Met Council CEO Advocates AI to Help Workers

Met Council CEO David Greenfield told JNS that the New York anti-poverty nonprofit has assured employees it will not lay anyone off because of AI, saying, "We're the first organization in the country that's told our staff we're not going to lay anyone off because of AI." Greenfield said, "We believe that AI should be used to help people. It should be human-centered, and it really should be a tool rather than a replacement," per JNS. He spoke at a June 4 AI summit that JNS reports was cohosted by Met Council and the Robin Hood Foundation.

Per JNS, Met Council pays staff two hours per week to learn AI, gives each department a budget to experiment, and has deployed a digital food pantry that uses AI to predict demand and route deliveries, plus an intake bot named "Reggie" that helps connect clients to services. Separately, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul named Greenfield to FutureWorks, a 20-member state commission charged with recommending how New York can protect workers while harnessing AI. The Governor's office lists Greenfield among members chaired by former U.S. Labor Secretary Tom Perez, TIAA CEO Thasunda Brown Duckett, and the Brookings Institution's Molly Kinder, with recommendations due by the end of the year.

Editorial analysis: This is a concrete example of the augmentation-over-replacement posture many nonprofit and public-sector organizations adopt when piloting AI - invest in staff learning time, centralize small experimentation budgets, and target high-volume intake and logistics work with human-in-the-loop automation. Pairing a frontline deployment with a seat on a state advisory body also shows how operating experience is feeding into AI workforce policy.

Editorial analysis: Worth watching whether Met Council publishes implementation metrics (intake speed, delivery-routing accuracy, error rates), whether FutureWorks issues substantive recommendations on its year-end timeline, and how the no-layoffs commitment holds as the tools scale beyond pilots.