Serviti Corps
Serviti Corps is a national network of local Corps, beginning in Wichita, Kansas. We work to protect people through the disruption of artificial intelligence and robotics—preventing disruption where possible, preparing before the wave hits, and responding when it does.
That means supporting the human transition: helping people prepare for emerging opportunities and dangers while protecting their independence, purpose, relationships, and ability to shape what comes next.
Our mission
We have first responders for fires, floods, and medical emergencies. Serviti Corps is building a response to the human consequences of technological disruption: lost livelihoods, changing demands, and communities struggling to keep pace. Those consequences extend beyond employment. People may face depression, anger, helplessness, isolation, or a loss of purpose—even while benefiting from the same technologies.
The mission is to prepare and mobilize people who can help others understand what is changing, adapt, and act. That means bringing human support and practical technology to the specific problems people face.
Pro-human. Not anti-AI.
As the host of the nationally distributed PBS series AI: Unpacking the Black Box, founder John McElligott encountered a recurring concern: even when guests disagreed about AGI, superintelligence, and timelines, they recognized that the transition would be painful for people caught in the middle.
AI can help a small business grow at an accelerated rate while the same technology takes away opportunities for the owner’s children. The benefits and costs can exist within the same family. Greater prosperity alone does not answer questions about purpose, belonging, or how the next generation finds its place.
We have all contributed to the world being transformed. Everyone deserves a meaningful voice in its future, the practical ability to prepare, and equal access to both the benefits emerging technologies create and the protections needed when things go wrong.
What the Corps is being built to do
See disruption or displacement coming and get ahead of it. Work with people and institutions to understand where AI and robotics may put livelihoods at risk, and act before people are displaced. Share early warnings and what we learn across our national network, so other Serviti Corps communities can act before the same disruption reaches them. The goal is to prevent displacement where possible and reduce its impact when it cannot be prevented.
Help people understand how AI, robotics, and emerging technologies may affect their work and lives, and build the practical skills needed for the “jobs of the transition.”
Communities also deserve the knowledge, tools, and trusted relationships to prepare for extraordinary abundance, serious disruption, and potential catastrophe. That requires understanding capabilities already available, emerging capabilities, and what putting technology to work actually involves. Existing capabilities already demand preparation. Waiting until harm is obvious leaves communities responding after people have been hurt. Preparation has to happen while the change is happening.
Bring people, tools, and technical capability to the problems disruption creates. The response must fit the person and the situation—whether that means adapting to changes at work or using technology to support greater independence.
It also means working through trusted local relationships to help people find support when change leaves them overwhelmed, isolated, or struggling with a loss of purpose.
Help people retain the ability to make decisions and act on them. The goal is more than getting through the transition: people need a meaningful hand in shaping what happens to them.
People whose livelihoods, independence, or ability to participate are threatened by technological change, and people seeking to understand and benefit from it. Workers, business owners, children and families, people with disabilities, and communities face different challenges. Someone can benefit from these technologies and experience hardship because of them at the same time. Their needs must shape the response.
A national network. Local Corps.
Wichita, Kansas is home to the first local Serviti Corps.
Serviti Corps is being built as a federation: one shared mission, with locally led Corps empowered to operate independently within common guidelines and guardrails. Local leadership brings knowledge of its community and the authority to respond to its needs, while remaining connected to the wider federation.
Founder John McElligott chose this structure after years studying organizations such as Rotary, Goodwill, and the YMCA. He recognized that trying to do everything himself, or through one central organization, would make serving communities at scale impossible. The lesson was to build around a shared mission and local leadership, with the structure to sustain both.
Local Corps are designed to work within and alongside existing federated networks, connecting with institutions that already have trusted relationships in their communities. This allows the Corps to build on existing human infrastructure and share knowledge across communities while keeping decisions grounded in local needs.
Local Corps work within their communities and connect through a national network. What one community sees coming can become an early warning for another. What one Corps learns can help others prepare and respond.
We work within the network to help prevent the same disruption or displacement from happening in other Serviti Corps communities wherever possible.
Existing human infrastructure
Serviti Corps works with individuals, educational institutions, governments, nonprofits, trusted organizations such as Goodwills and Rotary clubs, and faith communities—including pastors, priests, and rabbis.
These organizations are existing human infrastructure. They already serve people in multiple locations, with local relationships, knowledge, and trust. They are places people turn to for education, employment, support, and service.
Working through that infrastructure allows preparation and practical responses to reach people where they are. It also helps institutions prepare themselves to serve their communities as AI and robotics change the needs of those communities.
Faith leaders bring experience helping people navigate meaning, responsibility, grief, and hope. But they may be unaware that technological changes could soon threaten livelihoods across their congregation or parish—and unprepared for the questions their members will bring them.
A mayor knows their community, its priorities, and the projects already underway. But they may have little preparation for assessing how AI and robotics could change the assumptions behind a workforce initiative, an economic development investment, or a community project halfway through construction.
A suicide prevention center brings expertise in supporting people in deep despair. But its staff may need additional knowledge and resources to recognize and respond to concerns about AI-induced psychosis in teenagers.
These are the people and institutions communities will turn to. They already carry much of the knowledge, experience, and trust needed to respond. Yet unfamiliar technological developments can create blind spots with serious consequences—even within otherwise capable institutions.
Serviti Corps engages them as the community’s first responders and front line. We connect their expertise with practical understanding of emerging technologies, help identify gaps in preparedness, and work together to develop responses before those gaps become crises. Their experience also helps technical practitioners recognize needs and consequences they might otherwise miss.
Serviti Corps
The future is being built now. It can’t just be a place we end up. We need to make it a home.
Serviti Corps. So we all make it home.
About the founder
Founder & CEO, Serviti Corps
John McElligott is a robotics and AI practitioner, U.S. Marine Corps veteran, and host and co-producer of the nationally distributed PBS series AI: Unpacking the Black Box.
He is an international speaker on exponential technologies and how they will affect everyone—from royalty and the C-suite to families and individuals.
He founded York Exponential and Fortress Academy, a licensed robot-mechanics college. His work spans software, robotics, AI deployments, and workforce training, including developing the Artemis initiative with Goodwill partners.
He has run an R&D lab, deployed robotics on factory floors, and trained robot mechanics. He has also faced the people whose jobs his systems would replace.
Serviti Corps brings that experience to a response mission: protecting people through technological disruption and preserving their ability to shape what comes next.