Issue Brief: Automation in Southwest Florida

August 05, 2024 / RERI Research Team

With rapid advances in technology, workforce shortages, and industry seeking ways to cut costs and improve efficiencies, automation in the workforce is in the forefront of labor market conversations. Understanding the risk of automation across occupations and industries can help us identify which occupational groups may have a greater need for upskilling or reskilling. Likewise, predicting which geographies automation may be a higher risk in can better position workers, employers and local economies to thrive with these changes.

This Issue Brief explores the realm of automation in the state of Florida, along with a more detailed analysis of how automation has been integrated in Southwest Florida. The primary source of data used for this analysis comes from Lightcast^®, a proprietary labor market analytics firm. Lightcast^® attempts to capture the potential impacts of automation on industries and occupations through its automation index. The automation index is defined by Lightcast^® as “an occupation’s risk of being affected by automation”. The frame for automation risk in this context relates to exposure or change, meaning that the content involved with performing the job is likely to be affected by technology. How these tasks are impacted by automation remains ambiguous – a job could either see a shift in responsibilities, a shift in specialization, become substituted completely, or some combination of the three.

We use this framework to explore the role automation plays throughout our state and region, including 1) which workforce regions across Florida have the highest concentration of occupations with a greater-than-average risk of automation, 2) which major occupational groups in Southwest Florida have the largest share of occupations with a greater-than-average risk of automation, and 3) what occupations within certain major occupational groups help drive these findings.

Results from the analysis show that 43.4 percent of jobs across Florida had a high risk of automation in 2023. The share of jobs in Southwest Florida with a high risk of automation was slightly above the state, measured at 48.5 percent. Two of the largest employing major occupational groups in Southwest Florida, Food Preparation and Serving Related Occupations and Construction and Extraction Occupations, also had some of the highest shares of jobs at high risk of automation in 2023.

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Issue Brief: Automation in Southwest Florida

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