Verizon wants to spend $70 million teaching AI skills to people who might otherwise get left behind by it. Miami already has a working example of what that looks like, and it didn’t wait for a telecom company’s checkbook.
Verizon announced Tuesday it will invest $70 million in a nationwide AI training effort for job seekers, small businesses and educators. The company is partnering with nonprofits including Goodwill Industries, using training resources from IBM, Google, Anthropic, Microsoft and OpenAI.
What Verizon Is Actually Funding
“AI will change the face of the workforce,” Verizon CEO Dan Schulman said. “We can’t do it alone, by the way, but maybe we can inspire and be a bit of a role model.”
The new money adds to $20 million Verizon committed last year to retrain employees affected by 13,000 job cuts. Schulman wants other large companies to match the model. He argues a handful of $50 million to $70 million commitments from Fortune 100 companies could add up fast.
Goodwill Industries CEO Steven Preston is one of Verizon’s national partners. He said demand for AI skills in job postings “has just gone up exponentially.”
Many workers, he said, treat AI training like a “black hole” because they don’t know where to start.
Miami Already Ran This Playbook
Goodwill South Florida didn’t wait for a national initiative to test that idea. This summer, it partnered with Miami Dade College and internship platform GetMyInterns. Together they placed nearly 4,000 Miami-Dade students in paid summer internships with more than 1,000 local employers. Many of those roles were built around hands-on AI training.
“AI is everywhere, and every company, every institution, organization is leveraging those skill sets,” said Angelica Gomez, vice president of technology at Goodwill South Florida.
Students in the program didn’t just use AI tools. They learned to evaluate them critically, alongside their actual summer jobs. That distinction separates real workforce training from a weekend certificate course.
Why the National Numbers Matter Locally
Verizon’s national effort is explicitly built on the same partner network Goodwill South Florida already belongs to. If the company follows through on funding local affiliates, Miami-Dade’s program already has a track record other cities don’t.
Goodwill’s national leadership frames the problem the same way local staff do. Workers aren’t resistant to AI, Preston said. They’re unsure where a beginner is supposed to start. That’s precisely the gap Goodwill South Florida’s internship model was built to close, months before Verizon’s announcement.
The Local Test Case
Miami-Dade County’s economy runs on the kind of small businesses and entry-level workers Verizon says its money will target. A $70 million national fund is only as good as the local organizations that actually spend it.
Goodwill South Florida already has the relationships, the college partnership and a summer of results to show. The next question is whether Verizon’s money follows the places already doing the work, or starts somewhere else from scratch.
