The arrival of artificial intelligence in the American workplace is not a distant forecast — it is already reshaping which jobs exist, which skills are valued, and who gets to participate in the economy being built. Entry-level employment in the most AI-exposed sectors dropped 6% for workers aged 22–25 between 2022 and 2025(1). Dario Amodei predicts 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs will disappear within five years(2). The World Economic Forum projects 170 million new jobs by 2030(3) — but they are not one-to-one replacements. Workers with AI skills already earn 25% more than those without(4).
This is not a technology problem. It is an equity problem with a technology dimension. Low-income communities have historically been the last to benefit from major technological transitions — receiving access 5 to 10 years after a technology has already restructured the economy and established who participates fully and who doesn’t. By then, the opportunity gap has already taken root. The goal is not to help communities catch up. It is to get ahead of the curve — to be the organization that helped someone learn computer skills in 1988, before they became a baseline requirement for economic participation. That is the urgency of this moment.
The AI training that does exist skews heavily toward workers who are already higher-skilled. The OECD finds that most AI upskilling programs demand prerequisites largely inaccessible to the workers most exposed to displacement(5). Perceptions about which careers are “for someone like me” form as early as age 10 and remain largely unchanged by 14(6). The result is gatekeeping by neglect: not a conspiracy, but a consistent failure to extend to everyone the macro-level literacy that college-educated workers take for granted. AI is not creating that divide, but it is widening it.
Community development has been central to Pursuit’s model since the organization’s founding — long before AI was part of the conversation. Pursuit began as an advocacy and community organizing effort, and one of our earliest insights still holds: the biggest barrier keeping talent from starting on the path is not a skills gap. It is a belief gap — the lack of confidence that such an opportunity could be for someone like them. The software development fellowship was built on that foundation. The AI-native program deepens it.
Community development, properly understood, is not recruitment. It is not marketing with a warmer face. It is the work of cultivating belief in agency — in individuals, in families, in communities. And it requires holding two things at once: the urgency of this moment, and the reality that trust and belief take time. You cannot give someone a new set of skills and send them out into the world alone and call that transformation. Pursuit’s commitment is to remain present through the full arc — through job placement, through on-the-job support, through the sustained accompaniment that makes the difference between a skill learned and a life genuinely changed.
That commitment requires infrastructure. To reach the communities most likely to be left behind, Pursuit works across three types of partners:
Systems change actors — government agencies and public libraries — where we maintain regular touchpoints to stay embedded in civic infrastructure and influence how public resources flow toward AI access and awareness.
Bridge and workforce development programs also serving low-income New Yorkers, with whom we build two-way referral pipelines and share collective knowledge about industry trends. These partners extend our reach while strengthening the broader sector’s capacity to respond.
Community-based organizations with existing networks of trust in the communities we serve. These relationships are the connective tissue — the on-the-ground presence that makes outreach land as genuine rather than transactional.
One of the most direct expressions of this philosophy is our community workshop model - piloted earlier this year at Commonpoint Queens. Rather than waiting for prospective Fellows to find Pursuit, workshops bring the opportunity directly into spaces where people already are: community centers, public libraries, workforce programs, borough hall. Attendees don’t just hear about AI — they build something with it. Participants identify a real problem in their life, design a product concept to address it, and use AI to build it. The goal is to make tangible what makes this moment of economic disruption also an enormous opportunity.
This is a new and deepening part of our work. After our first community-based workshop, 83% of participants reported they planned to use AI to learn new skills, 66% understood how it could help them advance professionally, and 100% felt better prepared to engage with AI(7). The approach is not about convincing people. It is about creating the conditions for self-conviction.
Workshops deepen a board and consistent community presence. In the last six months, our community development programming has reached over 5,000 community members, through 29 events and partnerships with over seventy organizations and agencies.
The organizations that will matter most in this moment are not necessarily those with the best technology or the most sophisticated curriculum. They are the ones willing to go where people already are — into community centers and public libraries and workforce programs — and say, honestly: here is what is happening, here is what we know, here is what we don’t, and here is what we can build together.
That is what community development makes possible. Not a pipeline. Not a referral source. The actual precondition for any of this to work: that the people this transition could leave behind are treated, from the first interaction, as people capable of deciding their own futures — and then accompanied, through training, through placement, through the first months on the job, until that future is real. That is not a support function. That is the work.
(References)
(1) Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, “Young workers’ employment drops in occupations with high AI exposure,” January 2026. dallasfed.org/research/economics/2026/0106
(2) Fortune, “AI could make half of all entry-level white-collar jobs vanish, Anthropic CEO warns,” May 28, 2025.
(3). World Economic Forum, Future of Jobs Report 2025. weforum.org/publications/the-future-of-jobs-report-2025/
(4) PwC, 2024 Global AI Jobs Barometer.
(5) OECD, “Bridging the AI Skills Gap,” 2025. oecd.org/en/publications/bridging-the-ai-skills-gap_66d0702e-en.html
(6) King’s College London / UCL, ASPIRES Study: “Young People’s Science and Career Aspirations, Age 10–14.”
(7) Pursuit internal workshop data, 2025.