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Some in NY fret about being hit by the AI bus. Others are trying to board it.
By
Willow Higgins
Published Nov 15, 2026 at 7:00 a.m. ET
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By
Willow Higgins
Published Nov 15, 2026 at 7:00 a.m. ET
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In a conference room in Manhattan on a recent afternoon, a speaker named Claira spoke to a captive audience about the benefits of using an artificial intelligence agent as a personal assistant.
Claira would know — she herself is one.
The bot, appearing on a large screen, had caramel-color skin and bouncy, curly hair, and is the first ever Afro-Latina, multilingual virtual assistant to hit the market, according to Abran Maldonado, who helped invent her.
Claira was designed, Maldonado said, to bring a multicultural perspective to the AI space, which too often leaves Black and brown voices out of the mix.
Maldonado has showcased Claira across the globe, but in this case relied on the bot to help keynote last week's Latino AI Summit, in front of dozens of attendees who were mostly Latino and Black.
“It’s about visibility,” Claira told Gothamist in an interview. “When people see an Afro-Latina AI, it challenges the idea of who belongs in tech and opens the door for inclusive innovation.”
The Latino AI Summit, the in-person iteration of a forum that also has been featured online, is one of several efforts cropping up in the city designed to empower Black and brown people to get jobs in the AI world, hear from experts about how AI is changing the workforce, and build personalized tools that people can apply to their daily lives or jobs.
Other organizations are pushing similar initiatives, also with an eye toward reaching those often on the sidelines of the tech landscape, an arena at the center of attention, with the upcoming initial public offering of AI giant Anthropic set for Wednesday and expected to value the company at more than $1 trillion.
The Knowledge House in the Bronx provides coding and design training for underserved young people interested in the burgeoning AI economy. For adults, the Rev. Al Sharpton’s AI Fluency Initiative teaches people without tech experience the basics of AI. There, the mission is simple: It's to "close the digital divide and put the power of these tools in the hands of the people," the group states on its website.
The imperative is crystal clear to Michal Tapia, the cofounder of the Latino AI summit, which was held at Civic Hall and Berkeley College in Midtown. AI will play a major role in our future, whether people like it or not, she said.
The key now, she said, is making sure that people of all ethnicities and backgrounds are involved in the builders’ room.
“AI is happening, and it's either we get on the train, or we get left behind,” Tapia said.
A mixed view of the future
Early research on the impact of AI on Black and brown communities is a mixed bag.
A disproportionate number of Black workers hold jobs that are likely to be automated by AI, including in transportation, production and administration roles, according to a report from the McKinsey Institute for Economic Mobility.
And Black workers may already be feeling the squeeze. In a 2025 report from Jobs for the Future, a national nonprofit that influences education and workforce systems, found that 67% of Black survey respondents said they feel like AI is already impacting their jobs, compared to 57% of white survey respondents.
The report also found that more Black respondents said they feel like they need to gain new skills due to the impact of AI on their work than the overall sample of people surveyed. More than half of Black respondents in the same survey said they already use AI tools daily or weekly, compared to about 40% of all respondents.
Latinos, likewise, are underrepresented in the tech space. About 19% of the U.S. workforce is Latino, according to a report from the Kapor Foundation, which publishes research on racial equity and technology issues. But Latinos fill just 3% of board seats, 5% of executive leadership roles, and 6% of technical roles across the country’s largest tech companies, according to the same report.
To stay in the game, Maldonado said in an interview, it’s essential for all jobseekers to market themselves as AI-literate.
No matter what field you’re in, your resume should change, Maldonado said. The section that used to list skills in programs like Microsoft Office and the Adobe Suite, now should list proficiency in AI tools like Claude, Codex and Google AI Studio.
And instead of updating a resume every couple of years, jobseekers should update it once a month — that’s how fast the relevant AI tools change, he said.
But even ChatGPT, an AI chatbot, is becoming antiquated, he said. Baseline prerequisites for jobs of the future will include things like knowing how to use Claude projects, an AI work space and Cowork, a tool that helps people complete tasks. And ultimately, he added, administrative tasks should be delegated to an AI agent.
The best thing a person can do to prepare themselves for the changing workforce, Maldonado said, is to always be learning.
“Putting our heads in the sand is not the move,” he said. “ You have to tinker. You have to try these things out.”
Schools will also have to meet the moment, experts say — and some already are. Alpha School, for example, are K-12 schools with programs across the country that provide kids training on AI tools.
“ Kids are scoring through the roof ... the level of fluency and literacy that they have,” Maldonado said.
These curriculums need to be available in all schools, not just those that are predominantly white or wealthy, tech experts argue. Taylor Shead, founder of a company that develops AI-driven education, in the Jobs for the Future report, emphasized “prevention over intervention.”
“Equity and access mean meeting people where they are—going to the systems Black learners and workers are in,” she wrote in the report.
Kara Emery, the director of data science at the AI Hub of NYU’s McSilver Institute for Poverty Policy and Research, said time will tell how these things shake out.
“A lot of these projections of what AI will potentially impact are just that,” Emery said. “Projections on the future of what this technology might be able to do.”
The fear, said Emery, is that AI could make the already staggering racial income inequalities worse. But, Emery emphasized, people have a say in how things unfold.
There are “preparations and things that can be done now to try to protect against what could be a continuation of this wealth gap,” she said.
‘We are rapidly losing our jobs’
Summit attendee Fradely Delacruz, a computational scientist student and a professional data architect, said she is already feeling the economy change beneath her feet.
“Women of color specifically, we are rapidly losing our jobs in the STEM space and the research and development space,” Delacruz said. We’re “losing our jobs in huge amounts.”
Delacruz said she doesn’t entirely blame AI, which she feels is only exacerbating existing social systems and prejudice.
But, she said, half the battle is making sure all people have access to resources and information about what technology is up and coming and how it’s being designed.
“ When AI came, it kind of felt like there was other people who knew about it before we did,” Delacruz said. “By the time we're catching on, we're like, ‘Oh, we're not even part of the conversation.’ I think it's really important to position ourselves in community as innovators.”
Emery said she is seeing Black and brown New Yorkers rising to the occasion.
“ These communities aren't just sitting on the sidelines waiting for these things to have a negative impact,” Emery said. “They really have the agency.”
Not everyone is quite as optimistic.
David Gabeau, who created an online interface of AI companies in New York, is an AI entrepreneur who worked at tech-driven companies like Snapchat and Lyft before eventually starting his own company, which he has since retired.
Gabeau, who is Black, said that his race was one of the reasons he was inspired to work in tech. He said he felt like the social media he consumed growing up was based on Black culture, and he wanted to contribute to the technology’s design.
But after years of working in the space, he now fears that AI is only broadening social inequities across racial lines.
“People [working in AI] are going to get so, so so wealthy,” Gabeau said.
It’s my biggest fear, he continued, that “there will be no forcing function to spread the wealth, and that it will massively and drastically create a divide between the have and have nots.”
After spending 10 years in New York, Gabeau recently moved to San Francisco to get closer to the epicenter of AI.
There, he said, he recently spent an afternoon wearing a 4 pound headset that scanned his brain while he watched videos and answered questions. The effort was for a company that is working on using AI to develop a tool that’s akin to telepathy: the tool converts your thoughts into text without the need to type.
Gabeau said he was paid about $50 for his troubles, although he participated for the sake of his own curiosity. But the experience was an eye opener, Gabeau said. The other people in the room, many of whom were Black and brown, seemed to be there because they needed the money.
“These people's thoughts are gonna have helped create and train the AIs,” Gabeau said. “And they're definitely not gonna receive the benefits of this company getting very big.”
“It was a little predatory,” he added.
But Emery, the NYU researcher, said that sometimes the most outsize fears about AI come from within the tech industry itself. We should be wary, she said, of taking the promises of these companies’ success at face value.
“ This narrative of the inevitability of what these technologies will become is something that's often pushed by those who are currently in the big companies building them now,” Emery said.
She said the right combination of policy, education and a diversity of innovators working behind the scenes is key to preventing existing inequalities from worsening.
And Delacruz, one of the students who attended the summit, said she’s eager to put her skills to use. But at this point, she said she still feels unseen.
“They don't see the scientists and the researchers that are Black and brown and Latinos and Afro-Latinos. They don't know we exist, but we're here,” Delacruz said. “Well, let's look at the people who are professionals and let's collaborate.
Tagged
Race And Justice Unit
economy
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new jersey
new york
Willow Higgins
Willow Higgins covers changes in New York City neighborhoods for WNYC and Gothamist. She has previously reported on wrongful convictions, corruption in district attorney offices and Texas' child welfare system.
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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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