About one in six Houston workers have a high degree of exposure to generative artificial intelligence and are likely to see their jobs change significantly due to the explosion of applications such as ChatGPT and Claude, according to new research. 

But the region’s economy has some insulation from AI’s potentially disruptive effects, economists say, due to a heavy presence of workers rooted in the physical world, including in the energy, health care, manufacturing, and construction sectors. Artificial intelligence may be adopted for some tasks in those professions, but can’t replace them, economists say.