Physical AI and Blue-Collar Work: Geographic Exposure

• In the knowledge-work section, occupations could be assigned automation-exposure scores because software-AI capability is measurable against benchmarks (see Measuring AI Model Progress and the AI Exposure Explorer).
• Physical-AI capability, and its ability to replace human physical work, is still too nascent to support comparable scores, so this page does not score exposure.
• Total potential physical AI exposure by jobs: headcount in the four physical-task occupations that warehouse and factory robots most directly target (see below Top US Jobs with Physical AI Exposure).
• CRE42 will track and refine these measures as physical-AI deployment matures and the labor market adjusts and adapts (see What to Watch in 2026).

Exposure to Physical AI - Job Concentration by State

• Exposure concentration (basket jobs as a share of a state's total employment) peaks at 8.3% in Indiana and 7.9% in Kentucky; the most exposed states cluster in the industrial Midwest and South.
• The least exposed states sit near 3.0% (New York, Massachusetts), roughly one-third of the Indiana rate; the low end is a mix of coastal, service-oriented economies and small states.
• DC is an outlier at 0.7% and behaves as a city rather than a state economy.
• Concentration, not raw job count, is the local-risk measure: it captures how large a share of a state's workforce sits in these occupations.

Exposure by Region

• Employment-weighted, the Midwest is the most exposed region at 6.1%, ahead of the South (5.1%), West (4.4%), and Northeast (4.2%).
• The 1.9-point Midwest-to-Northeast gap tracks the manufacturing-heavy interior against the service-oriented coasts.
• The South holds the largest absolute exposed workforce (about 2.96 million basket jobs) but at lower concentration than the smaller Midwest base.

Top US Occupations with Projected Physical AI Exposure

• The basket is four occupations: laborers and material movers (2.95M), stockers and order fillers (2.83M), assemblers and fabricators (1.41M), and hand packers (0.56M).
• Together about 7.75 million jobs, roughly 5.0% of US employment (155.5M).
• Warehouse-type roles account for three of the four categories; assemblers and fabricators are the one factory-floor group.
• The basket is a transparent headcount proxy for exposure, not a task-level forecast of which jobs automation will eliminate.

Manufacturing Intensity by State

• Manufacturing's share of state GDP is the strongest available predictor of exposure concentration (r = +0.77).
• The most manufacturing-intensive states (Indiana at 24%, then Louisiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Michigan) are largely the same states that top the exposure ranking.
• Louisiana is the main exception: its high manufacturing share reflects capital-intensive petrochemicals, so its job concentration is lower than manufacturing GDP alone would suggest.