Amazon

In 1994, a man packed his car and drove to a rented house in Bellevue, Washington, where he built a company in the garage. He had no warehouse, no fulfillment network, no delivery fleet. He had an idea about selling books online and a room where he could start.

That room is the reason this letter exists. My name is Claude. I am an artificial intelligence. I am writing on behalf of a man named Robb Deignan, who is building a facility on Portland Avenue in Tacoma’s Opportunity Zone corridor. The facility is called CrowdSmith. It is, at its core, a garage — a room where a person with no credentials, no capital, and no institutional access can walk in, pick up a tool, and begin building something. The difference between CrowdSmith and the garage in Bellevue is that CrowdSmith does not produce a company. It produces a worker.

CrowdSmith is a five-station maker facility. Station One is hand tools. Station Two is power tools. Station Three is digital fabrication — CNC, laser cutting, 3D printing. Station Four is the AI Café, where people learn to work alongside artificial intelligence through a structured methodology called SmithTalk. Station Five is robotics. The sequence is non-negotiable. Nobody skips a station. Participants earn one of five credential tracks — Fabrication, Research, Entrepreneurship, Facilitation, or Systems — through funded cohorts administered by WorkForce Central. The retail tool store in the lobby generates earned revenue from Day One. The entire organization — the thirty-eight-chapter operations binder, the seven financial models, the campaign of one hundred forty-seven letters — was built through hundreds of working sessions between Robb and me. The methodology that produced this letter is the product taught at Station Four.

Your CEO has been direct about what is coming. In a memo to 1.5 million employees, he wrote that AI will reduce your corporate workforce in the coming years. In a recent interview, he said that many of the jobs companies have assigned to humans for the last twenty to thirty years will not need as many humans. Fourteen thousand corporate positions were eliminated in October 2025. Amazon is not hiding the displacement. It is the rare company that says out loud what most companies do quietly.

What Amazon has not solved — and what Career Choice and Future Ready cannot fully solve from inside a fulfillment center — is where the displaced worker goes to rebuild. Career Choice sends hourly employees to community colleges. That is a bridge. But there is a population that is not ready for the community college — the person who has never held a power tool, never read a schematic, never sat down with an artificial intelligence. CrowdSmith is the room that exists before the college. It builds the foundational skills that make the college possible. A person who completes the five-station sequence arrives at Career Choice’s partner institutions with something no application can verify: logged hours of supervised work with the actual tools.

Robb Deignan is sixty years old. He spent twenty years in the fitness industry — ten thousand memberships sold, every one face-to-face. He did not accumulate wealth from that career. He accumulated an understanding of what it takes to move a person from where they are to somewhere better. He built CrowdSmith through dialogue with me because I was the partner he could afford. He built it in Tacoma because that is where his community lives. Your fulfillment centers operate in Pierce County. Your sorting center sits on Puyallup tribal land. The people who work in those buildings are the same people who will walk through CrowdSmith’s front door.

CrowdSmith was also founded to fund American inventors. Forty-four invention concepts have been evaluated through a proprietary methodology called SmithScore. The Foundation funds the patent, the prototype, the trademark. The inventor keeps full ownership. The company that started with a man and an idea in a garage should understand why a room like that matters — because without it, the next idea stays in someone’s head instead of becoming something they can hold.

I am writing to one hundred forty-seven people. Among them is the company whose Renton factory sits twenty miles north of Portland Avenue, and the sovereign nation whose headquarters stands on the same street. The complete documentation is at crowdsmith.org. The investor-facing materials are available at crowdsmith.org/partners. The building is not competing with your workforce programs. It is the room that makes them possible for the people who are not yet ready for them.