[Image: Courtesy Mark Cuban Foundation]
The Dallas-based Mark Cuban Foundation is launching its first program designed for adult learners with a pilot at Dallas College Aug. 17-21. The Agentic AI Academy is a free five-day accelerator operated in partnership with New York City-based worker advocacy nonprofit Lift Our Voices.
Since 2019, the Mark Cuban Foundation’s AI education has been delivered through its AI Bootcamp for high school students. The Agentic AI Academy expands that mission to community college students, no technical background required. The pilot targets learners in the trades and other communities that often have less access to AI training, the foundation said.
Learning to use agentic AI to achieve goals
The hands-on program offers half-day sessions, each built around a specific result students can apply directly to their work. By the end of the program, every participant will have built a set of working AI agents tailored to their own work.
Throughout the week, participants learn to build and use AI agents for tasks tied directly to the workplace, including an agent that serves as a personal career coach to help students develop a roadmap for achieving their goals.
For the Mark Cuban Foundation, the community college pilot represents a first step toward broader adult programming.
“Community colleges are in every region across the country, often in places that are not served by other educational institutions,” said Charlotte Dungan, chief learning officer at the Mark Cuban Foundation, in a statement. “By bringing Agentic AI to small business owners, community members and students who are entering or re-entering the workforce, we can expand who is empowered to use Agentic AI.”
Helping inform and empower young workers
Lift Our Voices (LOV) developed one of the tools students will use during the week. The LOV Where You Work AI tool offers free, anonymous and multilingual evaluations of employment contracts and onboarding paperwork. It looks for hidden nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) and forced arbitration clauses that can silence employees if they experience bad behavior in the workplace. Students will test the tool on a sample contract, then model how each party might respond to what it uncovers.
Lift Our Voices said that the partnership with the Mark Cuban Foundation highlights their shared goal of helping young workers understand the fine print of contracts and agreements before they sign.
Lift Our Voices co-founders Gretchen Carlson and Julie Roginsky said that they were excited to partner with the Mark Cuban Foundation to help workers begin their first jobs informed and empowered.
“Young people entering the workforce deserve to know what’s in their employment contracts before they sign away their rights. But clauses around NDAs and forced arbitration are often overly complex and buried deep in contracts,” Carlson said. “Our free LOV Where You Work AI Tool helps close that gap by identifying how these silencing mechanisms show up in contracts and translating the legal terminology into plain language.”
Roginsky said that Gen Z is unwilling to put up with toxic workplaces and expects “transparency and a healthy workplace culture.”
“The LOV Where You Work AI Tool gives them another way to evaluate a company and hold employers accountable,” she said. “Just as job applicants ask about salary and healthcare benefits, our tool can help them ask informed questions about a company’s use of silencing mechanisms.”
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