For the past year, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has been predicting a white-collar crisis driven by artificial intelligence. Well, where is it? As the CEO of a fast-growing tech company, I see what AI is actually doing inside businesses every day, and it doesn’t look like a crisis. It looks like a revolution in productivity, and the people winning are the ones who leaned in.
I say this often, but it’s true: our team has never been busier. At Telnyx, we’ve grown our global team by nearly 20% over the past year and are hiring for over 100 roles. AI is not replacing that work. It is working alongside us as we build real-time voice agents and deploy internal assistants that help teams move operational work forward faster. That growth is directly tied to a workforce that understands and leverages AI, and businesses across the country are following the same playbook.
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Industries best positioned to adopt AI have seen exploding productivity growth. American companies are not pulling back. They are hiring more than ever.
The U.S. AI job market added more than 9,900 new positions in just the first quarter of 2026 alone, bringing the total to over 55,000 open AI-related positions, a nearly 18% jump from the prior quarter. AI job postings have also surged 163% year over year heading into 2026, with “AI engineer” now ranked as the single fastest-growing job title in the country.
What AI really does is serve as a force multiplier. The companies that lean into it are the ones I am most optimistic about.
I see this play out in real time daily. A member of our operations team, not an engineer, recently told me he felt “all-powerful and omnipotent” after building internal tools himself using AI, tools his team had waited months for engineers to prioritize. That’s not displacement. That’s empowerment.
The people succeeding at companies like ours are not always those with the most credentials. They are the ones who showed up curious and willing to learn. These workers are not just more productive, they are more valuable.
According to PwC’s 2025 Global AI Jobs Barometer, which analyzed close to a billion job postings across six continents, workers with AI skills command a 56% wage premium over their peers, up from 25% just a year prior. The workers who show up prepared will have their pick of opportunities. What threatens that is not the technology. It is the regulatory environment closing in around it.
AI is something the United States can’t afford to fall behind on. China has committed nearly $100 billion in state investment to AI infrastructure, startups, and education in 2025 alone. And directly following Anthropic’s export controls, Chinese models sought to close the frontier gap in Silicon Valley.
Thankfully, we have a president in the White House who understands that AI is not a job killer, but a job engine. The reason American businesses are investing in AI with this level of confidence is because President Donald Trump has made American AI leadership a cornerstone of his agenda. He’s backed it up with policy priorities that give companies the runway to build and grow.
That is exactly what is at stake in Congress right now. It’s concerning to see the emergence of 50 different regulatory frameworks that companies must comply with just to participate in this economy. Last year marked the first time every single state introduced AI legislation: 1,208 AI-related bills were introduced nationwide, 145 of which became law. The Trump administration has put a national framework on the table. Congress now needs to turn that direction into durable law so the U.S. can compete with China under one, clear national standard.
The alternative is a lowest-common-denominator approach, driven by whichever state passes the most restrictive law. For a company like Telnyx, that means diverting resources to state-by-state compliance instead of building. For startups, it’s even worse: They can’t survive a dozen different regulatory regimes. American innovators are going to get tripped up on compliance before they ever get a chance to compete. That is how you kill the next generation of American AI companies before they get off the ground.
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AI has the potential to deliver an elite level of capability to every American, regardless of ZIP code or family income. American workers are already seizing the opportunity with 55,000 open AI positions and counting. What is missing is the federal framework to ensure America stays ahead.
If we keep unleashing AI and Congress acts to clear the runway, America can grow its economy, create opportunity, and make sure the innovation stays here. The moment is real. Congress needs to protect it.
David Casem is the co-founder and CEO of Telnyx.
