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New York Commits $10 Million to Train 40,000 Residents for AI Jobs in Queens

Productivity · By: AIReport Admin · 1 hour ago · 👁 11
New York Commits $10 Million to Train 40,000 Residents for AI Jobs in Queens

New York Governor Kathy Hochul announced a $10 million AI Jobs Institute in Long Island City, Queens, run by the nonprofit Pursuit, aiming to train up to 40,000 lower-income New Yorkers for AI-related jobs by 2032. The move comes as CBRE reported the New York metro tech workforce reached 394,300, surpassing the Bay Area for the first time.

New York Governor Kathy Hochul announced on Thursday a $10 million AI Jobs Institute in Long Island City, Queens, a training hub intended to prepare up to 40,000 lower-income New Yorkers for AI-related jobs by 2032. The nonprofit organization Pursuit will design and operate the institute, connect trainees with employers, and produce research to guide state and federal workforce policy.

The funding mixes public and private sources. Public money comes from Empire State Development, the city's Economic Development Corporation and the Queens Borough President's Office, while operations will be funded by Ascendium Education Group, Google.org, Wells Fargo, Con Edison and Adobe. The institute is an expansion of New York's existing work with Pursuit, which in March was named statewide lead for the AI Prep for Jobs program, an accelerated-course alternative to degrees intended for 420 low-income residents.

The scale-up is steep. Pursuit shifted from software training to a 630-hour AI course about three years ago and updates the curriculum weekly; roughly 400 to 500 people have taken the full course or shorter workshops so far. Reaching 40,000 would require roughly an eighty-fold increase in about six years. Trainees start with tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Copilot, then learn to build AI agents that handle routine business tasks.

The program deliberately targets the people most exposed to AI displacement. Pursuit says 70 percent of its participants are Black or Latine, half receive public assistance, 60 percent lack a four-year degree and 40 percent are immigrants, and it credits its programs with more than $1 billion in participants' lifetime wage gains, an organization-reported figure. It cites PwC's Global AI Jobs Barometer, which found workers with AI skills earn a 56 percent wage premium, a figure that doubled in a year.

The timing is not accidental. New York's metro area added 30,640 tech workers from 2022 to 2025, reaching 394,300 and surpassing the San Francisco Bay Area, at 375,730, for the first time in the 13-year history of CBRE's annual tech talent report, with banks and financial firms driving much of the growth through AI hiring. At the same time, Census Bureau research points the other way at the entry level: since ChatGPT's release, graduates of AI-exposed majors like computer science have found fewer jobs and lower pay.

The institute's national advisory council includes former Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, OpenAI's Leah Belsky, Anthropic's Eleanor Dorfman and CUNY Chancellor Félix Matos Rodríguez, with employers on the council feeding hiring signals back into the curriculum. Hochul's FutureWorks Commission is expected to deliver policy proposals on training, job quality and the social safety net by the end of December.

The 40,000 figure matters less as a number than as a signal: a state government concluding that the market will not retrain the workers AI is most likely to displace on its own, and putting public money at the front of the queue instead of the back.

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