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 Phoenix?

The Phoenix metro area and other communities across the country will be at the front lines of this change.¹ To prepare for this future, New America will host the first ShiftLabs on April 20th in Phoenix, Arizona in partnership with Arizona State University and with support from the Rockefeller Foundation. At the day-long design lab, leaders from the Phoenix 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 Phoenix and to develop a long-term, place-based vision for opportunity.

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 from Oxford researchers Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne to conduct a first-of-its-kind analysis of the potential of automation to impact jobs in the greater Phoenix region. We ask: Of the thousands of jobs held by Phoenix 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 Phoenix 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 from 1980 to 2010 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 Phoenix in the years ahead, and especially on low-skilled jobs. In some cases, technology will eliminate high-risk jobs. In many more cases, technology will change them—sometimes dramatically.