new capacities—and if you start out behind, you are going to not just stay behind, you are going to fall further and further behind,” he said. “If we’ve got populations that are not … learning this technology, they’re putting themselves increasingly at a permanent disadvantage.”

13.4 million ready to work, but…

There are good news stories for the economy, among them that (as of June 2025) the nation’s unemployment rate had been at or below 4.5 percent for 44 consecutive months, said plenary moderator William M. Rodgers III. However, Rodgers, vice president of community development research for the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, also noted that there are still about 13.4 million Americans who are looking for full-time work. “These [include] people who are still working part time for economic reasons. They want to work full time, but there’s still a slack in their community. And then you have a set of people who … have stopped looking over the last four weeks, but if offered a job, they’d take it.”

Whenever she’s in a room full of employers, Bishara W. Addison asks a couple of questions. Her first question is, do you post your job openings online? Nearly everybody says “yes.” Then she asks, can people fill out applications for these jobs on a smartphone? They never know the answer, she says.

She then informs employers that in some communities, about 50 percent of residents can access the internet only on their smartphones. “So that entire population of people is not applying for your job,” said Addison, director of workforce innovation for the Fund for Our Economic Future in Cleveland, Ohio, and another of the session’s speakers. “So now you have something that you can do” to increase access to good-paying jobs and to ensure workers can build meaningful, sustainable careers, she concluded.

Addison’s organization, the Fund for Our Economic Future, in 2022 studied 5,000 Northeast Ohioans to determine the barriers to work that they face. Addison noted that the findings of this study proved similar to those of the Worker Voices Project, a separate study by the Federal Reserve.

Speaking during Policy Summit to those findings, Addison said in addition to lacking broadband, people face other barriers to work including inadequate transportation, inaccessible and unaffordable childcare, a lack of mental health support, and a lack of employment opportunities for those previously incarcerated. And these challenges often look “quite the same” regardless of whether people live in urban, suburban, rural, or other places.

What workforce development pros can do

The “ecosystems” influencing these matters (transit, childcare, etc.) have different professions and professionals operating within them, but they are interdependent, Addison said. If one fails, another can fail, she explained, citing as a current example the push inside corporate America to do something to increase access to childcare, which can determine whether someone with dependents can go to work. “We always needed to do something about childcare, but now it’s become a crisis because when an enabling piece of infrastructure in our community failed, it impacts another one,” Addison said.

Her call to action is this: Whatever one’s role is in the workforce development realm, be it research, public policy, or something else, work with people whose background you don’t share but whose success is highly dependent on your success, and vice versa. “Right now, we are disparate individuals who really care, who are really smart, and really want to do the work,” she said. “And unless we are better resourced to collaborate and do this kind of cross-sector engagement, we’re going to continue to struggle.”

Also, going forward, it’s important to plan and arrange word of mouth to get people who are “on the sidelines” into the workforce development pipeline and ultimately employed, Addison said. “The outreach cannot come from me,” she said. “I am not a credible messenger for the individuals that are currently on the sidelines, but they might have a neighbor or a grandmother or an aunt or a friend. We know with workforce development, when you ask, ‘How’d you learn about this program?’ it’s almost always word of mouth.”

The plenary session concluded with multiple questions for Orrell and Addison. They included

Read or watch their answers, beginning on page 11 of the transcript or at 43:35 of the video. Receive our content focused on lower-income communities: Sign up for the Cleveland Fed’s quarterly community development newsletter.