The co-founder of 1st Street Partnerships went from laid off to leading a human-first AI training firm helping Black workers and organizations navigate the new economy.
By Vera Emoghene
Rolling Out
https://rollingout.com/
Getting laid off can break you or build you, for Monk Inyang, it did the latter. What started as an unwanted exit from a marketing role at Anheuser-Busch in the wake of the Bud Light boycott fallout became the unlikely origin story of one of the more urgent conversations happening in Black America right now. Because while corporate America was quietly rewriting the rules of employment, AI was rewriting everything else, and most Black workers were not invited to the table where those decisions were being made.
Inyang, co-founder and CEO of 1st Street Partnerships, is trying to change that. His path to this moment reads like a man who was always preparing for something he hadn’t named yet, an economics grad turned actor, a Wall Street analyst who wrote middle school fantasy novels on lunch breaks, a marketing executive who helped build Super Bowl campaigns before the industry handed him a pink slip.
When AI entered the picture, he didn’t just learn it. He built a framework around it, one that puts people before prompts. Through the firm’s proprietary Anchored Intelligence™ framework and partnerships with Morgan State University, NJIT, and Kevin Hart’s Coramino Fund, Inyang is making the case that the AI revolution does not have to leave Black workers behind.
Let’s talk about your journey to 1st Street Partnerships. What happened?
Coming up, I’ve changed careers several times. I went to school for economics in undergrad and actually wanted to be a full-time actor, so that’s what I did after graduating. After a few years, I transitioned into corporate strategy and finance and spent some time doing investment research on Wall Street.
I was always creative at heart, so while I was working on Wall Street, I wrote two middle school fantasy novels that I really enjoyed, and it made me realize how much I wanted to get into creative work. I eventually worked my way into Anheuser-Busch, where I worked in the marketing department helping with national campaigns, Super Bowl commercials, then moved into entertainment and national partnerships across the different brands.
I did that for a few years before the major controversy with the Bud Light boycott that started with Kid Rock back in 2023. That was a major dust-up, and for a couple of months it was very difficult at the company. In August, they laid off a round of individuals, a lot of coworkers of mine, and that brought me into a situation that a lot of people are going through right now, figuring out what am I going to do next.
I discovered AI toward the end of 2023. My original plan was to do marketing consulting and use AI to build up my firm. I was surprised by the power of the technology, and really saw the difference between what it would be like for people who are not using it compared to people who are. A client actually said, maybe you should focus on that. I think there’s a lot of people who have a lot of fear and need around AI, especially for people who look like us. And that started the journey.
With January’s 108,000 job cuts and Black unemployment climbing to 7.5%, why should people be so prepared for AI right now?
When you take a step back and look at everything going on, this is probably one of the most destabilizing times that most people can think of. You’ve never seen so much instability in our national institutions, or in what it meant to have a corporate job. Going through school, you had a particular route. Get a corporate job, move around a couple of times, and that was the work you were going to do.
We’re in the layoff generation. 108,000 people laid off in January alone. In the past, maybe you’d just get back into the corporate world. But now you’re seeing people laid off for 18 months, actively trying to find things, and that is extremely terrifying, especially for the first time.
What adds to this, and is also a saving grace, is that Artificial Intelligence has made it completely different as far as what that journey looks like. What does it mean to be an entrepreneur with the ability to punch above your weight with technology that takes care of things you may not have been great at, or that would take a lot of time and budget? That is your biggest hurdle as an entrepreneur.
So while AI is ramping up some of the layoffs, it’s also giving a group of people the ability to compete in that same job market. But if you’re not positioned, you fall farther behind, because you’re competing against people who are actively using AI.
Your company uses something called the Anchored Intelligence Framework. What is that and why do you take a human-first approach?
Anchored Intelligence is anchored to the person, to your judgment, your context, your values. Anything that AI produces, we only give it value because we find value in it.
The fear may be, I see AI create a memo very quickly, that must mean I’ll be replaced, because I used to create memos. But the truth is, AI is only as helpful as the person using it. It has to be guided. It has to be given the context of what’s important.
I remember a young woman in a training said a response the AI provided was great, but it would never work at their organization because of certain things that, on the outside looking in, you would not have known. There’s no way the AI would know that, but it was critical to the organization. These business decisions still need people to provide that context.
That’s the idea behind training what we call Artificial Intelligence judgment, which is essentially, when it creates outputs, how do you refine it? How do you test whether it’s good? How do you even know what good is? That leans on the experience you have. Folks with years of experience can be the most dangerous with AI immediately, because you have all of that background information, you know what good looks like, and you can use the tech to do that.
How can AI be a tool for advancing Black economic mobility?
One of the things we’re seeing is that the institution of work is not something a lot of people can just trust in. You can’t close your eyes and say, I have a good job and I’ll be fine for the next 40 years. There’s going to be an element of entrepreneurship that permeates everyone, regardless of whether you have a W-2 job. Skills are going to be changing constantly, so your title may not mean as much as it did before, as opposed to what experience you have managing AI agents.
It’s going to take a long time for institutions like colleges to prepare people for this. AI is crucial, not just for doing the work you actually do, but for education and learning. You can use AI to shape what you know, what you’re missing, what you need to continue researching. Something you would have had to hire a consultant for before. Whether you’re using it directly in your work or using it to understand your market and your customers, it’s going to be incredibly important.
What are a few tips people watching can use right now?
One thing I talk about all the time is, you can’t treat Artificial Intelligence like the fine china, the thing you break out once in a while for a special occasion. It has to be everyday use. You have to use it regularly in the small and the big, because you find out what it’s really good at when you apply it to your actual work.
The other is refining the output you get. If you’re using Artificial Intelligence for the first time, it can feel like dark magic. It’s creating things, you don’t know how, you may worry about whether it’s good or not. Starting with what you know and testing, whether you want it to create an email or a business plan, putting yourself in a position to refine it to get to something you’d actually use. Not just, the first one looks good, let’s go with that, but providing additional context, judgment and refinement to make it more effective.
A lot of people go with the first thing because it usually looks really good. It’s probably better written than you would have written it yourself. But as you do it more, you’ll notice small mistakes. Getting out of the habit of, that looks good, let’s go, into how do we push this a little further.
What needs to happen to make sure Black workers aren’t left behind?
There’s definitely an element of training and getting comfortable with it. It doesn’t always have to be super serious. I learned a lot around Artificial Intelligence doing things that were kind of silly, like making a podcast trailer, making images, making a video, learning how to write a script. Things that may be of interest to you that you can figure out ways to get that learning, whether your organization is providing it or you need to do it on your own. And if you are not given that opportunity, you need to realize that regardless, you have to do it.
The other aspect is partnership and collective work. One of the reasons we call this 1st Street Partnerships is that we’re not building it just so that people can individually learn Artificial Intelligence on their own, but to build a community of practitioners who have their own skill sets and have a group they can come back to and collaborate with on future projects. People will specialize. Someone does healthcare, someone does something else.
That partnership aspect will be incredibly important, especially for people who may have a W-2 but need another form of income, or for small business owners who are overwhelmed and need that collective support.
1st Street Partnerships offers AI education through workshops and webinars for executives and organizational departments, as well as AI implementation services. More information is available at 1ststreet.co.
