Andrew Yang got right to the chase during the 2026 AFROTECH™ Conference.
Yang was a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate and is co-founder and CEO of Noble Mobile, which provides customers with unlimited data for about $40 per month. The company also returns compensation to customers for unused data at the end of the month, along with 5.5% interest, he confirmed while speaking on a panel moderated by AFROTECH™ Brand Manager Will Lucas.
He told the audience that he was offering them six months of free wireless service as well, redeemable 48 hours after his panel.
“Believe it or not, it’s still a sound business because there’s so much price gouging going on in the wireless market that if we give you a fair value, we can still build a really good, profitable enterprise, even giving it away for six months. If you can believe that,” he said.
Noble Mobile’s funding supported the gesture. In September 2025, it announced a $10 million seed round led by Corazon Capital, according to Business Insider. Reflecting on the investment journey, he said VCs pushed the company to laser-focus on AI.
“Multiple VCs said to me… ‘If you start something with AI in the name, I’ll cut you a million-dollar check right now.’ And I was like, I don’t want to start an AI company. I’m the wholesome, magical Asian man from the future who wants to give everyone money. I’m not trying to speed up the getting rid of their jobs thing,” he explained. “That’s kind of not my jam. But what that said to me was that there’s a hyper-investment bubble in AI, because if the professional investors were legitimately saying to me, it’s like, ‘AI in the name, I’ll cut you a check right now,’ it’s like, ‘OK, there’s too much money and not enough discernment going into that space.’”
That’s not to say Yang has not embraced AI at all. He acknowledged that at Noble Mobile, they have replaced various junior coding positions with AI, a trend he acknowledged many firms are replicating.
“The easiest people to fire are those you have not hired yet,” he admitted.
Yang spoke Wednesday, Nov. 4, in the session “Rethinking Income” at the AFROTECH™ Conference, which is celebrating its 10th anniversary in Houston. The conference runs through Friday, Nov. 6, and tickets are still available for the rest of the week.
Yang said the knowledge premium is declining, adding that people once expected that earning degrees and credentials through college prepared them to navigate “sophisticated organizations.” Over the past several generations, the knowledge premium is what contributed to job growth, but that advantage “is getting squashed by AI,” which he believes will mean a shift to more of a survivor dynamic.
“Where I spent months learning case law for various corporate types of transactions, now you just ask AI, and it spits it out. … There’s going to be a little bit of survivor dynamic, a little bit of, you know, who stays on the island, who leaves the island, which isn’t great for culture or human behavior,” he said.
Yang’s advice is to drive growth, revenue, and sales within the organization, as he believes those workers will be the hardest to replace.
On the flip side, he noted, “The first people they look to replace are going to be in customer service or things that are cost centers, and coding.”
He also still advocates for a universal basic income, a policy that would allocate funds to ensure Americans’ basic needs are met. He projects the amount should be $1,300, higher than his $1,000 suggestion when he ran for president in 2020. He credited Thomas Paine, Martin Luther King Jr., and Michael Tubbs, Stockton, CA’s first Black mayor, who also shared this idea.
“I will say, in America, this country is the richest, most advanced economy in the history of the world. Our GDP right now is $84,000 a head. I want you to think about that. … And it’s going to go up with AI to like $90,000, $100,000,” he explained. “At what point do you start actually putting it in people’s hands? … I dearly hope that some of the folks who’ve gotten elected [during the 2026 Midterm Elections] yesterday, last night, some of whom I know, decide to make this the case that they make when they take office next January, because there are trillions of dollars that are flowing up into the cloud, into the hands of these AI companies, being utilized in these data centers where we’re spending more on data centers right now than we’re spending on office buildings.”
He added, “If that’s not the clearest metaphor that the server farm is the new human worker, I don’t know what else you could actually put up to demonstrate that. At some point, we should just be distributing the value.”