The MIT future of work expert David Autor recently warned that artificial intelligence could create a grim future where skills and jobs are devalued, and “everybody is competing over a few remaining resources that aren’t controlled by some warlord somewhere.”
But, he added, quoting a friend, “the future is not a forecasting exercise — it’s a design exercise. You’re building it.”
In our work at Pacific Community Ventures, or PCV, we are keenly aware of the risks that AI, concentrated in the hands of the few, can generate. By acquiring Radiant Data, a mission-driven AI startup, PCV is actively designing a different future: one where AI is wielded to uplift community voices and build economic mobility. By incorporating ethical AI into our impact underwriting and measurement, we aim to equip underserved small businesses and their workers with more tailored resources to shape the economic future.
Through various initiatives, our hope is to unlock the potential of our economy by investing in high quality job creation, dignity, ownership, and climate resilience in the age of AI.
Lessons from the Good Jobs Innovation Lab
Pacific Community Ventures is a nonprofit CDFI and one of the country’s first impact investing funds. In 2021, PCV incubated the Good Jobs Innovation Lab to explore how impact investing, expert advice and AI can help small businesses hire, train and retain workers. As part of PCV’s Restorative Capital model, which was designed to establish wealth-building pathways in underserved communities, the Lab ensures that our small business clients have evidence-based resources to succeed financially while creating quality jobs.
By reshaping PCV’s data infrastructure to a cloud-based data warehouse with enhanced survey management and visualization capabilities, PCV began tracing small business client journeys to tailor loan products and advising while tracking impact outcomes like job quality. Using Radiant’s AIKKA voice-enabled AI tool, we gathered anonymous worker feedback on job satisfaction. We shared the synthesized findings with entrepreneur clients, establishing a feedback loop to support productivity and retention efforts.
The insights, gathered in several natural languages using AIKKA, confirmed that PCV’s Restorative Capital model was working as intended. We also learned that macroeconomic conditions, such as rising costs, supply chain disruptions, and a fraying safety net, are driving entrepreneurs and workers to seek solutions grounded in trust, relationships, and long-term value creation.
As we scale our data collection, initial insights from our AI-powered analysis can illuminate how small businesses and workers can be supported through technological and climate transitions.
Catalytic capital design for job quality
Since 2019, PCV has incorporated a pay for success model in the form of Good Jobs rebates, or microgrants, into our loan design to reward clients for adopting good job attributes like flexible scheduling, time off, and health and retirement benefits. Since the program began, approximately 75% of PCV clients, or 342 small businesses, have earned rebates worth $695,860.
Our surveys consistently show that clients that integrate good jobs strategies perform better financially. In 2024, despite economic headwinds, PCV clients outpaced the Federal Reserve’s Small Business Credit Survey respondents, with 50% demonstrating profitability and 26% breaking even post-loan, compared with SBCS results of 46% and19% responses, respectively.
Moreover, our most satisfied clients were those that received both a loan and BusinessAdvising.com support, and these clients were the most likely to receive Good Jobs rebates. Our analysis found that when small business owners have affordable capital paired with tailored services and data-driven insights, they eagerly invest in better jobs for their workers.
Elevating worker voice
Our pilots around AI-assisted community co-learning through the Good Jobs Entrepreneurship Fellows program demonstrated that traditional business metrics often miss the human dynamics shaping stability and growth. With Radiant’s AIKKA application, workers communicated pain points such as unpredictable scheduling and limited career pathways as drivers of turnover, signaling that solutions are often lower cost than businesses expect.
By elevating worker voice with AI-assisted tools, we uncovered actionable insights that strengthen both business performance and job quality. After sharing aggregated insights with entrepreneur clients, most of whom lack HR resources or trusted surveys, they began leveraging feedback to co-create quality jobs with their workers.
Driving participation in the climate economy
Knowing that green technologies will drive future job growth, PCV examined bottlenecks and drivers for small business participation in the climate economy. We discovered that businesses essential to the climate economy, such as clean energy contractors, manufacturers of electrification components and vehicles, and energy efficiency installers, face outsized cash flow challenges, tight margins, unpredictable demand and workforce shortages.
We designed the Climate Resilience Mobilization Fund to act on these insights, incorporating innovations such as contract-based financing, extended loan terms and interest-only periods to help installers meet immediate costs. To date, we have deployed over $3 million – with an additional $4 million in pipeline – to help small businesses like New Found Growth Construction and Family Laundry leverage our Climate Resilience product to save on operating costs while improving job quality.
Boosting worker retention and trust
Our analysis shows that employee-owned businesses are more likely than traditional firms to provide meaningful benefits while fostering transparency and trust.
For example, 78% of employee-owned businesses offer wealth-building benefits, compared with only 18% of traditional firms. About half of employee-owned businesses pay a living wage and offer basic benefits, versus 27% of non employee-owned businesses. They are also twice as likely to provide financial coaching and promote peer learning networks, practices that encourage workers to engage more fully in benefits such as retirement savings.
Despite these advantages, many of our underserved small business clients view employee ownership as an expensive and underfunded pathway, one that requires additional investment and culturally competent advising to be truly accessible.
Opportunity for collective action
With promises like the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund no longer likely and advanced technologies increasingly concentrated in the hands of the few, it is easy to lose hope and to see AI as an accelerant to the end of the American Dream. But, we can still design a more different future powered by shared success.
Research from the Kellogg Foundation found that eliminating barriers to economic opportunity in underserved communities would add $8 trillion to the US economy by 2050 — a reminder that our competitiveness as a nation is not guaranteed but requires intention and action to revive and co-create the American Dream.
On PCV’s horizon is a new chapter of innovation with enhanced AI capabilities through the new Radiant Data Hub. As we integrate ethical AI into predictive underwriting and impact measurement, we will continue building data insights to fine-tune our Restorative Capital model, so that more underserved small businesses can access the tailored resources they need to create and sustain good quality jobs and fuel their economies.
We recently announced our commitment to deploy $100 million in restorative capital to underestimated California small businesses. This funding will help sustain 100,000 good and green jobs using human-centered AI, the Good Jobs Innovation Lab and the Radiant Data Hub to target gaps, elevate worker voice and direct restorative capital where it builds community wealth and climate resilience by 2030.
We invite other impact investors and mission-driven lenders to join us to build data commons, elevate entrepreneur and worker voice, scale our impact and unleash the potential of our economy.
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Bulbul Gupta is president and CEO of Pacific Community Ventures, where she previously served on the Board. Prior to PCV, Bulbul co-founded an ethical AI think tank, Socos Labs, in Berkeley, CA.
Guest posts on ImpactAlpha represent the opinions of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of ImpactAlpha.
