Verizon is putting $70 million behind a simple idea: Learning AI shouldn’t cost anything.
Wednesday afternoon at the Liberty Science Center in Jersey City, the company launched Verizon AI Skills for America, an initiative offering free artificial intelligence training to job seekers, early-career professionals, displaced workers, educators and small businesses. The total combines $50 million in new money with an existing $20 million reskilling fund for departing Verizon employees.
Verizon gives LSC $1M AI grant
During the launch of Verizon AI Skills for America Wednesday in Jersey City, Verizon CEO Dan Schulman announced a $1 million grant to Liberty Science Center to create interactive programming that introduces visitors to AI skills training. Read the story here.
The centerpiece of the program is a single online portal that gathers AI training from Google, Microsoft, Anthropic, Coursera, OpenAI, IBM and others. Verizon said that kind of training can cost more than $700 per person per year. Here, it costs nothing.
Verizon officials said the goal of Verizon AI Skills for America is to provide coaching, mentoring and other hands-on help to the workers, small businesses and educators who need it most, particularly in vulnerable communities that face barriers to getting AI training on their own.
According to Verizon, the program aims to:
- Pair top-tier AI training from leading tech companies with hands-on, local support from community nonprofits;
- Reach learners at every career stage — students, job seekers, early-career professionals, displaced workers, educators and small businesses;
- Help workers keep their jobs or navigate career transitions and help small businesses grow;
- Close the AI readiness gap, particularly in communities that face barriers to training;
- Build an AI-ready workforce to keep the U.S. economy strong, resilient and globally competitive;
- Adjust the training over time based on real-time feedback from participants and partners;
- Bring together the private, public and nonprofit sectors on AI readiness.
To ensure access and opportunity, Verizon is pairing the portal with community groups: Goodwill, LISC, the National Association for Community College Entrepreneurship and the New Jersey AI Hub.
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Donna Epps, Verizon’s senior vice president and chief responsible business officer, said the stakes are high when she introduced the initiative.
“AI is not coming; it’s already here, and the question isn’t whether it will transform work,” she told the crowd. “The question is who will get to participate.”
Epps said surveys indicate 90% of employers say strong AI skills are critical, but only 30% of employees feel prepared to use AI at work.
“We can’t afford to let AI become another digital divide,” she said.
CEO Dan Schulman, who has pushed an AI-forward agenda across the company, framed the effort as a corporate obligation.
“We’re putting 70 million dollars to make sure we have free training to communities to really intimately understand AI,” he said at the event. “Because if we can do that, then I think we can strengthen our economy. We can prepare our workforce, and as business leaders, as government leaders, as leaders of nonprofits, educators, that is our obligation.”
Schulman said there’s no sitting this one out.
“We can’t be scared of it,” he said. “We need to embrace it.”
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While everyone agrees AI is moving faster than most imagined, Verizon did not rush out Verizon AI Skills for America.
In fact, it tried the idea at home first. Its own home.
Before the company offered free AI training to the rest of the country, it put its own employees through an internal program called AI Unlocked. Then it offered AI training and career services to the employees it let go last year, through the $20 million reskilling fund.
Carrie Hughes, associate vice president of social innovation in Verizon’s corporate social responsibility organization, said Verizon wanted to learn before it tried to teach.
So, it started with its own people.
“We knew we would learn more if we started in our own house,” Hughes said.
Now it’s marrying those lessons with years of digital skills work in communities.
“We’ve always known that emerging technologies were going to disrupt jobs, and so we’ve had these skilling initiatives,” Hughes said.
Hughes stressed: Verizon doesn’t write courses, and it didn’t want to start.
“We’re not content providers, so we didn’t want to duplicate or try to understand that space,” Hughes said.
Instead, it found expert partners willing to give their material away.
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So, how does a three-person company — or a 30,000-person company — get started?
Search “Verizon AI Skills for America,” or go to verizon.com/aiskillsforamerica, Hughes said.
Small business owners can also tap Verizon’s Small Business Digital Ready program, which carries AI content aimed at owners.
The in-person support will start in select regional markets and grow from there.
“We’re just rolling this out, so we’ll have more and more communities that come into the umbrella of work that we’re doing,” Hughes said.
Hughes said no one company can do it alone.
“It’s all of us coming together,” she said. “Corporate peers, you know, nonprofits, government, everything.”
Schulman hopes others see it the same way.
“I hope that part of this initiative can inspire other companies to do something similar,” he said. “Because the more we can invest, the more communities we can go into, and the more citizens we can impact by that.”
