Former commerce secretary says long-term bet on AI is good for the workforce, praises Northeastern
Former U.S. Secretary of Commerce and Rhode Island Governor Gina Raimondo is raising the alarm about AI’s impact on jobs and says the government, educators and industry need to work together to ease the transition.
Gina Raimondo knows firsthand what happens when the U.S. is not prepared for a moment of transition.
In the 1980s, the former U.S. Commerce secretary and Rhode Island governor watched her father get laid off from his 30-year job at the Bulova watch factory in Providence, Rhode Island, when the company shifted operations to China. As the world globalized rapidly, her father was left behind. In 2026, she’s starting to see some worrying similarities.
“Because I had a front-row seat in my family and my state to that suffering, I’m so worried we’re about to make the same mistake again with AI,” Raimondo said during a fireside chat Monday with Northeastern University President Joseph E. Aoun.
During their wide-ranging conversation, Raimondo focused on the potentially disruptive impact AI could have on U.S. jobs, and why retraining workers will be more necessary than ever. But she was adamant that the technology can also be a force for good, if implemented with care and room for innovation.
“Bad news is AI is disruptive,” Raimondo said. “Good news, we can use it to train people more effectively and efficiently and to predict the problems before they happen.”
Aoun said retraining workers would require an all-hands-on-deck approach.
“Everyone has a responsibility,” he said. “Namely, employers have a responsibility, the government has a responsibility and, obviously, higher education has a responsibility.”
For most of her career, Raimondo has tried to bridge the divide between private industry and public governance in a way that is now vital in the age of AI, she said.
She began in private equity financing, co-founding Rhode Island’s first venture capital firm, Point Judith Capital, in 2000. She then left her private sector job to serve as general treasurer of Rhode Island, her home state, starting in 2010. She eventually served as governor from 2015 to 2021. As governor, she oversaw Rhode Island’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, made community college free for all state residents and funded the largest infrastructure program in Rhode Island history. In 2021, she was tapped to serve as secretary of Commerce for the Biden administration.
Now, through a new initiative, Raimondo aims to create a national hub for innovative lifelong learning that will give workers the chance to retrain and futureproof their careers. By working with partner institutions at the local and state level, she hopes to fund experiments in higher education, like apprenticeship programs, that could eventually expand nationally.
“Technology will create new jobs, but it takes a minute,” Raimondo said. “So, I feel totally committed to making sure that the country creates new institutions, new forms of education, new training models, new transition support so that everyone gets brought along through this transition.”
Those options exist mostly piecemeal around the country, she explained. A self-professed “fangirl” of Aoun’s approach to higher education, Raimondo pointed specifically to Northeastern’s experiential leadership in experiential learning.
“The truth is what [President Aoun] is doing here is what America needs, which is to say a more modern, effective higher education that is there for people for their whole career,” Raimondo said.
As AI radically transforms what skills are and are not needed in certain industries, Raimondo is adamant that that approach needs to be adopted not just in higher education but in the federal government. Young college graduates need to have the skills necessary to succeed in a changing labor market, she said. But a 50-year-old paralegal or accountant who is displaced by AI should have the public support they need to retrain and redeploy into the workforce, she added.
In talking, Raimondo and Aoun could not help but draw comparisons between America’s response to the AI revolution and that of other international players, including China. The global superpower was the oft-mentioned elephant in the room during their conversation, largely because of how it has pushed its businesses and citizenry to adopt AI.
“They approach AI as, ‘We are going to embed AI in the companies, in advanced manufacturing, in robotics, in everything we do,’” Aoun said. “We focused on creating AI that will outperform people rather than focusing on also being more pro-worker, to use what some economists are saying.”
That approach has made the American public broadly uneasy about the technology, Aoun and Raimondo recognized. But Raimondo said she is still ready to place a “long-term bet on America.” She hopes that by investing more in collaborative, innovative solutions at the state level that directly address concerns around job loss and even data center energy usage, the U.S. can prepare itself for a transition to the AI economy that is not a matter of if but when.
“The way I’m telling this to governors is: be an AI-ready state,” Raimondo said. “Don’t be a state that doesn’t have a plan and winds up with sky-high unemployment.”
As for what skills people will need in the AI age, Raimondo said that beyond critical thinking and risk-taking, the greatest asset one can have, whether just entering the workforce or already decades into a career, is curiosity.
“Knowing how to learn and continuously reinvent yourself and having energy and curiosity to do that is vital,” Raimondo said.
