Jaz Lee Found AI's Window — Then Built a Door for Everyone Else

“Detroit founder Jaz Lee is training underestimated workers in AI fluency before the opportunity gap widens. Inside VETTED, GLU, and what she’s building next.”

It was late 2022, and Jaz Lee was sitting on the floor at her colleague Kwaku Osei's house in Detroit — wine in hand, conversation moving the way it does when builders get together — when someone pulled up ChatGPT. She wasn't watching a demo. She wasn't in a boardroom. She was on the floor, in the middle of a real conversation, watching a technology reveal itself before most of the world knew to look.

She didn't see a chatbot. She saw a window — and she understood, with the precision of someone who had spent fifteen years inside enterprise technology, that windows like this don't stay open long.

Jaz Lee introduces herself the way people do when the title hasn't caught up to the work yet: founder of VETTED, co-founder of GLU, Head of Customer Success at ConStrat AI, and, with a full-name kind of clarity, the BlkTechBarbie. She is based in Detroit, and she is building in every direction the word allows.

She puts it plainly herself: she is becoming an architect of opportunity — building companies, communities, and human-centered technology that unlock opportunity and propel economic mobility. That is not a brand statement. It is an operating principle, and her calendar proves it.

The numbers that frame her work are not abstractions. By 2030, the World Economic Forum projects that 39% of core job skills will change. LinkedIn's 2023 Workplace Learning Report projects that 70% of the skills used in most jobs today will shift within the same timeframe. These are not distant forecasts; they are the structural reality facing every workforce development program, every employer, and every worker in America right now — and the people least likely to receive early, relevant exposure to the tools reshaping work are the same people who historically have the least margin for error when the economy moves.

That margin problem is not hypothetical. A 2021 National Skills Coalition report found that 88 million U.S. workers — roughly half the workforce — lack the digital skills employers increasingly require. The gap is steepest among workers of color, workers without four-year degrees, and workers in mid-wage jobs — exactly the population Jaz is building for. AI fluency is becoming what college-level credentials were a generation ago: the threshold between opportunity and exclusion. The difference is that this window has not closed yet. But it is closing.

Jaz arrived at this work carrying fifteen years of enterprise technology experience — and almost none of the institutional infrastructure the city uses to recognize expertise. No degree to signal credibility to check writers. No legacy organizational relationships to navigate city or state contracting. No startup capital to formalize a nonprofit. No "magic box," as she puts it — no glossy concept to position as innovation.

What she had was the knowledge and the clarity of someone who had already used technology as a personal cheat code to prosperity, and who understood exactly what was about to happen to everyone who didn't get access to the next one.

She did not wait for the infrastructure to recognize her. She built around it.

That night at Kwaku's house was the hinge. Not a pivot away from workforce development — a decision to evolve it. She had already been doing workforce development work. Now she understood the specific tool the work had to center. She went home, and she started learning at the pace the moment required.

What followed was not a program. It was fifteen years of enterprise expertise colliding with hundreds of hours inside ChatGPT, then Claude, then DeepSeek, Perplexity, and Grok — not as a tech enthusiast, but as a consultant systematically mining what each tool could do for the specific populations she served. She went to YouTube University without apology. She went deep inside the Black Tech Saturdays community, where she found both peers and accountability. She translated everything she learned — immediately, constantly — into workshops, workforce programs, and then into direct AI adoption work with startups, small businesses, and medical practices that needed to do more with lean teams.

VETTED launched in 2023. The design principle was specific: workforce training built from inside the community it serves — relevant, digestible, and connected to real employment outcomes, not completion certificates.

The lesson she learned the hard way is the one that took the longest: being early is not enough. Being smart is not enough. Being experienced is not enough. "Technology can create leverage," she reflects, "but people need exposure, confidence, community, and practical support to use it." The other lesson — equally hard-won — is that impact work does not have to be charity. When designed strategically, helping people from communities like hers access opportunity can be both meaningful and financially sustainable.

The receipts are specific. VETTED has trained more than 500 professionals, students, and job seekers (self-reported). Through a partnership with Michigan Rehabilitation Services, 72% of participants secured employment within 60 days (self-reported). Six-month job retention reached 76% (self-reported). Participants saw an average wage increase of 35% (self-reported). Partners include Black Tech Saturdays, City Year, Per Scholas, Black Girls Do Science, the Detroit Lions, BasBlue, the LGBT Chamber of Commerce, Michigan workforce agencies, ConStrat AI, and ChurchSpace. The participant base Jaz has served is worth naming directly: seniors, deaf and blind participants, people with disabilities, people of color, LGBTQ+ communities, neurodivergent individuals, and teen girls. These are not edge cases. They are the population that workforce systems most often design around rather than for.

In 2025, Jaz partnered with technical founder Paris Plain to build the first MVP of VETTED OS — a platform to scale workforce delivery and internal operations. GLU, the community platform she co-founded for queer women, onboarded 60 members and reached more than 200,000 social media views in its first 30 days (self-reported).

These are not metrics from a startup that got lucky. They are proof of concept for a model — one where community trust, technical fluency, and workforce outcomes live in the same system rather than three separate grant applications.

What Jaz is building has a specific relationship to history. Every workforce program that gets built from inside a community rather than delivered to it creates a shorter path for the person who comes next. The next person inherits not just a story, but the exposure, the language, the relationships, and the roadmap Jaz had to construct from scratch. The employers, schools, and workforce organizations that partner with her inherit better systems for developing talent they have historically overlooked. That is not a side effect of the work. It is the design.

Detroit is a city in the middle of an economic identity shift — away from a single-industry past and toward a diversified technology economy. That transition will either deepen existing inequalities or disrupt them, depending entirely on who has access to the tools that define the next economy. Jaz Lee is not waiting to find out which direction it goes.

If your organization is ready to expand opportunity at scale — if you're a workforce agency, an employer, a funder, or a partner with resources to deploy toward sustainable, community-grounded AI fluency work — the work is already happening. The question is whether you're in it.

Connect with Jaz at @_iamjazlee_ across all platforms, or reach her directly at jaz@withvetted.com. Learn more at withvetted.com and mustloveglu.com.