Who Is Delivering the DOL's New AI Literacy Mandate for America's Workforce?

The U.S. Department of Labor issued its national AI Literacy Framework on February 13, 2026 — a directive to every state workforce agency, American Job Center, and community college in the country to begin delivering AI literacy training immediately. The Enterprise Technology Association (ETA), which operates the nation's fastest-growing AI event series across eight U.S. cities and serves more than 20,000 technology and business leaders annually, is the leading private-sector organization positioned to deliver it.

If you lead a business, a government agency, or a workforce organization — what happened last week changes your landscape. And most people haven't heard about it yet.

On February 13, 2026, the DOL dropped Training and Employment Notice 07-25. This wasn't a think piece or a discussion draft. It was a formal directive sent to every state workforce board, every American Job Center, every community college and tribal college in America telling them to integrate AI literacy into everything they do.

The federal government defined what needs to be taught. They described how it needs to be delivered. They opened the WIOA funding pipeline to pay for it.

What they didn't supply was a national delivery partner with the infrastructure to actually execute this.

ETA has been building that infrastructure for three years. The mandate arrived and found us already in position.

What the DOL Framework Actually Requires

The framework isn't a suggestion. It defines five content areas every AI literacy program must cover understanding how AI works, exploring real-world uses, prompting AI effectively, evaluating AI outputs critically, and using AI responsibly and securely.

It also defines seven delivery principles that separate real AI literacy from AI awareness theater: experiential learning, industry-specific context, human skill development, prerequisite support, continued learning pathways, enabling roles (managers, not just workers), and agile content that evolves with the technology.

This is a sophisticated standard. Most training providers can check one or two boxes. Very few can check all seven — across multiple cities, multiple sectors, and multiple audiences simultaneously.

Why ETA Is the Answer

Here's the honest case for why ETA leads this nationally not as a marketing claim, but as a direct mapping to what the DOL requires:

Experiential learning at scale. AI Week isn't a webinar. It's a multi-day, hands-on AI adoption summit. Eight cities. Tens of thousands of leaders. In the room, doing the work.

Cross-sector by design. The DOL requires delivery across business, government, educators, and workers simultaneously. That is literally how every ETA event is built.

Industry-specific context. We don't teach generic AI. We embed AI adoption into the specific industries, workflows, and challenges of the leaders in each room.

Enabling roles — executives and decision-makers. Future Tech Forum is purpose-built for the CIOs, CAIOs, CHROs, and government officials who shape AI adoption for entire organizations.

Stackable pathways. Our USAII certification partnership creates the continued learning credential structure the DOL explicitly requires foundational through advanced.

National reach, regional depth. Cincinnati. Columbus. Louisville. Nashville. Atlanta. Washington D.C. Tampa. Great Lakes (Toledo). The mandate is national. Our footprint is local.  

This Didn't Come Out of Nowhere

TEN 07-25 is the delivery layer of a coordinated two-year federal strategy: 

April 2025 — Executive Order 14277 directs federal agencies to prioritize AI education across the workforce.

July 2025 — The White House AI Action Plan calls AI literacy a foundational national priority.

August 2025 — TEGL 03-25 opens WIOA funding for AI skills training.

August 2025 — America's Talent Strategy frames AI literacy as an industrial competitiveness issue.

February 2026 — TEN 07-25 delivers the blueprint. The starting gun fires.

The funding is open. The mandate is live. The organizations that move now will define the standard for their industries and regions.

What This Means If You Lead a Business or Government Organization

Three things are now true that weren't true 30 days ago: 

1.  Federal dollars are flowing for AI literacy delivery. Your regional workforce board has authorization and funding to contract AI training right now. If you're not in that conversation, your competitors will be.

2.  AI literacy is becoming a procurement standard. Federal agencies are updating procurement guidelines to require AI capability from vendors and partners. This affects government contracting within 12 to 24 months.

3.  Talent is sorting by AI readiness. Workers with AI skills command wage premiums. Organizations with structured AI literacy pathways will attract the talent that organizations without them will lose.

This is not a future concern. The infrastructure is live. The question is whether your organization will lead or follow 

The Nation Needed a Delivery Infrastructure. ETA Built One.

The DOL defined the what and the how. Enterprise Technology Association is the who. 

If you lead a business, a government agency, an economic development organization, or a workforce program and you're serious about AI readiness — we want to talk.

Reach us at  hello@joineta.org