Why the Most Important AI Training Initiative Texts You Back

Most AI upskilling never reaches the people who need it most. It stays inside corporate training budgets, locked away from the average person. Michael Ioffe, Co-Founder and CEO of Arist, joins Steve Smith to talk about Make America AI Ready, a new partnership with the U.S. Department of Labor designed to deliver free AI upskilling to every American worker — entirely via text message. In this episode, Michael walks through how the program works, what the Department of Labor's AI literacy framework actually covers, and why SMS is the right delivery mechanism for education at this scale. They also get into what it takes to build infrastructure for a program that could reach a hundred million people, and what a successful outcome looks like for both the American workforce and Arist. If you've been thinking about how AI education reaches workers who aren't already plugged into corporate training programs, this one is worth your time.