The rise of AI has been accompanied by fears of massive job loss and some large-scale layoffs.
Now, a coalition of tech and labor organizations has launched a pilot program to retrain and upskill entry-level workers having difficulty finding a job in an automated world and tech workers who have lost their jobs because of artificial intelligence.
The effort, dubbed AI Dividend and led by the Fund for Guaranteed Income, a labor rights organization, and What We Will, a tech worker advocacy group, is providing a monthly stipend of up to $1,000 to a cohort of nearly 50 participants.
The initiative, which began payouts in late March, has $300,000 in initial funding and will distribute $3 million over the course of one year.
Kaitlin Cort, founder of What We Will, and Nicholas Salazar, executive director of the Fund for a Guaranteed Income (F4GI), told Business Insider that their goal is to test what a safety net for widespread AI disruption could look like.
“We’re hearing from workers of all levels that they need support,” Salazar said. “And we know that without resources, or when facing homelessness like some of our participants are, it is very difficult to invest in retraining.”
“The goal is to help participants transition and find another job,” Salazar said. “Without the support, they could fall into permanent unemployment.”
A shrinking mobility ladder
A data scientist and software engineer who has spent years mentoring through coding bootcamps and nonprofit training programs, Cort said that pathways into tech that offer upward mobility are narrowing.
“In the past year, we’re definitely seeing a lot of changes in the industry and a tightening job market, especially for entry-level workers,” Cort said.
SignalFire, a platform that tracks over 650 million professionals and 80 million organizations, wrote in its 2025 “State of Tech Talent Report” that entry-level is “collapsing” and that new grad hiring in Big Tech is down over 50% in 2024 from pre-pandemic levels in 2019.
Cort said there is now a “K-shaped labor market” where demand is growing for senior workers with AI expertise, while junior-level software roles are disappearing. The result, she says, is that computer science graduates are left scrambling for jobs.
“What people need is not just video courses,” Cort said, referring to retraining programs. “They need to have a project — ideally with real users — and AI-related job experience to be added to their résumé. So much of that requires in-person mentorship and training.”
The UBI debate
There are many vocal critics of UBI in Silicon Valley. Marc Andreessen wrote in 2023 that UBI would turn people into “zoo animals to be farmed by the state.” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman spent $14 million of his own money on a UBI study and no longer believes it is a good plan.
Dean Grey, an entry-level tech worker struggling to land a new job since his previous contract ended, however, called the monthly checks he receives through the AI Dividend “amazing” and “such a boon.”
Grey, a trucker before entering the tech industry, told Business Insider that he had gone through multiple bootcamps and a short-term contract, only to find that his skills couldn’t land him a position after hundreds of applications.
“Honestly, this program is still so new, and the curriculum is still developing, but right away I got a real sense of community,” said Grey. “And to be honest, just to have a structure again, some guidance, and community allowed me to move forward with some confidence.”
As part of the program, Grey is creating an AI chatbot to help newly unemployed people navigate their next steps and answer questions about healthcare, unemployment benefits, and networking opportunities.
A targeted ‘cash plus’ model
The AI Dividend program is already working with hundreds of laid-off workers, including about 270 laid-off Oracle employees.
Cort said many share a similar challenge: Their experience doesn’t match what the current market demands.
“They might have been working on a specific part of a code base that is Java-based and actually quite old for many, many years,” Cort said. “And they’re not exposed to the new advancements.”
Philip Luck, director of the CSIS Economics Program, said it is increasingly hard for governments to balance their budgets and that it is difficult to see a scenario in which any government could make a monthly payout to a large swath of the population.
“I’m 1000% for scaling up unemployment insurance and anti-poverty policies,” Luck said, adding that these assistances make sense for people who need to learn new skills or are nearing retirement, and need help getting through broad transitions.
“It’s hard for me to see an economy where a majority of labor is not needed,” Luck added. “We only have so much money, and we should channel it toward those who need it the most, through really effective, smart, and well-designed means testing.”
Salazar said that the AI Dividend is often seen as a UBI program, but it does more than hand out cash.
“UBI is universal, unconditional, and it’s supposed to be permanent,” he said. “But this program is actually targeted right now for AI-displaced workers, which means it’s conditional and it’s time-limited to between six and 12 months.”
Grey said that there are always people who would take advantage of any program, including UBI, but he is optimistic about its existence in some shape or form going forward.
“It might just mean that we transition to a new way of finding purpose, whether that’s not in what we do for occupation, but how we express ourselves or what we do creatively,” Grey said. “I don’t think that we’ll run out of ways to find purpose in life.”
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