Defining AI-Era Workforce Innovation: July 2026 Founder’s Letter

To our Fellows, Partners, Supporters, and our fearless Team: 

As we head into the next 5 years of work together, we are carrying forward a decade of experience, expertise, and outcomes that have already changed thousands of lives. Since our first cohort of 5 CUNY students, Break Through Tech has reached over 12,000 students across 40+ states, attending over 200 universities, in collaboration with over 350 employers. 84% of our AI Fellows land paid internships or jobs. 

Years before artificial intelligence became a household term, we invested in a generation of talent that could help shape its future. Today we operate the nation’s largest AI talent accelerator of its kind, equipping thousands of learners each year with industry ready skills, work experience, and professional networks that turn potential into impact. 

Break Through Tech Fellows across the country are bringing their power, perspectives, and values everywhere they go and their impact extends far beyond the jobs they hold.

Every Fellow carries influence into the rooms they enter, the teams they join, the products they help build, and the communities they serve. Around conference room tables, classrooms, boardrooms, and dinner tables, they are helping society navigate what technology can and should become. And they lift as they climb.

That has always been our aspiration.

Not simply to prepare individuals for careers, but to expand who has the power to shape the future.

Innovation has never been about predicting what comes next. It is about having the courage to move before certainty arrives. That spirit has defined Break Through Tech from the beginning.

We launched our AI work before there was consensus. We built pathways before there was a blueprint. We brought together employers, researchers, educators, and philanthropists before the broader market recognized the urgency of the challenge. Time and again, we have chosen to move toward uncertainty-not away from it – because that is where the most important work begins.

And today, we find ourselves at another inflection point. The question is no longer whether AI will transform work and society. It already has. AI is advancing faster than education and hiring systems can adapt. The “entry level” is no longer entry level. Early-career professionals are expected to arrive with applied, job-ready capabilities and the gap between classroom learning and what employers need is widening by day. Without intervention, opportunity gaps deepen and economic mobility stalls. The question is whether we will have the imagination and determination to build the workforce infrastructure for the AI economy that’s needed to ensure that transformation benefits everyone. I believe we will.

Our future is defined by enabling entire systems. We envision a future where Break Through Tech serves as the national leader in building workforce infrastructure for the AI economy; developing and validating new models of applied learning, establishing quality standards, generating market intelligence, leading delivery, and mobilizing employers, higher education institutions, workforce systems, and communities around a shared talent agenda. Our path to scale includes four core strategies: serving as a national learning and innovation hub, demonstrating impact through systems partners, enabling delivery at scale, and aligning employer and academic incentives to enable systems change.

Decades in technology – first building it, then leading it, and now reimagining who gets to build it next – have taught me three things. I have seen what is possible when talented people are given the opportunity to contribute. I have seen what happens when institutions choose to innovate rather than preserve the status quo. And I have seen what happens when ecosystems align and decide that a broken system is not inevitable. 

The systems we inherited were built for another era.

This is our moment to build something new, not simply new programs or new credentials, but new pathways, new signals of readiness, new models of partnership, and ultimately a stronger bridge between human potential, economic mobility and opportunity.

What we do now will determine who builds what comes next, which problems AI gets pointed at, and which get overlooked. And who’s in the room where the most important technology decisions of our time get made.

—

Judith Spitz, PhD

CEO and Founder, Break Through Tech