Against AI job cuts, RAISE US needs to consider small businesses

By David Stephen

Small businesses are the closest to people everywhere. If at least 2 in every 5 small business can thrive, they can absorb more people in the labor force, catering to purpose, income, taxes, skills and prospects.

Simply, aspects of unemployment, youth unemployment or even where AI displaces people at work can be said to be a result, in part, of difficulty in growing small businesses at scale.

This means that there should be more than 50x the effort to ensure small businesses are incentivized, particularly with strategy, so that they can grow and hire more people and expand the labor force.

RAISE US needs to consider small businesses

There are a lot of efforts and discussions about whether AI will displace people at jobs. The first problem with that is not even AI but layoffs that have been happening off/on since COVID.

There are reasons that several corporations would want to cut hiring. This means that preparing landing spots for workers necessitates engineering small businesses to have them start and grow with the right tactics.

This is the testbed for what the world may come to deploy, as AI begins to make wages for certain tasks seem wasteful. How do small businesses grow? One of pathways is marketplaces. Simply, how will new marketplaces be made for business owners to sell?

It is possible to make a large language model for landmarks in different locations, so that the commerce quotient of the places is made with predictions of what products or services are likely to thrive there.

The goal is to ensure that as people consider to start small businesses, move or increase their reach, they know where to target or how.

It is also possible to develop tier hiring, such that even for the same role, multiple people can be hired, so that lower than minimum wage can be paid, if the work is for capped hours.

Why? There are things to do that may not require too much skill or times that may not require much competence, someone on a lower tier may work in those times, while those on a higher tier may work in others. The purpose will be to reduce labor cost, ensuring that a small business can be efficient, getting enough hands to meet market demands, push sales and so forth.

There can also be labor credit, where there are loans to pay wages directly. This means that instead of having it in bulk to the owner, it is used to pay workers at the end of the term directly.

There can also be alternative remuneration, spending pegs, and much more. The thing is to ensure that there are ways to make small businesses prosper at scale, becoming options for society, so that AI is not as significantly risky to the labor market.

RAISE US

There is a recent [June 25, 2026] press release, Gina Raimondo and Eric Holcomb Launch RAISE US, Uniting the Nation’s Leading Employers and Bipartisan Governors Behind American Workers, stating that, “For the first time, AI and tech companies, governors, leading employers, and major philanthropies are joining together – and committing capital at scale – to prepare American workers for an economy transformed by AI.”

“Gina Raimondo, the 40th U.S. Secretary of Commerce and 75th Governor of Rhode Island, and Eric Holcomb, the 51st Governor of Indiana, today launched RAISE US, a nonpartisan national organization that will partner with governors, employers, workers, and training organizations to help the American workforce make a successful transition to an AI economy. RAISE US will design and pilot new corporate incentives to retrain and redeploy workers, new approaches to support people through job transitions, and new training models tied to changing employer demand.”

“Most efforts to help workers focus on singular pieces of the puzzle: a training program, a policy change, or an employer commitment. RAISE US is built to move all of them at once, working across government, employers, and education and training to design new models, pilot them with governors and employers, measure outcomes, and scale what works.”

“The organization operates across four core areas: State Partnerships, Employer Coalition, Education and Training, Policy Lab.”

“To scale what works, RAISE US is building a national platform to accelerate apprenticeships and other earn-and-learn pathways into sectors such as healthcare and advanced manufacturing.”

“Gina Raimondo will serve as CEO, with Eric Beane as President and Chief Operating Officer, and Janet Foutty as President of Corporate Partnerships.”

Small businesses workforce research lab

RAISE US can set up a small business workforce growth research lab under the policy lab or have it standalone as an engine for serious experiments, to ensure that the possibility to absorb workers multiplies.

The objective is to ensure that there are urgent outlets for innovation in labor economics, especially for ways to make their vision pervade the United States and the rest of the world before the end of the decade.

David Stephen does research in conceptual brain science and served as a visiting scholar in medical entomology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He did computer vision research at Rovira i Virgili University in Tarragona.

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