Last week, Anthropic — the AI company behind Claude — published a study that should matter to everyone in Collier County. Not because it predicts a robot apocalypse. Because it doesn’t. And because the places where AI actually is changing the labor market look a lot like the people sitting next to you at dinner on Fifth Avenue South.
The paper introduces something called “observed exposure”: a measure of how much AI is already being used in professional settings to perform specific job tasks. Not theory. Actual usage. The researchers matched real-world data against 800 occupations and found that computer programmers, customer service representatives, data entry workers, financial analysts, and sales reps sit at the top of the exposure list. Programmers are already seeing AI tools cover roughly three-quarters of their workflow.
Here’s the twist. The workers most exposed to AI are not the ones you’d expect. They’re older, whiter, better educated, and earn 47 percent more than their unexposed counterparts. Graduate degree holders are four times as concentrated in the exposed group. If you drew a composite sketch of the most AI-vulnerable American worker, you’d get someone who looks quite a lot like a Southwest Florida retiree still doing consulting work from the lanai.
The reassuring news: The study found no meaningful increase in unemployment among exposed workers since ChatGPT launched in late 2022. The worrying news: Hiring of younger workers aged 22 to 25 into exposed occupations has dropped roughly 14 percent. The jobs aren’t vanishing. They’re just not being refilled.
That matters here more than you might think. Southwest Florida already struggles to attract and retain working-age people. Retirees now make up more than 27 percent of the population in Lee, Collier, and Charlotte counties — double the national average. An FGCU study published last year described the tension plainly: Retirees drive demand for services, but the region can’t keep enough young workers to supply them. Housing costs push young people out. AI may now be thinning the white-collar entry-level positions that once justified those costs.
Meanwhile, the occupations that keep Naples running — construction workers, nurses, cooks, bartenders, landscapers — have essentially zero AI exposure. You cannot automate a roof repair after a hurricane. You cannot deploy a chatbot to pour a proper Negroni. Nearly a third of all American workers sit in occupations where AI usage hasn’t crossed the threshold of measurability, and most of those jobs involve physical presence, human judgment, or both.
So Naples faces a peculiar split. The retirees and part-time consultants who make up a significant chunk of our population match the demographic profile of AI’s most affected workers. But the service economy that sustains our daily life is largely untouched. We are simultaneously more exposed and more insulated than the national average, depending on which slice of our community you examine.
What should we do with this information? Three things.
First, stop panicking about the wrong jobs. The local labor shortage in health care, hospitality, and construction isn’t going away because of AI. If anything, it’s getting worse. Workforce development programs should double down on trades and health care credentials, not pivot wholesale to “AI readiness” training.
Second, pay attention to the young worker pipeline. If entry-level white-collar hiring is slowing nationally, Collier County needs to think harder about what career paths it can offer twentysomethings. That means housing they can afford and jobs with upward mobility — not just seasonal work.
Third, read the actual study. Anthropic deserves credit for publishing research that says, essentially, “our technology hasn’t caused mass unemployment yet, but we’re watching closely.” That kind of honesty is rare from a company with $8 billion in funding. The framework they’ve built will tell us more over time. We should pay attention.
AI is changing work. It just isn’t changing the work that keeps the lights on in Southwest Florida. Not yet. The question is whether we’ll use the breathing room wisely, or waste it arguing about robots.
David Rabjohns is a retired technology entrepreneur and small business consultant who lives in Naples.
This article originally appeared on Fort Myers News-Press: AI no threat to your bartender. It’s coming for consultants | Opinion
Reporting by David Rabjohns / Fort Myers News-Press
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