TL;DR
About three in every ten jobs across the South of England are in occupations AI is set to change, says a University of Southampton report unveiled to a regional business conference on 5 November. Exposure in Hampshire and the Solent is slightly above the England average. In most industries the researchers expect AI to help with tasks rather than replace jobs, but they put about 55,000 workers in a more vulnerable group.
Who is most and least exposed
The biggest changes, the report says, fall on public administration, ICT, finance and professional services. Care, hospitality and construction are the least affected. Sue Littlemore, the university’s Director of Civic University, who commissioned the work, summed it up as information, analysis and admin roles feeling the largest shift, with jobs that depend on being physically present or dealing with people less directly exposed.
The more vulnerable group, roughly 5% of the regional workforce, holds jobs in which AI could absorb much of the routine daily work. Women, part-timers and people midway through their careers are over-represented in it.
What the researchers recommend
The report calls for AI skills training, a programme in which the public sector models good practice, and a “transition guarantee” to retrain and redeploy those most at risk of losing their jobs.
A companion paper, “Fifty ways Hampshire and the Solent are shaping Britain’s AI revolution”, sets out how the region is adopting the technology. It says the proportion of businesses in the area that use AI has doubled over three years. Examples include an AI assistant answering public enquiries for Hampshire’s police and University Hospital Southampton using AI to improve breast screening images. Professor Les Carr of the university’s Web Science Institute pointed to the region’s big employers in defence, aerospace, maritime and life sciences.
Why it matters
Regional exposure studies like this one make national debates concrete. In our view, the demographic finding is the one for employers and local policymakers to act on. An at-risk group that skews female, part-time and mid-career needs retraining designed around those circumstances, not schemes built for school leavers. The findings sit alongside the Bank of England’s 5 November finding that AI is slowing hiring rather than causing layoffs.
Looking Forward
In our view, the transition guarantee is the report’s most concrete proposal. Whether councils, employers or government take it up will show whether local exposure studies change policy or simply describe the problem.