Shifting AI From Fear to Optimism: U.S. Department of Labor’s Taylor Stockton

**SPEAKER_1** (0:03)
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In the summer of 2025, the United States Federal Government released its AI Action Plan. Today, we talked to one of the executives behind it from the US. Department of Labor to understand how the agency is thinking about labor trends nationwide in this age of AI.

**Taylor Stockton** (0:57)
I'm Taylor Stockton from the US. Department of Labor, and you're listening to Me, Myself, and AI.

**Sam Ransbotham** (1:03)
Welcome to Me, Myself, and AI, a podcast from MIT Sloan Management Review, Exploring the Future of Artificial Intelligence. I'm Sam Ransbotham, Professor of Analytics at Boston College. I've been researching data, analytics, and AI at MIT SMR since 2014, with research articles, annual industry reports, case studies, and now 13 seasons of podcast episodes. In each episode, corporate leaders, cutting-edge researchers, and AI policymakers join us to break down what separates AI hype from AI success.
Hi, listeners. Thanks again to everyone for joining us. I'm excited to be talking with Taylor Stockton, Chief Innovation Officer at the US. Department of Labor. He leads the exploration of how AI and other emerging technologies are affecting the labor market. He's got a lot of interesting aspects to his background and I hope we can get into them. But most importantly, he and I met when he was an undergraduate at an introduction to IS class I taught. Because of this, I feel completely justified in taking full credit for any of Taylor's successes. And I hope our listeners realize that that's completely ridiculous. Taylor, great to talk to you again after so long.

**Taylor Stockton** (2:17)
Sam, it's great to see you and I feel like I should still say Professor Ransbotham, but it's great to reconnect so many years later.

**Sam Ransbotham** (2:24)
After this much time, I think we can go with Sam. Let's start with your current role. You've got a great overview of the economy right now. What's artificial intelligence doing to the economy?

**Taylor Stockton** (2:35)
It's such an exciting time to be at the Department of Labor because I think in many ways technology, and especially because of AI, is reshaping what labor is more than any inflection point in American history. I think what we're seeing in the economy is that AI's impact is not specific to a certain sector or a certain occupation. It is truly economy-wide, and even if there are jobs that won't increase or decrease dramatically because of AI, every job is being transformed. I think our role at the Department of Labor is to say, how do we have to evolve ourselves in terms of programs and policies to make sure that businesses and workers can really benefit from AI's benefits and navigate its challenges as well?

**Sam Ransbotham** (3:21)
Well, that's the crux of the whole problem though. It's like getting the good but not getting the bad there. Let's get a little detail. What kind of changes are happening? What kinds of things are you seeing?

**Taylor Stockton** (3:32)
Part of the dynamic that we're seeing, we're working with a lot of different business and industry associations across the economy. And we really believe that AI can shape benefits of productivity and job growth. And so we want businesses to be able to have the tools and resources to adopt this technology and integrate it within their companies. I think part of the challenge that we are hearing from a lot of these businesses, in terms of adopting AI, is just the change management. The barrier itself is not actually the capabilities of the technology. In many cases, it is traditional change management processes of how do you get a workforce to buy in to the benefits that this technology can bring to them, not just to the enterprise overall, but then how do you translate those benefits through to the different workflows, through to the different job descriptions and org charts, and I remember from my days in management consulting right out of Boston College, of some of these systems for a large enterprise to incorporate might take multiple years just for one system, and as you're looking at AI needing to reshape all of the systems within enterprise, all of the workflows, all of the job descriptions, these are in many cases things that are going to take multiple years, but our role as the Department of Labor is to make sure that we provide the resources and the funding and the guidance that can hopefully help accelerate that a little bit, such that workers and businesses can see these benefits even earlier.