Two former governors launch a bipartisan coalition to confront the coming AI jobs shock

Also: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune.

• In today’s CEO Daily: Inside the bipartisan effort to create an AI-ready workforce
• The big leadership story: Micron’s ‘paradigm shift’
• The markets: Down globally, as the U.S. tech selloff seems poised to continue.
• Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune.

Good morning. “We don’t want to wait for the ‘then what’ scenario,” former Indiana governor Eric Holcomb told me this week, “when there are 3 billion bots and agents and entry-level unemployment goes from four to nine to 18 to 30. Then what?”

That question is the engine behind RAISE US, a nonprofit initiative that Holcomb (a Republican) and former commerce secretary and Rhode Island governor Gina Raimondo (a Democrat) launched yesterday to convene AI companies, employers, philanthropies, and educators to bring capital, creativity, and a new spirit of cooperation to create an AI-ready workforce, not to mention AI-resilient jobs. 

Here’s why you should care: it’s an intriguing first step that could spark new ideas, policies and pilot projects that actually work. It creates a hub where leaders can come together to tackle a problem that’s not being effectively addressed. “I don’t hear a lot of concrete, specific, practical potential solutions to manage a transition period to an AI economy,” Raimondo told me. “We don’t have a super track record as a country managing a transition without high levels of unemployment.”

The challenge will be how to build trust and drive change. Right now, the coalition is weighted heavily towards tech players that are both experiencing and driving job disruption. It could give cover to companies like Amazon, Anthropic, Microsoft and the OpenAI Foundation that are disrupting jobs while pushing against concrete metrics and regulation that could hold them accountable for AI’s impact. 

Few understand the challenge of creating quality job growth like Holcomb and Raimondo. A 2021 Brookings study found that much of Indiana’s job growth came in low-wage sectors as middle-wage jobs went away. In Rhode Island, another study found, Raimondo reduced unemployment but didn’t do much to improve the quality of jobs. That’s less a rub on their tenure as governors than the reality that it’s easier to maintain an ecosystem of skilled talent and good jobs than rebuild it when the damage is done.

RAISE US might want to expand its ‘hub’ to include companies in sectors like manufacturing that are trying to find skilled talent, not replace it with technology. We need more conversations and more voices. That’s why I’m particularly excited about a ‘generations’ dinner that we’re co-hosting with Cengage CEO Michael Hansen in his home next month as part of the Fortune CEO Initiative. CEOs will each bring a young adult guest—I’m coming with my son—to talk about the future of work. These digital natives grasp technology’s upside and downside—and we need to hear their take on the path to a good job in the AI economy.

Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com