Verizon's $70M AI training is free for small businesses
Verizon put $70M behind free AI training for small businesses and job seekers, with coursework from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and IBM. Here's how to actually use it.
Verizon committed $70 million to free AI training, and small businesses are named as a target audience. The company announced AI Skills for America on September 23, consolidating coursework from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, IBM and Coursera into one free portal. Verizon says that same AI training runs over $700 per person per year when bought retail. For a five-person shop, that is a real line item that just went to zero.
What actually happened
The $70 million is $20 million redirected from Verizon's existing Reskilling and Career Transition Fund — money originally set aside for employees leaving the company — plus $50 million in new commitment.
The program targets job seekers, early-career professionals, displaced workers, educators and small businesses. Three nonprofits provide in-person coaching alongside the online material: Goodwill Industries International, the Local Initiatives Support Corporation, and the National Association for Community College Entrepreneurship. Core services roll out in select regional markets first, PYMNTS reported.
CEO Dan Schulman framed it as an obligation: companies "have a responsibility to invest in people with the same urgency they invest in technology."
Why free AI training matters for your business
We will say the obvious part: this is a telecom company buying goodwill, and the vendor list is the vendors' distribution play. Anthropic and OpenAI are not donating coursework out of civic feeling — free training is how a model provider becomes the default tool in a workforce.
That does not make it worthless. It makes it a resource with a bias you should read before you use it.
Here is how we would spend it:
Send the person who does the repetitive work, not the owner. The bottleneck in most small businesses is not strategy. It is the one employee who spends nine hours a week reformatting spreadsheets and has no idea that is now a twenty-minute job. That person, trained, finds more automation in a month than any consultant's audit.
Treat vendor coursework as vendor coursework. An OpenAI course teaches you OpenAI's shape of a problem. Take the skills, and keep your actual implementations behind an interface you own so the training does not become a procurement decision.
Write down what you automate. A prompt that lives in one employee's chat history is not a business asset. When training produces a working process, put it in a document with the inputs, the steps and the failure cases. That is the thing you keep when they leave.
Measure hours, not enthusiasm. Pick two tasks before the training starts, time them, and time them again in a month. If nothing moved, the training was entertainment.
Free training only compounds if the output leaves the individual and enters the business. Otherwise you funded a hobby.
Key takeaways
- Verizon announced AI Skills for America on September 23, 2026: $70M total, $20M redirected from an existing reskilling fund plus $50M new
- Free coursework from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, IBM and Coursera in one portal; Verizon says comparable training costs $700+ per person annually
- Small businesses, job seekers, displaced workers, educators and early-career professionals are named targets
- Goodwill, LISC and NACCE provide local coaching; core services launch in select regional markets first
- Train the employee doing the repetitive work, not the owner — that is where the automation hours are
- Document every process the training produces, and measure it in hours saved on two named tasks
Training finds the opportunity. Building captures it. Once your team knows which tasks should be automated, we turn the best ones into systems that run without a person in the loop — documented, owned by you, not living in someone's chat history. Put hours and dollars on the tasks you'd automate first, or walk us through your week.
Sources: GlobeNewswire, PYMNTS.
- #ai-training
- #small-business
- #upskilling
- #workforce
- #verizon
Tommy Rush — Founder, Rush Commerce
Operator turned builder. 15+ years running operations — now shipping the systems businesses run on. More
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