A culture of compliance: Beyond the usual policies, companies must foster trust and accountability through training, communication, and consistent enforcement. Namely offers the tech, services and resources—including a new compliance e-book—for SMBs.
The president, like your bosses in the C-suite, wants to speed up AI adoption, and he’s hoping a smoother regulatory landscape and strong guardrails against “woke technology” is the way to achieve American AI dominance.
President Trump released his administration’s AI “action plan” and signed a set of executive orders aimed at curbing regulations that slow the development of infrastructure related to AI deployment, bolster efforts to export American AI models across the globe and secure American dominance in AI, and ban “woke AI” from the federal government.
“We’re still in the earliest days of one of the most important technological revolutions in the history of the world. Around the globe, everyone is talking about artificial intelligence,” President Trump said at a recent AI summit in Washington. “America is the country that started the AI race. And as President of the United States, I’m here today to declare that America is going to win it.”
FWIW, while John McCarthy perhaps coined and first used the term “artificial intelligence” at a 1956 Dartmouth conference he’d organized, British mathematician Alan Turing actually first posited machine intelligence, and his eponymous "Turing Test" is famously used today to assess artificial intelligence.
The president’s new action plan is designed around three pillars: innovation, infrastructure, and global dominance. It calls for a wide range of agency initiatives designed to ease the permitting and deployment of AI data centers and to bolster programs that train workers to participate in an AI-enabled future.
Impact on HR and the workforce. While the action plan does not specifically mention the human resources department, and only once mentions “employee” (referring only to federal employees), it does outline several recommendations that HR pros should be aware of as it may impact future program or policy designs in the private sector.
The president’s plan calls on the Departments of Labor (DOL) and Commerce (DOC) to identify workforce development needs in fields related to the buildout of AI infrastructure and directs agencies to work with stakeholders on a national skilling strategy. The administration says it will direct spending towards training for certain priority professions such as electricians and HVAC technicians and direct curriculums to reflect the growing need for skilled laborers in supporting fields.
The plan also calls on the DOL to expand its apprenticeship programs to strengthen their support of AI infrastructure development and directs funding for workforce development programs that bolster Americans’ skills in AI.
Organizations and businesses may also be entitled to tax relief on AI upskilling spending under the Trump administration’s IRS, according to the plan.
The president's plan also establishes a DOL-led AI Workforce Research Hub to study AI’s impact on the workforce and will offer analysis and insights on broader labor market trends for businesses working to win the AI race.
AI leadership vacuum. In his remarks, the president also called on the federal government to take the reins on AI regulation across the entire US. States like Colorado and Texas have already passed legislation governing private AI development and use.
“We have to allow AI to use that pool of knowledge without going through the complexity of contract negotiations, of which there would be thousands for every time we use AI,” Trump said.
“We also have to have a single federal standard, not 50 different states, regulating this industry of the future…You can’t have three or four states holding you up. You can’t have a state with standards that are so high that it’s going to hold you up. You have to have a federal rule and regulation. Hopefully you have the right guy in this position that’s going to supplant the states. If you are operating under 50 different sets of state laws, the most restrictive state of all, will be the one that rules.”
Though the administration’s plan does not specifically call on Congress to enact AI laws, it does direct the executive branch to consider the regulatory burden when making AI-related funding decisions. As a result, states with a less onerous regulatory landscape may win larger financial support from Uncle Sam.
“We need one common sense, federal standard that supersedes all states, supersedes everybody. So you don’t end up in litigation with 43 states at one time,” Trump said.