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: the fourth and final installment, which proposes ways to grow and better integrate workforce funding streams.

As Deputy Mayor for Economic Justice Julie Su has described, a bridge is only as strong as the strands that hold it up. New York City’s workforce system has plenty of strands, including programs, funders, agencies, and employers, but too few are woven together. The result is a system weaker than the sum of its parts. This final installment of NYCETC’s “Four Days, Four Big Workforce Ideas” looks at how to better connect them.

With slow job growth, AI disruption, federal immigration crackdowns, and rising demand for talent in sectors from care to advanced manufacturing, there is growing consensus that NYC needs to do more to meet its labor market challenges. But two major barriers stand in the way of meaningful action for jobseekers, workers seeking advancement, and businesses in need of skilled talent.

The first is that, despite significant investment, particularly in programs for young people, NYC still lacks the funding needed to pursue a truly transformational workforce agenda. The second is that the stakeholders who control the purse strings, above all government and philanthropy, are not on the same page about priorities, metrics, and overall strategy. So long as this is true, we will struggle collectively to take big swings at the most intractable problems, even with ample resources. 

What follows are our ideas for how New York City can grow its pot of workforce funds, derive more value from each dollar, and shift what those dollars buy us, from low-wage job placements toward real economic mobility. 

Part One: Gridlock: Too Little Money or Too Little Alignment?

Funding decisions play out in countless negotiations, from budget debates in Congress to family foundation boardrooms. Ultimately, dollars will follow political pressure and the flow of events. At the local level, as NYCETC detailed in its 2025 report, Putting Our Dollars to Work, New York City has significantly increased support for workforce programming that serves youth and young adults, but city investments in most other populations, above all working adults, have not kept pace. Federally, investment might be best described as “uncertain, and under threat.”  

For context, in Fiscal Year 2024, New York City spent $589 million across its major workforce programs. Of that total, the city itself contributed approximately $363 million, or 62 percent. (New York State contributed just $11 million, or 2 percent.) But the impressive topline city figure obscures a significant imbalance. Most city funding is concentrated in youth programs, particularly the Summer Youth Employment Program. Programs serving working-age adults rely much more heavily on federal dollars and operate at a far smaller scale.

Of that $589 million total in FY24, federal funding accounted for about $215 million, or 37 percent. The largest single source comes through the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA), signed into law by President Obama in 2014. When WIOA passed, it ended a decade-plus of brutal cuts to federal workforce spending that hit New York City especially hard: In nominal dollars, the city’s annual federal workforce allocation under the Workforce Investment Act (WIA), which preceded WIOA, plunged from nearly $97 million in Program Year 2002 to under $63 million in PY 2013. Adjusted to constant 2024 dollars, that represented a 50 percent cut. 

Annual WIOA funding to NYC has fluctuated substantially since then, with a sharp dip in 2017-18 and a relative peak in 2023-24. Since President Trump returned to office in 2025, his administration’s budget requests have proposed consolidating WIOA’s core Title I programs into a single block grant at roughly 30% below current funding, while eliminating WIOA Title II adult education and Job Corps entirely. Congress declined to adopt the consolidation for FY2026, though House appropriators have since advanced an FY2027 bill with deep cuts of their own.

In addition to local and federal funding, philanthropy is a third major source. New York City stands second to none in the depth and commitment of its foundations that support workforce development. In fact, based on a survey by the NYC Workforce Funders Collaborative (NYCWF), collective annual philanthropic support for workforce programs and services is comparable to what the city gets each year under the WIOA. Philanthropic support totaled approximately $92 million in 2024, compared to $99.4 million in WIOA funding for the roughly contemporaneous Program Year 2024. Of course, that $92 million is the sum of dozens, if not hundreds, of smaller grants—each with its own objectives and milestones—to provider organizations, intermediaries, and other groups. 

Ask a dozen stakeholders in New York City’s workforce development ecosystem what the system is supposed to accomplish, and you might get a dozen different answers. The absence of a guiding principle or goal renders it almost impossible to attempt change at scale, a constraint that becomes more painful as labor market conditions deteriorate. Worse, government itself seems to be working at cross-purposes, as different agencies at both the federal and city levels follow the dictates of program design and funding restrictions, often with little coordination across them.

In Washington, the Trump administration has articulated a strategic vision for workforce policy but has undermined it through repeated proposed funding cuts and its broader attempt to reorganize the Cabinet, which has badly strained the U.S. Department of Labor’s capacity. Meanwhile, Congress appears to be punting on WIOA reauthorization altogether, likely delaying any meaningful reconsideration of the law until at least 2029.

Closer to home, multiple efforts across previous mayoral administrations to define a larger guiding vision never came to fruition. Bill de Blasio’s Jobs for New Yorkers Task Force, the Future of Workers Task Force, and Executive Order 22 during Eric Adams’s mayoralty all faltered after City Hall turned its attention elsewhere. Without shared objectives and a forceful mandate to work in concert, city agencies largely carried on as they traditionally have.  

The result, often lamented by workforce veterans, is that our field seems stuck in an endless loop of discussing how siloed the system remains, and what that costs us in terms of scale and service quality. 

Part Two: The Bridge – A New Compact for Mobility

Part of what makes that unending conversation so frustrating is that it has occasionally surfaced ideas with the potential to break the cycle. In its final report released in 2023, the Future of Workers Task Force proposed a Talent Investment Fund, in which leaders from philanthropy and government would blend resources to create a pool of dollars that they could jointly disburse through a grant process. The explicit justification was to create the Fund “as a vehicle for collaborative co-investment of public and private dollars based on shared criteria.” In theory, this vehicle could align objectives, standardize definitions, milestones, and metrics, and foster innovation.

The jump from report to reality is long and daunting, and the Talent Investment Fund proved unable to stick the landing. Government and philanthropic leaders were unable to resolve questions of ownership and administration, tricky city procurement and budgeting rules, philanthropy’s concern that it would not have an equal voice in strategy or investment decisions, and a failure to identify a clear guiding principle, such as a focus on economic mobility or apprenticeships. 

These obstacles are real, as are concerns on both sides about potential hostile federal audits, skeptical foundation board members, and resentment from organizations that see this potential change as a threat. They’re also all surmountable, if the parties decide that the benefits of a blended fund matter more. For system leaders, these benefits include greater strategic clarity and, vitally, a mechanism to force common ground on priorities and practices. For grantees, combining dollars would mean a lighter reporting burden and lower opportunity costs associated with scrambling to fill program budget gaps and then figuring out which funding streams can cover which services. With limited dollars, boosting the return on public and philanthropic investments is a significant win.  

With all this in mind, it’s time to try again. The good news is that the two biggest pieces are already in place. 

On the philanthropic side, the foundation already exists. The New York City Workforce Funders Collaborative (NYCWF) pools resources from 12 foundations and corporate philanthropies, establishes shared priorities, and makes collective grant decisions. Its 2026–2028 strategy focuses specifically on middle-wage careers and economic mobility through research, high-potential pilots, and public-private partnerships. NYCWF is strongly positioned to serve as the philanthropic partner, or even the initial fiscal and grantmaking home, for a broader Talent Investment Fund. That is precisely the role philanthropy can play: absorbing the risk of early experimentation so that government can invest with greater confidence and scale what works.

Meanwhile, the NYC Workforce Development Board has provided a public sector starting point. Its plan to utilize $1 million in WIOA funding for a Workforce Innovation Fund offers a practical seed-and-match model. The Talent Investment Fund could absorb or build upon that structure, enabling the combined capacity to both launch promising approaches and test, strengthen, and expand them. That public sector commitment could serve as the foundation for a broader investment architecture, drawing additional resources from economic development activity, publicly controlled assets, philanthropy, and employers.

These two ideas aren’t exactly the same, but it’s hard to believe they can’t be reconciled. Motivation to try should be particularly strong on the city side, given the restrictions on how WIOA dollars can be used. For instance, a proposal to expand high-quality sector training probably could not include a budget line to assist participants with wraparound supports such as childcare or transportation, leaving gaps that providers would then need to fill through other means. A Talent Investment Fund could remove that need, streamlining the process for providers while ensuring a higher share of the award goes to services for jobseekers, workers, and businesses.

The possibilities are already visible. New York City Economic Development Corporation’s (EDC) Economic Mobility Networks reflect a straightforward idea. When the city invests in major development projects, residents in the surrounding neighborhoods should be positioned to benefit from the growth those projects create. Its cruise terminal community funds offer another model, demonstrating how fees, leases, concessions, and publicly controlled assets can generate sustained community investment rather than one-time grants. And the Northwell School of Health Sciences, supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies, shows how the pieces fit together. Philanthropy creates room to innovate, government provides the infrastructure for scale, and an employer builds a talent pipeline around its own needs. That it is happening in a sector where demand is urgent and the careers on offer are durable makes the model all the more worth building on.

Through its first eight-plus months, the Mamdani administration has largely kept quiet on workforce issues. Given the mayor’s focus on affordability and commitment to working-class New Yorkers, this omission is puzzling. This administration has a specific economic justice lens, an affordability mandate, and new leadership at EDC with skills in value capture and operational expertise. Announcing a Talent Investment Fund would break the silence and align with the team’s vision for the city.

Deputy Mayor Julie Su has described the Brooklyn Bridge’s cables as a collection of individual wires that, when brought together, become strong enough to hold up the bridge. That is how we should think about workforce funding. Each investment may be valuable on its own, but if these investments remain standalone pieces, they will not hold up over time or get New Yorkers from point A to point B.

Doing that requires a complete vision, sufficient investment, and a clear understanding of what the investment is supposed to accomplish. The goal is not simply to spend workforce dollars, but to connect New Yorkers to opportunities across the city and move them toward genuine economic mobility.

The problem is not that we do not know what works. We do. Across this city, we can point to successful training programs, employer partnerships, apprenticeships, and career pathways that move New Yorkers into good jobs and help businesses find the talent they need.

Workforce investment should be part of the economic development deal from the start, not an add-on at the end. When public action creates economic value, whether through a subsidy, rezoning, major development, public contract, or other investment, the question of who gets access to the resulting opportunity should already have an answer. Businesses and developers that benefit should help build and finance the talent pipelines that make their growth possible, with public and private investment working toward the same goal of expanding economic mobility.

That compact cannot begin with employers. It has to begin at City Hall.

This mayoral administration has an opportunity to plant a flag and say clearly that this is how New York City will pursue economic success and economic justice together. This is what we will invest. This is what we will expect from those who benefit from public action. These are the outcomes we will measure. And this is how we will hold ourselves and our partners accountable for delivering them.

And accountability cannot end when the deal is announced. We should track commitments, measure outcomes, and publish results. Which investments created pathways into good jobs? Which employers hired, trained, and advanced New Yorkers? Which public investments produced economic mobility, and which did not? Transparency should allow government, employers, labor, philanthropy, and communities to see whether we are collectively delivering on the compact we made.

We know how to build successful pathways. What we have lacked is the joint commitment to connect them, invest in them, and hold ourselves accountable for whether New Yorkers can actually reach them. City Hall should set that expectation, demonstrate it through its own investments, require it of those who benefit from public action, and show New Yorkers the results.

This is what economic mobility looks like: connecting New York’s strongest ideas into a bridge from precarity to prosperity. The alternative is a city that keeps generating extraordinary wealth on one side of the bridge, while leaving working New Yorkers stranded on the other.

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 3 of 3: on making city government the anchor green employer.

by Neil Padukone

Climate change is already reshaping daily life in New York. Extreme heat, smoke-filled summers, and storms that bring the city to a standstill are all the new normal. At the same time, the green economy the city once projected could reach 382,000 jobs by 2040 is facing real headwinds. Federal opposition to clean energy, corporate retreat from sustainability, and a slowdown in state ambition all point to the same conclusion. New York City cannot wait for someone else to lead. We need to use our city to green our city.

Fundamentally, the city needs to step into its role as the anchor green employer. As our recent report An Affordable Climate Economy details, the public sector was largely overlooked in the city’s Green Economy Action Plan despite being a foundational pillar of green jobs in New York. Delivering green space, mass transit, distributed energy resources, and denser development can reduce heat and flooding, decrease vehicle miles traveled, and lower per capita carbon emissions. These are mostly public sector functions that, when delivered effectively, can also lower household costs.

But to get this work done, we need the people who can do it. With municipal agencies facing upward of 17,000 vacancies, the city has an opportunity to fill critical public-sector roles by creating clearer pathways for New Yorkers into green careers. A “Full-Cycle Model” of green workforce development can connect education, training, hiring, and advancement to the jobs the city already needs to fill.

In this model, city government itself would be the proving ground for any hiring and workforce practice we would ask private sector green employers to adopt. The model would span a New Yorker’s full career trajectory, including career exploration, preparation, access, launch, and advancement.

Imagine a high school freshman thinking about her future. Through a class visit to a Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) wastewater treatment plant, she sees how her high school science lessons are applied to turn sewage into fertilizer and cooking gas. That exposure leads to a paid DEP internship, then an apprenticeship that earns her college credit at City College. With clearer civil service pathways, more frequent exams, and more transparent hiring timelines, she can quickly move into a job as a DEP environmental engineer. As her career advances, unions, nonprofits, and industry partners help her keep pace with emerging technologies and new green economy skills. Years later, after rising to Assistant Commissioner, she brings that experience to the private sector and helps inspire the next generation of New Yorkers entering the field.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the Departments of Parks and Recreation, Transportation, and Sanitation and other government entities can do the same with railyards, municipal offices, power stations, garages, and every other piece of their fascinating operations and hiring apparatus. They can ensure that their bus and train operators, landscapers, mechanics, building operators, accountants, and other employees are educated by and sourced from New York, and that they remain at the forefront of their industry.

If this model can work inside the city’s own famously slow hiring bureaucracy, it becomes the most credible, battle-tested template we have for scaling the private sector green economy because it will have been proven on the hardest case first. The Department of Citywide Administrative Services that manages the city’s workforce is making important starts, including the “youth apprentice” civil service title that opens up paid learning opportunities to young New Yorkers, and it needs to keep going.

The city also needs to look beyond its own bureaucracy and better connect the workforce efforts already happening across New York. Nonprofits, labor unions, community colleges, community-based organizations, and small businesses from Hunts Point to Canarsie and the West Shore are already training New Yorkers in green economy skills and putting those skills to work.

To bring that expertise closer to City Hall, the Mayor should establish a “Climate Workforce Cabinet” that reports directly to him. The cabinet should include NYCETC, representing its 200 coalition members, as well as employers, labor unions, training organizations, educational institutions, city agencies, utilities, philanthropy, and the Green Economy Network. Its role should be to keep the city’s workforce strategy aligned with industry needs and grounded in the communities already doing this work.

That kind of cross-sector collaboration is already finding fruit at DEP itself. The Green Readiness Opportunities for the Workforce (GROW) pilot program partners with the Doe Fund to train a cohort of New Yorkers to maintain the critical infrastructure that reduces rainy day flooding in selected neighborhoods. To provide the workforce needed to do this vital work citywide, the city can continue to work with the civic sector to source and support candidates, as well as with unions to ensure that there is a promise of career growth beyond these transitional jobs.

Especially in this moment of federal uncertainty, we need to make sure that every local asset in the green economy is more efficiently coordinated. Educators must train students with the skills they need to be hired for work that is well-funded and executed by thriving businesses whose efforts increase the city’s sustainability and resiliency. At the same time, empowered workers, including those in unions, must have opportunities for career growth and wage mobility. 

From within city government and across the five boroughs, we need to use our city to serve our city. The weather won’t wait.

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 2 of 3: on redesigning work itself so that technological progress and economic mobility advance together.

by Mary Beth Williams

For generations, entry-level jobs have been where young people learn how to work, where they build skills, relationships, confidence, and the experience that unlocks the next opportunity. As AI changes the tasks traditionally performed by junior workers, we risk weakening that first rung of the career ladder just as young New Yorkers are trying to get their footing.

​That outcome is not inevitable.

​New York should be asking a more ambitious question than how we train young people for the jobs that remain: How do we redesign work itself so that technological progress and economic mobility advance together?

Singapore offers one model for what that could look like. The comparison is instructive. Like New York City, Singapore is a dense, global economic center with a diverse workforce, a population measured in the millions, and a government managing a budget of more than $115 billion annually. Both have also made ambitious commitments to harness AI as a driver of economic opportunity. 

But Singapore has paired its recent investments in AI with something New York has not yet developed at the same scale: a deliberate strategy to anticipate how technology will change work and help employers and workers adapt before disruption occurs.

Singapore’s Jobs Transformation Maps examine how technology—including generative AI—is expected to reshape jobs and skills across 19 industries. The government is also putting substantial resources behind workforce transformation initiatives and job redesign, offering employers public support to rethink roles, work processes, and responsibilities as technology changes how work gets done. Employers can now receive public subsidies covering up to 70% of the cost of job-redesign projects.

New York City has made promising investments of its own, positioning itself as the “Applied AI Capital of the World” and investing in the infrastructure, business incubators, and innovation challenges that can make that ambition real. But we have not yet articulated an equally ambitious strategy for the workers whose jobs will change along the way. 

We should start with the jobs that serve as the first rung of our career ladder.

Instead of waiting to see which entry-level roles quietly disappear, New York should work with employers now to identify where AI is changing junior-level work and test how those jobs can be redesigned. That means asking which tasks can technology take on, which human capabilities become more valuable, and what new responsibilities can give young workers meaningful opportunities to learn, contribute, and advance?

This isn’t about preserving jobs or tasks that no longer make sense. It’s about preserving pathways. When AI eliminates the tasks through which generations of workers learned a profession, we need to be intentional about creating new ways into that profession, or new pathways to opportunity altogether.

What would that look like in practice?

Start small. A philanthropic partner could provide the risk capital and convening power to bring together employers, CUNY, workforce organizations, and—critically—young workers themselves. The group could identify a handful of occupations where AI is rapidly changing the work traditionally assigned to junior employees and recruit employers willing to redesign those roles rather than simply eliminate them.

Then examine the work itself. What does an entry-level employee do today? Which tasks can AI automate or accelerate? Which responsibilities that once required more experience could now move down the career ladder? And what training, supervision, or workplace supports would allow a young worker to take them on successfully?

Public and philanthropic dollars could help employers answer those questions in practice—funding job-design technical assistance, training, implementation, and evaluation so individual businesses are not asked to shoulder the full cost and risk of experimentation.

And we should be clear about what success means. The test is not simply whether AI makes an employer or worker more productive. It is whether the redesigned job still functions as a genuine first rung of a career ladder. Are young workers gaining skills and meaningful responsibility? Are they staying, advancing, and earning more? And does the redesigned role create enough value for employers to ensure the model can be sustained and expanded?

If it works, New York would have something far more valuable than another report, advisory council, or working group conversation about the future of work. We would have a model employers can adopt, workforce organizations can support, and government can help bring to scale.

Making this happen will require employers willing to experiment, funders willing to invest before all the answers are known, and workforce and education partners willing to build and learn alongside them. New York already has the essential ingredients, including world-class employers and civic institutions, an extraordinary workforce ecosystem, and a city actively investing in AI and its economic potential.

What we need now is the same level of ambition for economic mobility. AI will reshape how we work and how careers begin. The question is whether we redesign the first rung of the career ladder with intention, or let technology redesign it for us.

Let’s make sure every young New Yorker still has a path to opportunity in the economy AI creates.

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.

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. Yesterday, we published an open letter to the new EDC leadership. Today: a response to the mayor’s recent announcement on creating a new Business Advisory Council. Stay tuned for more of our workforce ideas throughout the week.

If you missed it last week, Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced the establishment of a Business Advisory Council. Composed of 15 leaders from finance, technology, real estate, healthcare, sports, entertainment, and retail, this new council will meet quarterly with the mayor and Julie Su, the Deputy Mayor for Economic Justice, to help shape the city’s next stage of economic growth and innovation.

I welcome the initiative, and I have great respect for those who have agreed to serve. New York needs its business leaders engaged in shaping the city’s future, a conviction Mayor Mamdani voiced as Mayor-Elect and one that animated our work on his transition Committee on Economic Development and Workforce Development. That is what makes the roster puzzling. Not one member of that committee sits on the Business Advisory Council. A single council member served on the transition’s Housing Committee. The other sixteen committees are entirely unrepresented.

According to the announcement, the Council will “advise City Hall on the industries driving New York’s economy as well as the infrastructure, talent pipeline, and regulatory environment those industries need to grow.” Reasonable aims, but framed entirely around what industries need to grow, not what New Yorkers need to reach them. That is pothole work: important work, but no substitute for addressing the deeper structural problems beneath it. Our city’s structural failures have deepened the divides in our K-shaped economy and pushed affordability further out of reach for the New Yorkers already furthest from it.

If economic growth is the Council’s organizing objective, how will it advance this administration’s stated commitment to economic justice? And is this the business leadership best equipped to advance both? Dr. King asked: “Where do we go from here?” His answer began with a precondition: “We must first honestly recognize where we are now.”

The measure of the city’s economic strategy should be whether it creates good jobs, raises wages, and expands access to careers that can support a family, and whether those gains reach across communities and across racial and gender lines. That is possible only when equity is built into the platform itself. As Alicia Glen and James Patchett argued in Vital City, that platform rests on three pillars: “investing in infrastructure, incentivizing private sector investment and fostering talent pipelines to fuel high-growth industries.”

That broader vision of economic growth is largely absent from the announcement. It is not until the eleventh of fifteen member statements that anyone names it. Robert Wolf speaks of policies and partnerships that “create good-paying jobs, raise wages, and make New York a more affordable place to live, work, and build.”

It shouldn’t be a footnote. It should be the assignment.

Although New York is close to a record-high level of total employment, we are falling behind peer cities in creating many of the higher-wage jobs that support the middle class. While the unemployment rate as a whole has improved, Black and Latino New Yorkers still have considerably higher unemployment than white New Yorkers. Young adults face persistent barriers to employment. Many employed New Yorkers still cannot afford to live in the city where they work.

An administration committed to affordability and economic justice has to treat economic development and workforce development as one question, not two. Where will the jobs come from? What will they pay? Who will be able to reach them? What skills will workers need to get there? How does someone move from an entry-level position into a career? And who is accountable for building those pathways?

Nothing in the Council’s mandate suggests it will be tasked with answering any of these questions. That silence is not the members’ fault. Several of them already do this work.

In fact, several members bring experience that points toward what a stronger workforce strategy could look like. Healthcare is represented, and Northwell Health’s involvement is encouraging. Its investment in FutureReadyNYC and the Northwell School of Health Sciences shows the kind of long-term commitment we can and should see more employers make. Marcus Samuelsson’s work with the Careers through Culinary Arts Program offers another strong example, linking young people with culinary training, internships, and apprenticeships. Steiner Studios represents an industry that has a well-established record of workforce partnerships, such as the Made in NY Production Assistant Training Program.

These are important models, but individual examples have not yet added up to a citywide strategy.

The sectors that have seen the most recent growth in employment in New York, namely home care, child care, and human services, are not adequately represented. Neither is the broader nonprofit sector, even though community-based organizations are major employers and important engines of economic mobility across the city.

Education, organized labor, and clean energy and utilities are also missing. Small businesses need a clearer, more direct voice, as do the workforce development organizations that prepare, place, and support hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers.

The same lack of connection is evident in the institutions and partnerships the city has already built.

The Workforce Development Board (WDB) oversees nearly $100 million in public workforce funding. Do the members of the new Business Advisory Council know what the WDB is responsible for, where it has invested, or what its priorities are? Will the Council work with the Board or simply alongside it? Not a single person sits on both bodies. Amalgamated Bank is the only organization with representation on both. Perhaps the distance is explained by the fact that the current Board is a holdover, with a roster largely unchanged from the Adams administration.

The city also has industry partnerships such as the New York Alliance for Careers in Healthcare and the NYC Tech Talent Pipeline. How will these partnerships interact with the new Council? Will their knowledge of employers, occupations, training requirements, and career pathways influence its work?

Will the Council build on the Adams administration’s Rebuild, Renew, Reinvent: A Blueprint for New York City’s Economic Recovery (2022)? Or its Pathways to an Inclusive Economy, the Future of Workers Task Force blueprint (2023)? Will it reach further back, to the Career Pathways report of the de Blasio years? Or will New York once again start from scratch?

Various administrations, different names, the same ambitions.

Every mayor wants to build a stronger public-private partnership. Each administration brings in respected leaders, sets up an advisory body, and promises a new phase of cooperation. Too often, the city then begins another discussion without having decided what to do with the structures, commitments, and lessons left by the previous administration.

In 2024, Mayor Adams launched a Workforce Development Council (WDC) to “unlock new job opportunities for New Yorkers.” Chaired by Rob Speyer, CEO of Tishman Speyer, it was charged with helping “build an economy with real pathways to family-sustaining careers,” in the Mayor’s words. Two years later, Mayor Mamdani has asked his Business Advisory Council to “double down on what makes this city the best place on Earth to start a company, grow a business, and build a career.”

A direct comparison will always be imperfect because the WDC’s full membership was never released publicly. But one contrast is unmistakable, and it runs against expectation. Adams, the moderate, framed the problem as a recovery that had failed working families. Mamdani, the democratic socialist, frames it as a city that has to prove it still works for business. Neither council’s stated mandate makes affordability or economic mobility the measure of success. The economic indicators can trend upward, as they are now, without answering the question both administrations say they are trying to answer.

Growth and equity can move together. I have less confidence that a council drawn this narrowly can determine how to achieve both, or agree on the tools and measures needed to get there. We will meet the future either way, prepared or not. The question is whether we are willing to name the crises we share, and whether we are thoughtful about whom we invite to help solve them. Mobility for all New Yorkers, not some, is the measure. It ought to be the mandate.