Jaime-Alexis Fowler leads Empower Work , where her team uses OpenAI models to help volunteer counselors guide workers through job loss and workplace crises. In her early twenties, Fowler went through a “gut-punch experience” that left her without a job and nowhere to turn. Someone who witnessed what had happened took her to lunch, reassured her and helped her think through what to do next. The conversation helped her regain enough footing to begin making decisions again, and planted the seeds of empathy for people in similar situations.
She sent hundreds of job-seeking applications without receiving an email or call back, but eventually got back on her feet because other people opened doors for her. As her career advanced, she tried to do the same for others: make an introduction, send an email or help someone make their next step. In her day job, she led marketing at an international health nonprofit and ran operations for a peer-counseling organization. Later she built the marketing function at Code for America and helped launch an investigative newsroom. But more and more people turned to her when they were struggling at work.
Late one night in 2017, after her child had gone to sleep, Fowler spoke with a woman who had reached her through her wider network. The woman’s family worked in agriculture, and she was the first to attend college. Her job at a tech startup could open new opportunities for her family, but she feared losing everything and had no support from her employer. Fowler hung up feeling she lacked the resources to give the woman the help she needed.
Fowler began researching what help was available. She knew that workers could pay for a career coach themselves, or their company might pay for support, but was surprised at howas how little support was offered beyond that. Access depended on having money or an employer benefit. Workers without either often had to piece together help from disconnected employment services, public programs and personal contacts, with no obvious place to turn when a workplace problem became a crisis. The safety net was mostly made of holes.
Fowler spent 2017 investigating whether that gap extended beyond the people she knew. She conducted more than 200 interviews with workers, workforce specialists and employment lawyers, and collected more than 180 survey responses. Across the board, she found that people facing consequential work problems often had no independent, affordable place to get immediate support.
Her research showed that people facing trouble at work already reached for their phones to text a friend or parent. Those conversations often provided emotional support without the practical guidance they needed. To test a service that could offer both, Fowler printed 60 fliers with a phone number and taped them to poles near busy San Francisco bus stops. The fliers offered a conversation with a peer counselor about a tough work situation. People responded by text.
Fowler launched Empower Work in 2018 as a free, confidential text line powered by trained volunteer counselors. Workers could talk with someone who combined emotional support with the experience and resources to help them work out what to do next.
A crisis in the workplace can affect housing, food and family before the worker ever finds support. Employee-assistance benefits reach just 44% of workers in the lowest-paid quarter, compared with 80% in the highest quarter, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. Many “help seekers” that Empower supports work for small employers without HR departments. Job-loss and job-search concerns accounted for 22% of Empower Work's text-line conversations in 2023 and 54% in 2024.
A worker can reach a counselor from a break room or bus without being overheard. Workers frequently ask, "Are you human or AI?" They want to know a person is listening.
Without their AI assistant, counselors generally manage two conversations at once, each lasting about 50 minutes, while trying to reply within three minutes. When someone is frightened about both rent and a job search, the counselor has to decide which problem comes first, and track down location-specific resources.
Empower Work’s UX lead Jessy Baer and CTO Rajiv Puranik led development of an AI assistant inside the counselor’s workflow. Using OpenAI models, it retrieves vetted resources and summarizes conversations when one volunteer takes over from another. Reducing that administrative work lets counselors devote more attention to helping workers think through their problems. Counselors review the assistant’s suggestions and decide what to send.
The share of counselors able to handle at least three conversations rose from 27% to 53%, Empower Work reports. Resource sharing took 41% less time; summaries for volunteers’ handoffs took 60% less. At six months, 65% of counselors handling active conversations used the assistant at least once per shift; after a year, nearly all active counselors did.
One help seeker, Dawn, found the service through workforce partner SkillUp after two years without a job. Two peer counselors helped her think through her options. She took an in-home care job, earned a nursing-assistant credential and now works weekdays in a hospital, with weekends off—her dream job.
Fowler says about 170 active volunteers support the service; across its programs and online resources, Empower Work has reached nearly 600,000 people since 2018. Volunteers can see someone move from feeling stuck to identifying a next step within a single conversation. Fowler says the organization’s one-year results also show improvements in mental health and income.
