Forget Coders. The Real A.I. Threat Is in the Back Office.

If artificial intelligence disrupts the job market, which workers will be most vulnerable?The obvious answer, and the one that has dominated public debate over A.I.job loss in recent months, is that the workers most at risk are programmers, software engineers and other tech industry employees.

They have borne the brunt of the mass layoffs by Meta, Block and other Silicon Valley companies.Their skills are the ones that A.I.

systems have mastered first.But many economists are more concerned about a different, larger group of white-collar workers: customer service representatives, bookkeepers, payroll clerks and human resources specialists who fly under the radar but collectively account for tens of millions of jobs.Some of these workers have college degrees.Many do not.

They are spread across the country and throughout the economy, working in every industry, in big cities and small towns, at major corporations and mom-and-pop businesses.They are disproportionately — overwhelmingly, in some occupations — women.These jobs typically offer a middle-class salary or a pathway to achieving one — much as manufacturing jobs did for men before decades of globalization and automation wiped many of them away.“I worry that A.I.

will be to high-school-educated women what deindustrialization was to high-school-educated men,” said Molly Kinder, a former researcher at the Brookings Institution who is starting an organization focused on A.I.’s impact on workers and the economy.For now, such an outcome is a fear, not a forecast.Despite high-profile layoffs in tech and finance, there is little firm evidence that A.I.

has hurt the labor market as a whole....