We’re using the first four days of September to spotlight four big ideas shaping the future of New York’s workforce. Each day, we’ll share a new perspective on what it will take to create good jobs, expand opportunity, and build an economy that works for every New Yorker. Then, right after Labor Day, we’ll release our calendar for the year ahead. Today: a three-part series on workforce as infrastructure. This is Part 1 of 3: on building AI infrastructure for the public good.
The debate over artificial intelligence in New York City is, at its core, a debate about infrastructure: the digital infrastructure that determines who gets access to new tools, the workforce infrastructure that helps people adapt as jobs change, the physical infrastructure of energy, water, and data centers that makes AI possible, and the civic infrastructure that ensures the transformation serves the public good.
New York City’s infrastructure is already under great strain, fragmented, and characterized by deep inequalities. Black and Brown communities that lack adequate resources and have historically been denied access to digital tools, good employment opportunities, and public investment tend to fall further behind during periods of transformative change and are also often required to bear the environmental costs of the infrastructure that generates wealth and opportunity elsewhere.
That cannot be the story of AI in New York City.
The city is right to create guardrails around how AI is used in our public schools. But caution in the classroom cannot become caution about preparing New Yorkers for an economy already being reshaped by this technology. AI is advancing, the labor market is changing, and New York still lacks a broader strategy to ensure workers and communities are prepared for what comes next.
Caution is necessary. Disengagement is not a strategy.
The New York City Employment and Training Coalition, together with its members, has already begun taking action. To promote the ethical, responsible, and meaningful use of AI, we have collaborated with the Workforce Professionals Training Institute and JobsFirstNYC to create an 18-point AI guide for nonprofits. Among our members, organizations are introducing AI into schools, community programs, and workforce services, while also preparing to address how AI is changing jobs, altering employers’ expectations, and affecting the skills New Yorkers need to succeed.
But individual initiatives will not be enough. New York City needs a coherent AI agenda built around four essential forms of infrastructure: physical, digital, workforce, and civic.
Digital infrastructure
Support equitable access to AI tools.
If AI becomes essential to learning, working, and navigating public life, access to it cannot depend on income, race, neighborhood, or ZIP code. We cannot discuss AI’s effect on the labor market without confronting the practical barriers that prevent many New Yorkers from using it. Cost, devices, broadband connectivity, accessibility, language, and digital literacy all shape who can participate in this new economy. An AI access and equity assessment would help the city understand those barriers and direct resources where they are most needed.
Workforce infrastructure
Monitor AI’s impact on the labor market.
We need real-time intelligence on AI’s impact on jobs, skills, wages, and hiring. What occupations are undergoing change? Which tasks are vanishing? Where are new opportunities appearing? Workforce organizations, educational institutions, employers, labor groups, and policymakers all need access to this information, not months or years after changes take place, but as they happen.
Support workers displaced by AI.
The precise scale and pace of displacement remain debated, but workers are already feeling the effects. Those effects will not be limited neatly to either blue-collar or white-collar occupations. New York City needs an AI worker-transition playbook and policy agenda. We must identify the workers and occupations most exposed to disruption and make it easier for people to move from one career to another without falling into financial crisis. That means providing career navigation, skills training, income supports, benefits counseling, and clear pathways into occupations with real opportunity.
Create new pathways into careers enabled by AI.
Even as we support workers facing displacement, we must confront what may be happening to the first rung of the career ladder. Traditional entry-level jobs are shrinking, changing, or disappearing as employers automate the tasks through which workers once gained experience.
How is a career supposed to start if the first rung is gone?
Answering that question will require employers, philanthropy, CUNY, labor, workforce organizations, and city government to work together. We must identify emerging entry points and intentionally build pathways into them, particularly for New Yorkers who have historically been excluded from technological change and the prosperity it can create.
Expand AI training for incumbent workers.
New York City needs a comprehensive scan of the AI skills-training landscape: what programs exist, which models are succeeding elsewhere, what workers and employers need, and where the gaps remain. Training cannot be limited to people entering technology careers. Workers across healthcare, education, construction, human services, finance, transportation, government, and other industries will increasingly need the ability to work alongside AI systems.
Physical infrastructure
Confront the environmental and community consequences of AI infrastructure.
AI does not exist in the cloud. It depends on physical facilities that consume massive amounts of land, energy, and water. Expanding data centers can put new pressure on communities already contending with environmental burdens, aging infrastructure, and insufficient investment in climate resilience.
Every community affected by this build-out must be resourced, compensated, protected, and meaningfully involved in the decisions being made. The city must establish strong standards for water and energy use, emissions, land use, transparency, and community benefits. The communities hosting the infrastructure should share directly in the economic opportunity it creates.
That includes jobs. Constructing, operating, maintaining, securing, and improving data centers and their related energy and water systems will require skilled workers. New York City should connect those investments to local hiring, apprenticeships, workforce training, and durable career pathways. We should not separate the infrastructure conversation from the talent conversation.
Civic infrastructure
Build AI capacity among nonprofits and small businesses.
Although large institutions have the capital, staff, and infrastructure necessary to experiment with AI, most nonprofits and small businesses do not. Yet, these organizations employ New Yorkers, serve communities, and help sustain neighborhood economies.
They need readiness assessments, technical assistance, practical clinics, shared tools, and peer-learning opportunities. New York City should consider an AI civic engagement corps that can help community institutions understand the technology, adopt it responsibly, and use it to strengthen their work.
Promote responsible AI adoption among large employers.
Adoption cannot be measured by speed or efficiency alone. Employers must also address bias, accessibility, worker voice, job quality, privacy, transparency, and the consequences of redesigning jobs around automated systems.
The city should establish clear standards for responsible AI use and a meaningful way for employers to demonstrate that their practices meet them. New Yorkers deserve confidence that these tools are being deployed ethically—not simply because they are available.
Advance effective municipal workforce AI use.
City agencies are making progress, but not at the speed this moment requires. New York City is long overdue for a serious examination of how municipal work is organized, how technology can improve services, and how public employees can use AI responsibly. AI cannot justify indiscriminate cuts to the workforce. Instead, it should be a chance to invest more in public workers, reduce administrative burdens, address problems more effectively, and improve the way residents experience government.
Harnessing AI for the Public Good
AI is the most consequential and most dangerous technology of our lifetime. The same capacity that organizes information, expands knowledge, and supports problem-solving can also reproduce bias, erode privacy, spread misinformation, and reshape how we learn and think. We have never held a tool with this much power. But it will not produce equitable outcomes on its own. That takes public systems built deliberately to govern it.
In a recent Fast Company article, two scholars at Harvard and Johns Hopkins that realizing AI’s potential in local government will require strong leadership “to overcome gaps in imagination, skill deficits, and employee anxiety, compounded by the complexity of ensuring that AI changes comply with democratic values.” Their suggestion of a “systematic approach” is both sobering and sensible, especially for a mayor who has proven to be remarkably skilled at communication. Such an approach would require “a powerful narrative of the service benefits while using their political and legal skills to negotiate with the city council, union, and employee leaders.”
New York has enormous assets to build from, and limitations. But becoming a leader in AI cannot be measured only by the companies we attract, the technologies we develop, or the productivity gains we achieve. It must also be measured by whether workers benefit from that progress and whether technological change expands, rather than constrains, pathways to economic mobility, including by reimagining how government works.