Introduction

Today, work as we know it is shifting, and rapidly. Over the next decade and beyond, how will artificial intelligence and automation change work and opportunity in cities like Indianapolis?

The Indianapolis metro area and other communities across the country will be at the front lines of this change.¹ Of course, Indianapolis is no stranger to automation and technological change, including both the risks and rewards. Over the last few decades, the region’s manufacturing sector has experienced job loss and technological change. Today, Indianapolis’s tech sector is growing and the city was shortlisted for Amazon’s second headquarters. Looking ahead, rapidly advancing technology will bring new opportunities and challenges for the region.

To prepare for this future, New America will host its second ShiftLabs on May 18th in Indianapolis, Indiana, with support from the Rockefeller Foundation. At the day-long design lab, leaders from the Indianapolis region and across the country—from technology, industry, policy, philanthropy and culture—will come together to consider the impact of technology and automation on work in the greater Indianapolis region and to develop a long-term, place-based vision for opportunity. The Indianapolis ShiftLabs follows the first ShiftLabs on April 20th in Phoenix, Arizona, which New America hosted in partnership with Arizona State University.

To bring a data-driven lens to ShiftLabs, New America partnered with leading labor market analytics company Burning Glass Technologies and their analysis of data to conduct a first-of-its-kind analysis of the potential of automation to impact jobs in the greater Indianapolis region. We ask: Of the thousands of jobs held by Indianapolis workers today, which could be performed by existing technology? Which occupations and skills are at greatest risk of automation, and who holds those jobs today? To answer these questions, we combined and analyzed Burning Glass data on the likelihood of a computer being able to do a job using existing technology, as well as data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics on occupations in Indianapolis and nationally.

To be sure, emerging technologies will also create many jobs, including entirely new jobs that don’t even exist today. This is a familiar pattern—about half of all job growth came from the creation and expansion of brand new jobs. On balance, automation and technology may create more jobs than they eliminate, but predictions of the number and types of jobs that will be created are outside the scope of this study.

The findings of our analysis are clear: Automation will have a widespread impact on jobs in the Indianapolis region in the years ahead, and especially on low-skilled jobs and especially on female workers. In some cases, technology will eliminate high-risk jobs. In many more cases, technology will change them—sometimes dramatically.