David Vail is professor of economics emeritus and former director of environmental studies at Bowdoin College. John Dorrer is a labor economist and former director at the Center for Workforce Research and Information at the Maine Department of Labor.

Predictions about the impact of artificial intelligence on every aspect of our lives fill the media, with forecasts ranging from utopian abundance to dehumanizing corporate and technological tyranny. There’s also much speculation about AI’s impacts on job security, career opportunities and work life. 

Former U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo has emphasized AI’s job-destroying potential: “Artificial intelligence is transforming work faster than our workforce is adapting. Millions of Americans – from white to blue collar, entry level to executive – may soon find themselves jobless and without prospects.”  

The Brookings Institution concurs: millions of America workers will be “exposed” to job loss. However, its more optimistic analysis concludes that “workers with the highest AI exposure rates [also] possess characteristics … to navigate job transitions successfully.”

Indeed, labor economist David Autor foresees attractive new career opportunities as “new activities … come into existence because of the technology, requiring new expertise.”

This op-ed explores AI’s likely impact on Maine employment and on working people’s well-being in coming years. It proposes a strategy to improve Mainers’ ability to adapt — and thrive — in the age of artificial intelligence.

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The Brookings study concludes that roughly one-fifth of American workers (37.1 million) face a high risk of AI-driven job loss.

“Around 70% of highly AI-exposed workers … are employed in jobs with a high average capacity to manage job transitions if necessary … At the same time, 6.1 million workers, primarily in clerical and administrative roles, lack adaptive capacity due to limited savings, advanced age, scarce local [employment] opportunities and/or narrow skill sets. Of these workers, 86% are women.” 

Economist Autor adds that, in contrast to mass layoffs affecting entire industries, “AI will mostly affect specific occupations and roles and tasks … The concern is about devaluation of expertise” — that means human obsolescence.

Maine has faced large-scale worker dislocations before.

Paper making and apparel jobs have largely disappeared, driven by global competition, corporate restructuring and technological transformation. Between 1980 and 2025, paper industry employment plummeted from 18,000 to 3,000, leaving thousands of primarily middle-aged rural men with obsolete skills and few nearby alternatives. Over the same period, footwear employment dropped from roughly 15,000 to just 1,200 — in this case, largely middle-aged women in a mix of rural and smaller urban labor markets.   

Plant closings and mass layoffs triggered federal dislocated worker programs, administered at the state and local level. But these well-intentioned efforts had difficulty mounting effective responses. Poor alignment of income supports with job training programs often short-circuited workers seeking longer term reeducation or retraining for new careers. Overall, federal support was woefully inadequate to support state-implemented programs and services.

Can Maine effectively anticipate and adapt to AI’s exploding capabilities and rapid penetration of our schools and workplaces? Young people have their doubts.

Nonetheless, across all institutional and industry settings, there are powerful incentives to raise worker productivity and cut labor costs with artificial intelligence. 

Left to the free market, AI’s workplace “takeover” will produce winners and losers, as illustrated by two major Maine employment sectors.

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Health care and social assistance, with nearly one-sixth of all Maine jobs (110,000 employees), is a growing sector where AI’s impacts will be pronounced.

Administrative services such as billing, coding, scheduling and other support functions lend themselves to AI takeover. Thousands of jobs will likely be eliminated and others will require re-skilling. At the other end of the health services spectrum, physicians and medical researchers are benefiting from AI “agents” that penetrate deeply into medical data and imaging, improving diagnoses and treatment recommendations.  

Another sector that will be powerfully affected by the spread of large language models is professional and business services, with 76,000 workers or 11% of Maine’s payroll employment.

Entry-level jobs like paralegal researchers, accountants, bookkeepers and software coders risk being replaced by AI. In contrast, knowledge-centered professions based on highly specialized expertise, such as lawyers, business consultants, engineers and software systems designers, will benefit from incorporating AI tools in their work. 

In sum, the AI revolution will affect Maine employers, large and small. Thousands of workers risk losing livelihoods without advanced reeducation and retraining. As AI infiltrates workplaces., young workforce entrants must be prepared for careers where the definition and content of occupations change rapidly.

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The strategy we propose is a three-way partnership between businesses, formal education institutions and labor market intermediaries, backed by a strong social safety net to cushion workers’ transition to new occupations. This strategy builds on innovative approaches that are already proving their effectiveness elsewhere. Frustratingly, Maine and other states cannot count on effective AI regulation or sufficient fiscal support from the current federal administration. 

For vulnerable employees already in the workforce, Maine needs a network of high-performing labor market intermediaries that invest in skill enhancement and connect displaced workers with new employers. Maine’s Career Center network, supported by the Maine Department of Labor and regional workforce investment boards, currently helps workers explore career options and find new jobs.

The large scale of impending AI worker displacement will require the Center’s outreach to be more proactive and its programs better targeted to vulnerable occupational groups and to skills in growing demand. This means a major increase in public funding for reeducation and retraining, including support for employers to invest in upgrading their employees’ competencies.  

Needless to say, workers’ ability to undertake crucial career transitions are strengthened if they are assured of unemployment compensation, food security, medical coverage and (for many) access to affordable child care. Again, the present federal government is more part of the problem than the solution.

To help young people preparing to enter the workforce, employers adopting AI applications  need to communicate their changing skill needs; education and training institutions need to adapt their curricula; and students need a chance to experience the world of work. Internships, paid apprenticeships and cooperative education programs are already helping young Mainers explore career alternatives and helping employers recruit for rapidly changing skill needs.  

A prime example of this is Focus Maine’s Career Catalyst Program, which placed 3,200 interns with Maine employers from 2018 to 2024. In 2024, the Maine Department of Labor registered 1,445 apprenticeships, the most ever. Apprenticeships have spread from traditional blue collar jobs to AI-affected sectors like health care and information technology.

Maine’s chronic labor scarcity incentivizes employers to prioritize recruitment and training. AI’s workplace transformation requires greater investment in these initiatives. 

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The mission of K-12 education is to build the foundation for fulfilling lives, including capacities for career success and lifelong learning. Artificial intelligence already offers new tools for teaching and learning. Students need to understand AI’s ethical, technological and cognitive dimensions to succeed in work — and in life. The disturbing downward trend in Maine students’ reading and math scores casts doubt on how many will have the core competencies for continuous learning in an AI-driven world. Reversing this trend must be a top educational and policy priority. 

At the postsecondary level, Maine has introduced important innovations such as free community college, customized training for specific employers and experimental workforce development initiatives. An example of the latter is the new Maritime Industrial Workforce Training Center with partners Bath Iron Works, Maine Maritime Academy and Region 10 Technical High School. The center offers multiple career pathways that include postsecondary credentials, apprenticeship qualifications and job placement in advanced manufacturing and maritime trades.  

Maine’s higher education institutions are also responding on multiple fronts. Northeastern University’s Roux Institute in Portland is a prime example. Its goal is to erase “the boundaries between the real world and academia through learning programs and research initiatives that meet the needs of employers, integrating classroom learning with professional experience, and supporting the launch of innovative startup companies.”

Essentially all of the startups Roux backs employ artificial intelligence and require problem-solving abilities and critical thinking skills in their new employees. Institutional innovations like those at Roux and the Maritime Training Center are needed throughout Maine’s higher education system.

It is still “early days” in the development and spread of artificial intelligence. But its transformative impacts, including for work life, are already apparent and its cumulative effects will be profound.

We have sketched a human resource strategy that we believe will enable Maine to take advantage of AI’s positive career-shaping potential while minimizing its toll in human obsolescence.