WASHINGTON, DC – JULY 23: U.S. President Donald Trump displays a signed executive order during the “Winning the AI Race” summit hosted by All‑In Podcast and Hill & Valley Forum at the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium on July 23, 2025 in Washington, DC. Trump signed executive orders related to his Artificial Intelligence Action Plan during the event. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Getty Images
The National Science Foundation (NSF) has launched a new nationwide initiative to coordinate AI workforce readiness across all U.S. states and territories, partnering with the Department of Labor, Department of Agriculture, and the U.S. Small Business Administration. The program, called TechAccess: AI-Ready America, will fund a national convener, state-level coordination hubs, and AI education efforts to help workers, small businesses, and local governments adapt to AI’s impact on the economy.
When states and regions face shocks to their labor markets, local workforce and economic development actors are tasked with the herculean effort of triaging labor market needs, organizing local workforce leaders, pursuing and allocating funding and resources, implementing solutions in a coordinated fashion, and instituting a feedback loop to refine approaches.
Whether it be a response to natural disasters or global pandemics, recessions, federal industrial policy and workforce initiatives, or the impact of technological change as with AI or the advent of the Internet in the mid-1990s, it is almost always underfunded, invisible work, and its beginning to implicate AI education and workforce development efforts that the federal government aims to address through a new federal initiative.
Francie Genz, a Fellow with New America’s Future of Work & Innovation Economy program, recently defined this work as the six functions of economic and workforce development intermediaries, drawing on the experiences of workforce and education leaders working within tech-based economic development organizations.
Coordination leaders must conduct an orchestra comprising a broad set of workforce and education leaders playing their own instruments with their own set of incentives, funding formulas, politics, and segment of the labor market.
These include state universities and community colleges, K-12 schools, employers and industry associations, state agencies, workforce development boards, philanthropies, and a broad constellation of civic institutions. The broad constellation of players includes community and economic development organizations, labor unions, community development financial institutions, libraries, museums, small business centers, and other organizations who have a stake in growing a state’s economy and fostering AI literacy.
Coordination and facilitation of this network is one of the biggest responsibilities for a state or region, and it remains one of the most understated aspects of workforce and economic development ecosystems at the local level.
New America recently outlined six coordination functions local intermediaries must fulfill in order to effectively navigate labor market opportunities, such as those brought about by AI.
Francie Genz and Natalya Brill, New AmericaState Coordination Challenges Comes for AI Education
Today, states and regions are once again contending with this coordination and facilitation challenge as AI tools mature and adoption gradually spreads across the labor market. To help solve for the coordination challenge, NSF’s TechAccess: AI-Ready America initiative will be an experimental program to watch.
Led out of NSF’s Technology, Innovation, and Partnerships Directorate in partnership with NSF’s Directorate on Computer, Information Science, and Engineering and the Directorate for STEM Education, the multi-agency federal collaboration is focused on capacity building of state coordination around AI education, workforce development, and business competitiveness. The program has a focus on three core fundable components:
Establishing state-level AI readiness coordination hubs.Establishing a national coordination lead.Issuing AI-Ready Catalyst Award competitions to pilot or scale specific approaches to address AI readiness and literacy.State Coordination Challenges Comes for AI Education
Through the AI-Ready America initiative, the NSF and its partners aim to expand access to AI knowledge, tools, training, and capacity-building so that all Americans can participate in and benefit from the AI economy.
“America’s AI competitiveness depends on a strong research and development ecosystem paired with access to advanced science and technology knowledge for our current and future workforce,” said Brian Stone, performing the duties of the NSF director, “NSF AI-Ready America provides that foundation.”
NSF AI-Ready America is targeting three areas where gaps are widest, including expanding AI literacy and applied skills development across the workforce; equipping small businesses and local governments with the tools and technical assistance to adopt AI; and building hands-on learning pathways, such as internships and project-based programs, that translate AI skills into real-world applications.
The coordination hubs within states will need to triage gaps in basic AI fluency, such as using AI for daily life, to more advanced AI proficiency that tilts more towards skill development for using AI at work or building AI systems and infrastructure. Many states already have activities underway to address these issues, but they generally operate in silos with limited impact or opportunities for cross-pollination.
The National Science Foundation identified several characteristics of AI coordination hubs as part of its TechAccess: AI Ready initiative.
U.S. National Science Foundation
Five core responsibilities of state AI readiness hubs as defined by the U.S. National Science Foundation.
U.S. National Science Foundation
For example, NSF’s Advanced Technological Education program has supported capacity-building of community and technical colleges nationwide through the National Applied AI Consortium led by Miami Dade College, Houston Community College, and Maricopa Community College District.
However, those college-level efforts typically aren’t coordinated with similar efforts at workforce development boards or universities or K-12 schools across states. Sometimes training organizations see one another as competitors for students or upskilling workers rather than collaborators or peers working toward the same goal.
In an informational webinar hosted by the NSF, program directors highlighted a few responsibilities intended to be held by state coordination hubs, including developing a strategic plan for AI readiness, supporting the alignment of existing programs towards credential attainment and meeting labor market needs, and creating resource navigation infrastructure to better organize AI readiness programs in a given state.
Fostering AI Literacy and Skill Development Networks
NSF AI-Ready America coordination hubs should also engage existing federal programs in states such as the Department of Agriculture’s network of Cooperative Extension Systems, the Small Business Administration’s Small Business Development Centers, the Labor Department’s American Jobs Centers, and the Economic Development Administration’s Tech Hubs initiative. Hubs must demonstrate being able to link together the activities of the NSF’s own programs in the state such as the Regional Innovation Engines and National Artificial Intelligence Research Institutes.
Hubs are not expected to create new curriculum or training programs but rather help steer existing programs, pools of resources, and education stakeholders towards a shared vision and goals at the state-level.
The agency is currently soliciting letters of intent from local organizations seeking funding to be a coordination hub through June and full proposals through July. Funding will be distributed in tranches, with ten awards expected in the near term and fifty-six total hub awards to follow, contingent on funding.
Funding for hub support is fairly limited for the proposed scope of work. Hubs can receive around $1 million per year for three years, with the possibility of an additional year of support. A wide range of non-profit organizations, including higher education institutions, and some for-profit businesses are eligible to apply for funding.
However, the funding picture for such initiatives is unclear. Despite its call for expanded AI skills development as outlined in the Trump administration’s AI Action Plan, a wave of mass layoffs, leadership resignations, and sudden reorganization has hit the National Science Foundation since last January. The president’s budget request has repeatedly proposed cutting the NSF’s budget by more than half, which so far have been rebuffed by Congress.
Funding uncertainty aside, federal programs like NSF AI-Ready America are a step in the right direction to support bottoms-up innovation while enabling better coordination around education and workforce strategy.
From red states to blue states, rural regions and urban centers, the coordination challenge is real, and it must be solved intentionally if regions are going to succeed in helping their communities, students, workers, and businesses become AI-literate and ready for the future of work.
NSF’s program illustrate the art of the possible of how federal investments could potentially help education, workforce, and economic development leaders in states solve the coordination challenge that so often impedes the effective implementation of efforts to spark economic growth with rooted in advanced and frontier technologies.