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Academy, a US $ 115m scheme that trains electricians and welders and guarantees them jobs at the end.“ We are in the race of our lifetime,” Mike says.“ It’ s like a space race, we’ re having a Sputnik moment, and that moment is the realisation that it all comes down to workforce.” Dina Powell McCormick, Meta’ s president, reaches further back.“ In World War II, the country came together to physically build the arsenal that defeated tyranny,” she says.“ Today, these American workers are building the infrastructure that’ s going to allow American AI leadership.” The money behind the rhetoric is real and enormous. AT & T is spending US $ 38bn over five years to train the tradespeople who lay its fibre. Lowe’ s has committed US $ 250m to skilled-trades education, BlackRock US $ 100m and Autodesk US $ 350m to teach people to work with AI far beyond its own staff. Larry Fink, Chairman and CEO of BlackRock, reckons the world needs US $ 10tn of AI infrastructure.

Larry Fink’ s estimate of the global AIinfrastructure bill

He puts it plainly:“ The scale of growth underway in Texas demands a workforce ready to build it. The bottleneck for the most advanced technology ever built, it turns out, is people who can wire a building.

New PM, same problem White-collar work is next, and it knows it. In one of her final acts before Andy Burnham took No 10 and dismissed her, then-Chancellor Rachel Reeves used her last Mansion House speech to launch a financial services“ skills compact”, binding banks such as Barclays and Lloyds to retrain thousands of staff for the AI age. The 22 firms that signed, from the London Stock Exchange to Nationwide and Fidelity, employ more than 250,000 people between them, and each will draw up rolling three-year plans to certify staff in up to five critical skills, with AI mandatory, reporting to the Treasury every year. Claire Tunley, who runs the Financial Services Skills Commission and helped build the scheme, does not undersell it.“ It’ s very significant,” she says.“ I don’ t think we’ ve seen the likes of this in a generation.” Skills gaps are old news in the City, she adds,“ but what’ s different is the scale and speed that we’ re seeing change happen, driven by Gen AI”. Morgan Stanley has estimated that AI could put more than 200,000 European banking jobs at risk by 2030, around a tenth of the industry, and the financial

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