How We Build: The Next Generation — AI and First Jobs
Since about 2023, hiring into entry-level, AI-exposed roles has softened. The effect is concentrated among the youngest and earliest-career workers. It started in tech and has begun to show up across the broader economy. The trend has not reversed.
This workshop brings bipartisan policy staff, think tank researchers, advocates, venture investors, founders, and enterprise leaders into one room to work through what it means and what, if anything, to do about it.
Join us for a series of fireside conversations and small-group table discussions, all under Chatham House rules.
Why This Conversation
Step back to the whole economy and unemployment looks unaffected by AI. But right now the pressure is falling on the first rung of the career ladder. That's where people learn judgment, sharpen technical skills, build networks, and pick up the people skills a career runs on.
If that pattern is real, and the evidence keeps pointing that way, the usual answers don't fit. Reskilling assumes a destination that no one can name yet. A safety net assumes the problem is only a missing paycheck, when the thing going missing is the entry level job itself, and most of how people build a life still runs through work.
Meanwhile in Washington, when an elected official asks a hard question about AI and its effect on people, one answer from parts of the tech industry has been a super PAC ad. Those fights are usually about regulation, not jobs. But the reflex behind them is the same. It's an expensive way to not read the room, and a poor way to reach young people with real concerns about where they fit in an AI future.
From our conversations with staff on the Hill in both parties, people across Washington want to take these questions seriously. If you're one of them, please request a seat.
It is recess week on the Hill, which is either terrible timing or a good week to get people in a room to wrestle with this instead of talk past each other.
Speakers
Dr. Bharat Chandar, Stanford Digital Economy Lab and Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence
Brent Orrell, American Enterprise Institute
Harin Contractor, Burning Glass Institute
Mayu Takeuchi, Associate, Breakwater Initiative
Rob Weil, Director, AFT; CEO, National Academy for AI Instruction
Ground Rules
Chatham House: take what you hear, leave out who said it. Come to understand, not to pitch.
About How We Build
How We Build puts people from different sides of a build into one room and asks them to work through the real tradeoffs behind AI's hardest problems, rather than perform the debate. The first session took on data centers and the energy they run on. This one takes on workers and the next generation of work.
About RIL
Responsible Innovation Labs is a nonpartisan 501(c)(3). We coach founders through a fellowship, we convene founders, investors, policymakers, and labor around the real tradeoffs in how AI gets built and deployed, and we produce the content, policy education, and case studies that inform the wider ecosystem. We work toward a culture where building responsibly is how great founders scale startups into companies that last.