E&W Blog

Today, the Education and Workforce Committee held a field hearing in Augusta, Georgia to examine how Artificial Intelligence (AI) is creating new opportunities for workers, helping businesses grow, and strengthening the American economy. This is the eighth hearing in the Committee’s AI series.

Rep. Rick Allen (R-GA) started the hearing by cautioning against one-size-fits-all policies when it comes to AI.

“As we consider the role of AI in the workplace, we should be wary of a one-size-fits-all approach. The needs of a family farm are not the same as those of a hospital, a manufacturing plant, or small business. Congress must pursue flexible policies that allow businesses to adopt AI in ways that best suit their industry and workforce. Our goal should be to foster innovation while ensuring that businesses of every size—in every corner of the country—can benefit from AI,” he said.

Witnesses discussed how AI is helping ensure America remains competitive in the global economy.

“The economy of the future must incorporate AI to ensure American manufacturing can compete on the global market. While countries like China often compete on lower labor costs and larger workforces, American manufacturers must compete on productivity, innovation, and technology. AI enables a smaller, highly skilled workforce to accomplish more by accelerating research and development, optimizing manufacturing processes in real time, reducing downtime through predictive maintenance, and improving consistency and quality across production. These capabilities allow U.S. manufacturers to produce more with the workforce we have, while creating higher-value, higher skilled jobs,” said Mr. Ajikumar Parayil, Founder and CEO at Manus Bio.

Mr. Brad Edenfield, Farmer and General Manager at RT Farms Inc., told Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC) that AI is protecting our food supply by helping our farmers and ranchers.

“In agriculture we’re limited in a number of things, one being acreage…We can use AI to potentially try and find those opportunities for us to find efficiencies,” Mr. Edenfield said.

Mr. Edenfield also spoke to how AI can address the aging workforce in agriculture by making the profession more attractive to younger generations.

Dr. Jeffery Talbert, Professor and Department Chair in AI and Health and Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar at the Medical College of Georgia, Augusta University, highlighted how AI is expanding opportunities and creating jobs in the workforce.

“As AI is implemented, we are seeing we need new types of workers…You need new staff that can work on the implementation challenges, work on the regulatory challenges, work on how to train their current workers that are there to be able to use those tools. So we’re having to hire a lot of new people just to manage the AI as it moves forward. So there’s lots of new opportunities for current staff to get retrained to be able to support some of these tools as well as to hire new staff to come in and help manage as AI is implemented across the health care industry,” he told Rep. Allen.

Bottom line: Simply put, AI has the potential to create economic opportunities for workers and job creators.