This report looks at observed AI exposure by occupation to answer three questions about the Philadelphia metro labor market. Which industries and occupations are already affected by AI? Who holds these jobs? And is any of this showing up in employment numbers yet? Observed AI exposure shows where AI is already integrated in daily tasks. High exposure means AI already covers a large share of the tasks it could do in that job. The measures come from the Anthropic Economic Index (March 2026) and The Budget Lab at Yale (June 2026).
At 3.39× the workforce average. Business and financial operations come second at 1.90.
Educational instruction (1.73) and healthcare practitioners (1.28) sit well above the average, and education and health care employ more people than any other part of the region's workforce.
Farming registers 0.08 times the average; building and grounds cleaning, 0.12; production, 0.17. Office and administrative support lands near the middle at 0.93.
Industry exposure ranges from almost zero (Postal Service) up to about 31% (Data Processing). Credit Intermediation (Banks) and Finance & Insurance are at the top.
Clothing, furniture, electronics, building materials, and sporting goods sit between 21% and 24%, much higher than the metro median of about 12%. Sales jobs have a limited set of tasks AI can perform, and those tasks, such as clarifying product questions, promoting, writing, advertising, and conducting inventory checks, are where AI can be used most.
Most high-exposure industries also sit on the high-wage side. Retail concentrates the high-exposure, low-wage jobs. These workers are already seeing a lot of AI in their jobs but have lower average wages.
Customer Service Representatives (56,000 workers, about 70%), Secretaries and Administrative Assistants (37,000, about 44%), and Office Clerks (24,000, about 43%). At the top, Computer Programmers have about 74% exposure. The region's deepest AI use is in office, sales, and retail jobs, although tech jobs are only a small part.
Hover a bar. Bar length is exposure; the label is how many people hold the job.
22% of the region's workers, roughly 713,000 people, are in jobs where more than a quarter of possible daily tasks already use AI. Of these, 100,000, or 3.1% of all workers, are in jobs where over half of tasks use AI.
Food & Beverage Stores (80,000 workers), General Merchandise (66,000), and other smaller retail groups together employ several hundred thousand workers in the high-exposure, low-wage category. Hover a bar to see its exposure-wage group.
The neighborhood map shows how jobs are spread across the region. Each area is colored by the average exposure of the workers who live there. Hover for details.
Exposure is lowest, about 8%, in North and West Philadelphia. The city's lower exposure reflects the jobs its residents hold, mostly healthcare support, food service, personal care, and transportation, occupations with almost no observed AI exposure.
Exposure is highest, over 15%, along the Main Line, Conshohocken, King of Prussia, and central Bucks County. When mapped by residence, AI exposure follows the region's existing patterns of jobs and income.
Employment-weighted exposure runs from 12.8% in Miami and Los Angeles to 15.1% in Washington, DC. Philadelphia's 13.2% ranks next to New York (13.5%) and Chicago (13.4%), a sign of a broad, diversified economy.
In Philadelphia, 14.7% for women and 11.8% for men, mainly because of the types of jobs they hold. The gap is smallest where men also have high-exposure jobs (Washington +10%, Boston +12%, Seattle +14%) and largest where men mostly have physical jobs (Dallas +31%, Los Angeles +32%, Miami +38%).
Philadelphia, with a 2.9 percentage-point gap, or 24% in relative terms, is in the middle. Higher exposure does not mean women use AI more. Anthropic's survey finds that, within the same job, women use AI in less automated and more step-by-step ways than men (Massenkoff et al., June 2026).
Finance & Insurance and Credit Intermediation are always the top two. When the ranking chart changes, it is because the mix of job conditions in that industry is different locally. Insurance Carriers & Related is third in Miami, its highest spot anywhere; Real Estate is ninth in Miami but twelfth or lower in Washington and New York.
Hover a line or label to follow one industry across all ten metros.
Not yet. From 2022 through 2025, the four exposure-wage groups mostly moved together. The link between exposure and job growth is slightly negative but not statistically significant (Spearman ρ = −0.21, p = 0.07, across 79 industries). Exposed and unexposed jobs differ for reasons unrelated to AI, so this report only describes the data. Through early 2026, national analysis finds no significant effect of AI on employment or wages in exposed occupations (Gimbel, Kendall & Nunn, 2026; The Budget Lab at Yale, June 2026). AI use is growing faster than any labor market change. Whether that gap continues is something the next data releases will help answer.
Hover the lines. Employment by exposure-wage group, eleven MSA counties.