Rural Nurses Will Get AI Training Through a $5M Grant From Google and J&J

The American Nurses Foundation has received $5 million to bring practical artificial intelligence education to nurses in rural, remote, and underserved communities, the American Nurses Enterprise (ANE) announced Thursday. The funding comes in equal parts: a $2.5 million grant from the Johnson & Johnson Foundation and $2.5 million from Google.org.

The three-year initiative, called Nurse AI Training in Rural and Underserved Communities, will deliver co-designed education meant to help nurses understand foundational AI concepts and apply them safely in real clinical environments. ANE says the training will emphasize real-world application, including how nurses can talk about AI with patients, families, peers, and organizational leadership.

The American Nurses Foundation is part of ANE, which also includes the American Nurses Association and the American Nurses Credentialing Center.

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The initiative puts its priority on settings where the stakes of getting AI adoption right are highest. “AI is already showing up in everyday workflows across healthcare, and nurses must be prepared to lead how these tools are adopted, especially in rural and underserved settings where staffing and infrastructure challenges can be most acute,” said Brad Goettl, DNP, DHA, APRN, ANE’s Chief Nursing Officer, in the announcement.

ANE CEO Angela Beddoe said the initiative reflects a commitment to giving nurses in those communities “access to practical, trusted education that strengthens confidence, supports safe implementation, and keeps patient care at the center of innovation.”

The grant flows from a larger collaboration the two funders announced in April: a $10 million commitment, split evenly between Google.org and the J&J Foundation, to fund AI literacy training across the rural healthcare workforce. Both organizations have standing programs in the space, with Google.org’s AI Opportunity Fund working on AI skills broadly and J&J’s CareCommunity focused on care access.

For the ANA family, the grant converts principles into funded programming. In May, the association’s AI in Nursing Practice Think Tank published consensus findings calling for nurse-led guardrails on AI in healthcare. In June, the American Nurses Foundation announced AI research microgrants for nurse-led AI projects. The through line in all of it is the same argument Goettl made in May and repeated this week: nurses should lead how these tools reach the bedside, rather than have them arrive fully formed.

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The announcement did not include curriculum details, a rollout timeline, or how ANE will measure whether the training works, all of which will matter more than the dollar figure. It also arrives as AI tools move into nursing workflows faster than training has kept up, from documentation assistants to AI agents interacting directly with patients, a pattern our Nursing AI Watch has tracked across more than 100 health systems.

For rural nurses, though, the premise of the program is hard to argue with: the tools are coming either way, and the nurses most likely to encounter them with the least institutional support are about to get training built for them.

🤔 Would AI training change how you practice, especially in a rural or under-resourced setting? What would you want it to cover? Tell us in the comments below.