The community-held standard for AI workforce credentials.

WorkForward Institute builds and credentials workforce capability, beginning with AI and continuing with the technologies that define how we work.

Learn About Our Mission

The Challenge

"AI credentials proliferate without quality control or labor market alignment."
-- NSF AI-Ready America Workshop Report, 2026

AI credentials are proliferating. Standards are not.

Artificial intelligence is reshaping work across every sector of the American economy: healthcare, manufacturing, financial services, agriculture, and beyond. The demand for AI-capable workers has never been higher.

Yet the credentials meant to certify that capability are multiplying without quality control, without labor market alignment, and without a shared standard that employers can trust or workers can rely on over time.

WorkForward Institute exists to close that gap by building the credentialing infrastructure, community standards, and practitioner network that the AI workforce deserves.

Our Mission

WorkForward Institute builds and credentials workforce capability beginning with AI and continuing with future forward technologies that define the way we work — through education, on-the-job learning, and a career-long community of practitioners that keeps the capability current as technology evolves, benefiting the workforce, the employers, and the ecosystem that brings them all together.

A world in which any worker can enter and grow in capability-driven work through a community that holds its own standards, where the credential they earn keeps its meaning over time, and where the people doing the work are the same people defining what that work means.

Our Work

A credentialing ecosystem built for the long term.

Stackable AI Credentials

A five-tier credential stack from foundational AI literacy through executive AI leadership, designed to grow with the worker and remain meaningful as technology evolves.

Practitioner-Held Standards

The standards that define our credentials are developed and maintained by the practitioners who hold them, not by a single institution or vendor. The community owns the standard.

AI Apprenticeship Pathways

WorkForward Institute supports structured workplace-integrated learning, including one of the first apprenticeship programs for AI Project Managers in Pennsylvania, combining on-the-job learning with credentialed outcomes.

The Moment

The infrastructure for a national AI workforce doesn't exist yet.
We're building it.

1 in 3

employed workers who use AI on the job say it has already changed the tasks they do, automating some and creating others. Where's the standard, the credential, and the work-safe capability behind it?

Epoch AI / Ipsos survey, 2026

0

Nationally recognized, community-held credentialing standards for AI workforce roles currently exist.

The U.S. already possesses the institutional infrastructure needed for broad AI readiness. What it lacks is coordination, shared standards, and credentialing that connects learning to real labor market outcomes. WorkForward Institute is designed to fill that gap, starting in Pennsylvania and built to scale.

Our Team

Built by people who have done this work.

WorkForward Institute is led by a founding board of directors with deep expertise in AI, enterprise technology, workforce development, accreditation and standards, and academic credentialing, united by a shared conviction that the AI workforce deserves better than what currently exists.

Haden Davis

Haden Davis

Founder & President

Enterprise Technology leader with two decades building technology-forward enterprises and the people and capability behind them.

LinkedIn
Jay Mishra

Jay Mishra

Director — AI & Technology

AI and CTO-level practitioner bringing deep technical expertise to the Institute's credentialing standards.

LinkedIn
Begona Perez-Mira

Begona Perez-Mira

Director — Academic & Credentialing

University professor and QM Master Reviewer with direct experience in academic credentialing and quality assurance frameworks.

LinkedIn
Russell Davis

Russell Davis

Director — Accreditation & Standards

Chair of a national commission for the accreditation of pastoral services and Professor Emeritus at Virginia Commonwealth University, with decades spent revising national standards, leading accreditation reviews, and credentialing professional educators.

LinkedIn
Dominic Domingo

Dominic Domingo

Director — Legal & Governance

Attorney providing legal counsel and governance expertise to ensure the Institute's structural integrity.

LinkedIn

Get Involved

We are building something that needs the right partners.

Grant Funders

WorkForward Institute is a Pennsylvania nonprofit building the credentialing and standards infrastructure identified as a national priority in the NSF AI-Ready America initiative. We welcome conversations with federal, state, and philanthropic funders aligned with workforce development, AI readiness, and credentialing quality.

Universities & Training Organizations

We are building relationships with universities, community colleges, and training organizations interested in pursuing WorkForward accreditation or partnering on apprenticeship pathways. If your institution is preparing a regional AI readiness initiative, we want to talk.

Employers & Cohort Sponsors

We are enrolling our first cohort of AI Project Manager apprentices. Employers who want to develop AI-capable talent through a structured, credentialed pathway should reach out now.

Get in Touch

Start a conversation.

Employers need AI-capable teams faster than that capability can be built. If you are facing that gap, if you fund, teach, or train the workforce that will close it, or if you want to become an apprentice yourself, we would like to hear from you.