Lost your job to AI? These support programs provide cash, support, and more

As artificial intelligence puts Americans out of work, there are programs available to help them land on their feet—but experts warn they’ll need to ramp up quickly to meet the demand.

One new pilot program sends a $1,000 monthly stipend to workers displaced by AI while providing career support to help them return to the workforce. Called the AI Dividend, it’s an initiative that’s privately funded through donations to the Fund for Guaranteed Income (a nonprofit that distributes cash through various programs, including its AI Commons Project) in partnership with What We Will, which provides recipients with community support and career resources. The Fund for Guaranteed Income facilitates a range of similar programs that use cash as a stopgap for marginalized Americans, and has distributed roughly $25 million over the last five years.  

“The need that we are hearing and seeing for people who are getting displaced by AI made us start thinking this would be a good application of this intervention,” says Eli Berk-Rauch, the research lead for the Fund for Guaranteed Income and the AI Commons Project. “Regardless of where AI goes from here, there’s already people being displaced and facing unique challenges in the job market.”

Berk-Rauch explains that the cash isn’t designed to replace lost income, but to provide some financial support, so that recipients can focus their time and energy on updating skills and applying for jobs.

“We’re trying to ferry workers to their next role,” says What We Will’s director of media and communications, Kyle Abasi. “We’re building up capacity to meet workers where they are with workforce development, whether that’s skill sharing or mentorship or job referrals.”

The AI Dividend is one of just a few programs offering relief to workers stuck in the crosshairs of AI job displacement. While such programs are only currently offering assistance to a tiny fraction of affected workers, they offer a glimpse into potential solutions that are becoming more necessary by the day. 

We’re Going to Need a Bigger Safety Net 

Though the full impact of AI on employment is yet to be seen, recent developments and forecasts paint a grim picture.

According to a recent Gallup poll, 18% of all U.S. employees and 23% of those whose organizations have adopted AI say it is somewhat or very likely their job will be eliminated in the next five years. Research from Goldman Sachs suggests those who are displaced by AI alsoface a more challenging path back into the workforce.

The impact of the AI Dividend is currently being tested by a small group of pilot participants. It’s still very early days—the pilot is only a few weeks old—but Abasi and Berk-Rauch say the results could help shape larger assistance programs for AI-displaced workers in the future

“With the scale of what might come, we do feel like there’s some degree of policy changes that we need to make to stabilize the economy, stabilize people’s livelihoods, and we hope that this can be a model,” Abasi says. And “running experiments like this is how you build the evidence base to demonstrate whether this would work at that type of scale as a solution,” adds Berk-Rauch.

Entry-Level Workers Face the Highest Risk

AI job displacement can impact professionals at any level of seniority, but the technology’s proficiency in administrative tasks, which tend to fall to more junior employees, has created even greater challenges for entry-level workers.

According to a recent report by the Brookings Institution, 15 million college graduates work in jobs that are highly exposed to AI displacement, including 11 million in “gateway” occupations that act as a bridge to higher wage roles.  

“AI is good at performing discrete tasks that are repetitive in nature, and a lot of entry-level jobs are administrative in nature,” says Darrell West, a senior fellow in the Center for Technology Innovation of the Governance Studies program at the Brookings Institution. “We know entry-level workers are being particularly hit, but there are more advanced occupations that also face some risks.”

Prior to entering the job market, students can tap into a broad array of financial support programs, like federal Pell Grants, state-level financial aid programs and financial aid offered by institutions directly. But West says most who lose their job or struggle to enter the labor market after graduating are on their own.

“You have to find a retraining program, and oftentimes you have to pay for that retraining,” he says. “There’s little public assistance for adult education, and that’s where this unemployment problem is arising.”

Building Skills While Building Communities

Cash may be an effective way to support those displaced by AI as they update their skills and find their way back into the labor force, but other programs are looking to community service as a way to help build those skills while supporting local communities. 

Since its founding in 1988, City Year has provided financial support to 40,000 17-to-25 year-olds in exchange for serving as Student Success Coaches in 60 of the country’s most under-resourced school districts. The program is offered through AmeriCorps, a bipartisan government program that pays people — mostly young adults — to engage in community service. 

During their ten months of service, Student Success Coaches provide one-on-one academic and homework support, work with teachers to track students’ progress, lead extracurricular activities, and more. In exchange, they receive a $25,000 stipend, healthcare benefits and a Pell Grant worth up to $7,500 to put towards training programs, student loans or graduate school. City Year also equips them with employable skills that employers — like Deloitte, Salesforce, and ServiceNow — are actively seeking.

“We are now the only non-four-year institution that is a recruitment pathway into Deloitte,” says City Year CEO and alumnus Jim Balfanz. “So, if you’re a young adult and you want to work for Deloitte, which is a great little company, you need to graduate from one of the universities on their recruitment list — unless you graduated from any four-year university program and completed City Year.”

According to a new white paper published by City Year, 91% of alumni secured a job or enrolled in higher education within 12 months of completing their service term, and 83% credit the program for building the skills that launched their careers.

“There’s an opportunity for us to leverage national service as part of a solution to the workforce disruption,” says Balfanz. “We’ll also have an incredible additional set of benefits to our society in terms of the development of young people and services provided to communities across the country.”

City Year currently operates in 29 American cities, with a 30th on the way, as well as the United Kingdom and South Africa.

Though it’s the largest program of its kind, it’s going to take a lot more to stem the tide of youth unemployment, which hit a post-pandemic record of 11.4% last June. 

“We have an existing infrastructure that you could — from federal, state, local and private-public investments – go from $1 billion a year to $10 or $15 or $20 billion; that really could scale,” Balfanz says. “Our role is to be a leader and an innovator in our space and an exemplar and a coalition builder, because it’s the coalition that’s going to scale to the size of the workforce disruption challenge in the US.”

Will it be enough?

AI’s advancement has proven relentless, and the technology’s impressive prowess is creating workforce disruptions at a speed and scale few could have anticipated. 

“AI is getting better and better, which means it can do more sophisticated tasks, which means that a broader range of jobs are going to be affected,” says West of the Brookings Institution. “So, this problem of people not getting their first job or getting laid off later in life is going to become more acute.”

In the face of such rapid and widespread workforce displacement, those who are serious about finding a solution have little time to develop and test novel ideas. Though they’re too small to meet the existing demand, much less what’s expected in the coming years, programs like City Year and the AI Dividend provide two of the only solutions tested in practice. 

“This is not a temporary problem or a small-scale issue,” says West. “It’s really a fundamental change in the nature of the economy, and we’re going to need some solutions that meet that challenge. We can’t just continue business as usual.”

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