A new study has found that physical and manual workers in the United States face some of the most severe job displacement risks from automation, challenging the widespread assumption that artificial intelligence (AI) primarily threatens white-collar and knowledge workers.
The April 2026 report by Planera, a construction scheduling platform, analysed more than 55 manual occupations across production, trades, logistics, agriculture, retail, and healthcare, scoring each by automation risk, current employment levels, projected job change, and median wages. Office, computer, and technology roles were deliberately excluded to focus on the physical backbone of the workforce.
Metal and plastic patternmakers topped the risk ranking at 99%, which Planera classified as imminent displacement. Just 1,570 people held the role across the US in 2024, and employment in that occupation is projected to fall a further 24.4% before 2034. Their median annual wage of $54,540 sits below the national average, leaving affected workers with limited financial buffer to manage a career transition.
Underground mining machine operators ranked second at 97% risk, with 6,130 workers employed and projected job losses of 22.3% over the coming years. Milling and planing machine operators came third at 91%, followed by agricultural graders and sorters at 89%.
Cashiers presented the starkest picture by volume. More than 3.1 million people worked as cashiers in the US in 2024, making it by far the largest occupation on the list. With an 88% automation risk and a median annual wage of just $31,190, the scale of potential displacement in retail dwarfs that of smaller industrial categories.
Production roles dominated the top of the ranking, with forging machine operators, grinding and polishing workers, print binding workers, drilling machine operators, and sewing machine operators all scoring between 85% and 87%.
“The conversation about automation has been almost entirely focused on office workers and knowledge jobs, but the production floor is quietly going through an equally significant shift,” a Planera automation expert said. “Patternmakers and machine operators don’t make headlines the way software engineers do, but the people in these roles are facing some of the most immediate disruption in the entire job market.”
The report drew on automation risk scores modelled from O*NET job attribute data alongside employment and wage figures from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics survey from May 2024.
At the other end of the spectrum, emergency services carried the lowest average automation risk at 11%, followed by social services at 12% and healthcare at 16%, reflecting the irreplaceable role of human judgement, physical adaptability, and interpersonal trust in those fields.
