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IN THE NEW WORLD OF A I - In the early 1980s, America's workforce system trained workers in the repair of typewriters, calculators and copy machines. Within the decade, most of these jobs were gone. But the system pivoted and adapted to the new jobs emerging. Now with the march of Artificial Intelligence, the system is set to pivot and adapt again.
Across America’s vast workforce system, one issue dominates all conversations today when workforce practitioners get together: the impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in altering, creating and destroying jobs.
The job counselors, job developers, case managers, and labor market analysts who make up the system are tasked with assisting workers to find and retain jobs. The unexpectedly rapid speed by which AI is being taken up by employers is bringing a reconsideration of strategies and workforce roles. How are workforce professionals responding? How is the job placement process changing?
Over the past half century, the workforce system has been a dynamic one: pivoting and adapting to shifts in jobs and occupations. Already it has started this adaptation with AI, following the lead of employers. The system is also in the early stages of utilizing AI to improve its own operations, accountability, and services to job seekers.
Typewriter Repair and the March of Technology
In the early 1980s I headed a small job training and economic development group, the San Francisco Renaissance Center. One of our first job training classes was in business machine repair. We trained unemployed ex-offenders and out-of-school youth to repair typewriters, copy machines, and calculators. They found jobs with some of the major manufacturers of the time—Olympia, IBM, Xerox, Taylor Made—as well as with the small business machine repair shops that doted the South of Market area of San Francisco.
Though the training went well for a few years, within a decade the jobs they had been obtaining largely disappeared. The typewriter, copier and calculator were being replaced by the personal computer and other electronic devices. Within the decade, most of the local business machine repair shops had closed, unable to respond to the transformation.
Other job training groups at the time also saw their training becoming obsolete. A nearby community group had a longstanding partnership with the local banks to train bank tellers; another group trained data entry operators, a third trained and employed bike messengers. Within the next two decades, these jobs too had become obsolete.
Some of the training groups went out of business themselves. Yet, for the most part, the workforce system adapted. Training groups shifted with the job market. At the Renaissance Center, we pivoted to trainings in personal computer technician, microwave technician, and telecommunications technician, developing curricula with the local employers. Other groups shifted to training for the emerging technician jobs in the banking, transportation and logistics industries. Later in the 1990s and early 2000s, training groups shifted to coding, customer service and cybersecurity jobs linked to the internet, as well as other jobs not even envisioned in the 1980s.
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Far more than other post-secondary education systems, the workforce system has followed and responded to the march of technology. Far more than other post-secondary education systems, it has adopted a market-based discipline tied to outcomes---though it still has a way to go, with the promise of AI.
The Workforce Today: Adapting to AI
The more than 550 local workforce boards throughout the nation are at the center of America’s workforce system: directing and funding the job training and placement activities. A survey of the 45 boards in California finds that most already are immersed in tracking the initial impacts of AI on hiring standards and skill requirements, and trying to respond to market signals.
So far, employers of administrative and tech workers in California are reporting AI as beginning to eliminate a segment of entry level jobs, but numbers and details are scarce. The prominent national studies of job impacts by the Stanford Digital Economy Lab and Harvard Business School are still in early stages, their data limited on numbers of jobs created or destroyed. AI’s main job impacts in California have involved the integration of AI in existing jobs.
This morning, Burning Glass Institute (BGI) will be issuing its latest AI jobs study, “Beyond the Binary: How Automation and Augmentation are Combining to Reshape Work.” The report emphasizes how AI is reshaping existing jobs. The report contradicts the idea that AI is sorting the job market into automated “loser” jobs and augmented “winner” jobs. Instead, AI is reshaping the skills needed inside roles rather than eliminating the roles themselves.
For the workforce field, this points to an emphasis on short-term skills upgrading, rather than career changes. BGI President Matt Sigelman explains,
“As AI changes the nature of the skills people use at work, even workers who have been in a field for decades may find that they are lacking key skills, creating an urgent training imperative., In fact, opportunity may increasingly be unlocked not by wholesale career switches, but by timely, targeted skill development interventions that help workers adapt as their existing roles evolve. Effective workforce systems, in turn, will be those that can detect these shifts early and guide people toward training that aligns with how jobs are changing in practice—not how we once assumed they would.”
Such an emphasis on short-term skills upgrading is already afoot. Blake Konczal, Executive Director of the Fresno Regional Workforce Development Board, explains that his staff are in close contact with area employers as to how they are using AI. “Across our sectors, in agriculture, health care, and even construction and forest management, our employers are looking into how their existing workers can better function,” notes Konczal, “and we in turn are looking at how we can upskill incumbent workers with short-term interventions to enable them to utilize AI in their roles.”
AI and Accountability
Konczal and Fresno Board staff also are experimenting on the use of AI in their operations, to more fully track and understand training and placement outcomes, and make funding decisions based on these outcomes. “We currently are testing the use of AI to analyze the work histories and skills of our previous job seekers, the training and placement expenditures associated with these job seekers, and the results obtained over a period of years. We see this as a way of improving our services to job seekers and outcomes.”
Jake Segal, a Managing Director at Social Finance, over the past decade has been at the forefront of thinking about how to improve outcomes and accountability among a range of health, human services, and employment services. His projects in recent years have focused on the use of funding mechanisms that are outcomes-based rather than process-based or service-based. He sees in AI the opportunity to further the outcomes-based approach.
An outcomes-based approach directs funding to training groups which can show job placements and retention--not those whose products are measured in meetings or e-mails. As Segal explains, “AI promises to hasten this approach as it is able to help break down data silos and help administrators more effectively track outcomes across periods.”
One marker of this change: a recent announcement by the US Department of Labor that it will offer pay-for-success funding grants in support of the President’s goal to grow apprenticeship. Says John Colborn of Apprenticeships for America, which has advocated for this funding approach, “Paying for apprenticeship outcomes means high performers are rewarded and tax dollars are directed to connecting job seekers with real jobs.”
AI and Job Search
The workforce system is most advanced in its use of AI in the job placement process. Nearly all of the local workforce boards in California report incorporating AI in their services to job seekers.
Cynthia Avila is the Business Solutions Manager at the Workforce Development Board of Ventura County. Her unit of 5 business solutions specialists provides recruitment and training solutions to local employers, and partners with case managers in identifying job openings for their job seekers.
“AI is freeing up my staff from the reporting and paperwork linked to our government funding sources. We are able to spend more time interacting with employers, understanding their businesses. We have more time to spend with the case managers to get to know our job seekers.
“Additionally, for small and mid-size employers who might be struggling in a one or more areas of operations, we prepare a ‘business needs assessment.’ We’re finding AI is not only allowing us to prepare the assessment more rapidly, but also is suggesting options and strategies that we might not have thought of.”
In the job search process, case managers in Ventura and at other workforce boards are using AI to tailor resumes and interview preparation to the individual job posting. Employers today are receiving tens of job applicants (sometimes hundreds) for each position, AI is enabling case managers to target each job application to the skill and experience requirements of the job posting, and do so in short periods of time.
What If This Time is Different
Like most long-time veterans in the employment field, I think about whether this time will be different. The typewriter and business machine repair jobs that I started with in the early 1980s were eliminated by new technologies, as were other jobs at the time. But new occupations and jobs arose that were greater in number. The pattern has repeated itself in the subsequent decades and with successive technology advances.
Whether this pattern of job creation will continue with AI, whether AI represents a different form of job destruction and creation, is an ongoing subject of dueling narratives. In its 2025 Future of Jobs Report, the World Economic Forum put forward the optimistic narrative, estimating that worldwide AI will eliminate 92 million jobs by 2030, but will create 170 million new jobs. Others, including Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei have presented a more sober picture of large scale job loss.
Nobody knows whether AI will be different. What we do know is that if large scale job displacement does occur, the current proposals of universal basic income and guaranteed income are not the answer. And we know that in the short term, AI is bringing improvements to the job training and placement processes, with promise of additional improvements.
Photo: Boston Globe via Getty Images
(Michael Bernick is the former Director of California’s Employment Development Department and previously served eight years on the BART Board. He is currently employment counsel at Duane Morris LLP, a Milken Institute Fellow, and a Fellow at the Burning Glass Institute. A leading voice on workforce issues, Bernick focuses on employment strategies for neurodiverse populations. His latest book is The Autism Full Employment Act. He is a regular contributor to CityWatchLA.com.)
