OpenAI, Anthropic, Amazon, and Microsoft announced last week that they are the anchor funders of RAISE US, a new $500 million nonprofit designed to retrain workers displaced by artificial intelligence. The coalition launched on June 25 with bipartisan backing from former Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and former Indiana Governor Eric Holcomb.
Read that again. The four companies whose AI models are most aggressively displacing knowledge workers are now paying to clean up the aftermath.
The numbers behind the initiative are stark. According to Challenger, Gray & Christmas data reported by TechTimes, more than 50,000 American layoffs over the past eighteen months have been attributed directly to AI. Through June 2026, AI has been cited in over 100,000 U.S. job cuts — nearly double the figure for all of 2025. For four consecutive months, AI has been the single most common reason companies gave for eliminating positions.
RAISE US will fund pilot programs in four states, connecting displaced workers with new training and placement services. The goal is $1 billion in total commitments.
A reasonable question: why are these companies spending half a billion dollars to fix a problem they created? Because the alternative — a generation of displaced workers with no pathway back into the economy — is worse for everyone, including the companies selling AI.
But the real question for business owners is simpler. Is the only way to use AI to cut people? A Gartner survey of 350 executives at billion-dollar companies, published in May, found that 80% had reduced headcount after deploying AI. The correlation between those cuts and improved returns was zero. The companies that slashed deeply did no better than the ones that did not.
The companies that did see returns had something in common. They used AI to augment their existing teams, not replace them. That is the difference.
Viktor was built on exactly this principle. It is not a replacement for your staff. It is a tool your staff uses.
Viktor lives inside Slack and Microsoft Teams. You @mention it in a thread the same way you would ask a colleague. The output — a PDF, a report, a task created in your CRM, an email drafted in Gmail — lands where it should land.
Your marketing person uses Viktor to draft campaign copy and pull performance data. Your operations manager uses it to build weekly reports from raw numbers. Your sales team uses it to research prospects and prepare proposals. Your finance team uses it to reconcile data and generate summaries. Nobody loses their job. Everyone gets faster. Viktor runs on Claude, GPT-4, and Gemini — all three included in one credit balance — and selects the right model automatically.
The $500 million going into RAISE US is necessary. But the smarter move is to never need it.
You get $100 of free credits to begin. No time limit, no commitment. That's enough to do real work and see what Viktor can actually do before you spend a penny. There's also $50 off your first bill. You must use this exact link to receive both benefits.
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