The accountancy firm in your town is more at risk than the warehouse worker. The solicitor who drafts standard contracts is in more danger than the delivery driver. The mid-tier management consultant who produces slides summarising other people’s reports is closer to obsolescence than the plumber. This is not the story that newspapers are telling. It is, however, the story that the evidence supports.

The popular narrative — that AI will displace low-skill, repetitive, manual work first — has it almost exactly backwards. Manual work requires physical presence, fine motor control, and situational judgment in unpredictable environments. A robot that can tile a bathroom to a professional standard costs considerably more to build and deploy than one that can draft a legal brief. The trades are structurally protected by their embodied complexity. The professions are not.

What AI does exceptionally well is pattern-matching on structured data, synthesising documents, and producing consistent outputs at scale. Those are precisely the activities that define mid-tier knowledge work. A McKinsey report. A standard employment contract. A tax return for a company with no unusual circumstances. A market research summary. These are not creative acts. They are sophisticated filing operations. And sophisticated filing is now automatable.