Pittsburgh250 — This story is part of a Pittsburgh Media Partnership collaborative reporting project exploring how Southwestern Pennsylvania communities are marking America’s 250th anniversary — and how local history continues to shape civic life today. Technical.ly, City Cast Pittsburgh and Pittsburgh’s Public Source teamed up to explore the region’s economic horizons.
Two hundred and fifty years ago, a new country formed with the idea that ordinary people could shape their own futures.
Now, new technology is raising questions about what control people have in making a living over the next 250 years.
Recent data shows AI isn’t currently erasing Pittsburgh’s largest job sectors.
Instead, local experts say the tech is changing what workers spend their time on — offloading routine, administrative or physically demanding tasks, making expertise, training and human judgment more important.
Still, concerns about AI’s possible disruptions to the labor market and the workplace aren’t unfounded — though that may have something to do with general economic and workplace trends rather than the tech itself.
“A question that we need to be asking about automation in general is not just what types of jobs will be displaced,” Christophe Combemale, an assistant research professor at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), told Technical.ly, “but how easy is it for folks with those jobs to maintain the wages that they have and reskill elsewhere.”
Workers have navigated waves of automation before, and worker protections historically followed, like unions, retraining programs and expanded social safety nets.
But there’s another possible future, one where what workers reasonably expect from their jobs could shift, according to Denise Rousseau, a professor of organizational behavior at CMU, leading to an era of greater acceptance of “bad jobs,” or work without stable hours, pay or security.
AI is accelerating a shift that started long before ChatGPT
Despite workers’ anxieties, available data suggests that AI is not wiping out Pittsburgh’s largest job sectors.
Because of the current buzz, the tech has become a scapegoat. It’s an easier way to explain layoffs, Rousseau said, as opposed to just weathering an economic storm.
“[AI] is a nicer reason than ‘we had to cut headcount because we think the stock market will respond favorably to our cost-cutting efforts,’” she said. “AI is a boogeyman, in addition to an explanation, and I’m hesitant to overattribute to AI explanations for the behavior that we see in organizations.”
Morgan Frank, an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Computing and Information, theorizes that today’s white-collar labor market problems started in early 2022, before ChatGPT launched. He said it likely stems less from AI than from rising interest rates and the messy transition out of the pandemic economy.
And there’s another shift happening inside workplaces, too. The relationship between employers and employees has become more transactional, according to Rosseau.
Rousseau traces the trend back to the late 1980s, when instability pushed firms toward shorter-term thinking. This continued into the 2000s as global competition pressured companies to produce more short-term results.
“Organizations were already keeping people for much shorter periods of time and already not investing very much in development or skill building,” Rousseau said. “Training [today] targets the immediate job rather than the future job.”
AI is playing into this. AI tools are generally being used as “a labor substitute” for routine tasks, which in turn is limiting workers’ chances to build deep expertise on the job, according to Rousseau.
“It also says something about the extent to which employees are thought about as weak to build with,” she added. “They’re plugging a demand now rather than part of a resource to be deployed over time. That’s a huge shift — much more transactional.”
Top sectors are still hiring — but the jobs are changing
Pittsburgh’s two biggest sectors — healthcare and education — aren’t immune to the shifts that come with new technological breakthroughs, even if they’re showing employment gains.
These two industries accounted for more than 250,000 local positions in 2025, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data.
Broadly, these sectors, plus other local industries like finance and manufacturing, have seen employment grow or remain steady since early 2025.
Instead of causing displacement, new AI tools are changing the amount of time spent on admin tasks and the demand for employees to bring expertise — a shift that can be seen in the data and lived experience alike.
In healthcare, for example, the adoption of AI-enabled tools has traditionally been slow, largely due to liability concerns, but ambient AI medical scribes like Abridge have recently gained widespread adoption, according to Holly Wiberg, assistant professor of operations research and public policy at CMU.
That adoption has come with a strong push to keep humans in the loop, Wiberg said, as clinicians are still responsible for reviewing and acting on AI-generated outputs. Early research shows Abridge’s AI tool was associated with a significant drop in clinician burnout after just 30 days.
In education, Frank, the assistant professor at Pitt, sees the same shift firsthand.
Using tools like Claude Code lets him offload much of his routine data work, but it also means his expertise is more important than ever.
“You need to be very strong in statistics and coding to get to be successful with these AI tools,” he said, adding, “In total, I spend more time thinking [about] hypotheses and interesting questions … but I think the wheels would fall off if I wasn’t as knowledgeable about data science programming and statistics.”
The best-case scenario is more time for higher-value work, like clinicians spending more time with patients, Wiberg said, but administrative functions are also “more likely to decline in importance.”
Still, the unions most embedded in these sectors are paying attention to possible negative consequences.
Nurses at UPMC Magee-Womens Hospital are pushing back against the idea that AI can solve the staffing crisis, calling instead for more humans — and their union, SEIU Healthcare PA, has taken that argument to Harrisburg.
Meanwhile, negotiations over the use of AI in education are also playing out between Pitt’s graduate student union and the university, as the workers try to get ahead of possible workplace woes.
Manufacturing tests AI’s jobs promises
Manufacturing remains one of the clearest places to watch how AI could reshape work in the region.
New advancements in machine vision and robotic material-handling capabilities mean more highly manual activities in manufacturing could soon be automated, according to Combemale, the CMU expert whose research focuses on how technology affects workforce skills and training needs.
Take food processing work, like plucking a chicken, for example. Working with irregular, soft objects used to be difficult for robots, but “the physical embodying of AI is making it possible to automate a lot of these tasks that were formerly quite manual,” Combemale said.
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The question becomes what happens to the people who used to pluck chickens — are they going to be laid off en masse? Or face massive wage cuts?
Probably not, according to Combemale.
“If anything,” he said, “it will create new jobs that are more technical and more highly paid, and the individuals who may be displaced from those jobs may find it relatively easy to relocate to other kinds of activities.”
In Pittsburgh especially, there are signals that development of physical AI — AI systems embedded in machines that operate in the real world — isn’t slowing down. Last quarter alone, local startups raised more than $1.6 billion developing the tech behind next-gen robots, software and data centers.
That’s coinciding with workers in the field and outside of it being pulled in with new opportunities to reskill for an era of automation.
With help from efforts like the Build Back Better Regional Challenge — a $62.7 million federal grant for workforce development in Southwestern PA — local institutions like Robert Morris University and the Community College of Allegheny County have expanded training programs meant to prepare workers for more technical manufacturing jobs.
No workers, however, are entirely insulated from risk, because their futures will likely depend on more than skills alone.
Worker protections could decide who benefits from AI
Workers are likely to experience more job disruptions and poorer mental health without institutions — unions, workers’ councils and labor laws — giving them protection, according to Osea Giuntella, an associate professor of economics at Pitt.
Giuntella’s research has compared the adoption of industrial robots in Germany to the US, finding there were similar positive results for workers’ physical health as the robots took on more dangerous or physically demanding tasks.
But in the US, the tech shift also meant more labor market disruption and worse mental health outcomes for workers.
The German workforce, according to his research, didn’t experience the same strain.
Newer workers moved into other jobs while more experienced workers kept theirs — a difference Giuntella attributed to stronger legal protections, union power and worker representation on company boards.
This playbook for protecting workers isn’t new.
Mass layoffs and displacement from automation in the 1950s spurred support for the War on Poverty, ultimately leading to the creation of crucial social support programs like Medicare and the bolstering of Social Security benefits, Lou Martin, a professor and expert on labor and working-class history at Chatham University, previously told Technical.ly.
Today, workers and unions have the same chance to advocate for retraining programs or more worker protections on a national scale.
And, in Pittsburgh, top industries of healthcare and education — that’s already happening, showing a possible future where worker protections and tech adoption could coexist.
America’s next 250 years
Pittsburgh is changing fast. As a hub for AI and robotics activity, the city is currently molding around the sector.
The universities that produce the most innovation in this space, mainly Pitt and CMU, plan to keep expanding. Developments in Bakery Square, Lawrenceville, the Strip and projects along the city’s riverfronts are being designed with these tech industries in mind.
Local government agencies are also adopting AI tools and experimenting with their uses. Data centers, the developments that power all of this, are popping up across the region.
With all these changes come possible risks — like environmental harms, job displacement or careless government decisions.
But, as things continue to move quickly, the best way to make decisions as a society that mitigate possible risks, according to Vincent Conitzer, an AI ethics expert from CMU, is to keep humans in the loop, make sure we have an educated electorate and have a more conscious, constructive vision of the future — something Americans are familiar with.
“The founding of the United States was also this very visionary event to try to create something new and good in the world,” Conitzer said, “and so maybe we can use the [semiquincentennial] anniversary to do something like that again — to have a good positive vision for how the world looks with AI.”
Alice Crow is the lead Pittsburgh reporter for Technical.ly. She joined the newsroom in September 2024 after working as a reporter for the Waco Tribune-Herald, where she covered city government, health and education.
