Six measurements, one interpretation · 2026 Edition
Key findings
Every statement below is computed from the published dataset; the same figures appear in the county table and the downloads. Measurement first, then the author's reading of it — labeled as interpretation.
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Higher-overlap work accounts for a larger share of pay
High- and substantial-exposure occupations account for 27.4% of Colorado's jobs but 34.8% of its payroll, and the payroll share exceeds the job share in all 64 counties — exposure skews toward higher-wage work. The gap is widest in Broomfield County (35.3% of jobs; 44.0% of payroll).
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The highest shares are in Front Range metro counties
The five counties with the largest share of jobs in high- or substantial-exposure occupations — Broomfield (35.3%), Denver (33.1%), Boulder (32.6%), Arapahoe (31.0%), and Douglas (30.8%) — are all Front Range metro counties, and together they hold 44.9% of the state's UI-covered employment.
Broomfield County · Denver County · Boulder County · Arapahoe County · Douglas County
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County shares vary, but the estimates vary in strength too
The share of jobs in high- or substantial-exposure occupations runs from 15.9% in Gilpin County to 35.3% in Broomfield County — more than double, though Gilpin's occupation mix is the most heavily estimated in the atlas (86.4% of its employment in industry cells suppressed in the public data). The 0–100 mean exposure score, kept as a secondary measure, spans a proportionally narrower range: 24.7 (Morgan) to 35.2 (Broomfield).
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In observed Claude use, assistance leads automation
In observed AI usage (Anthropic Economic Index, Sept 2025), Colorado conversations lean toward augmentation over automation — 53.9% to 46.1%, a stronger augmentation lean than the 50.9%-to-49.1% U.S. baseline.
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Some counties have much less local data
In 17 of 64 counties, more than half of employment sits in industry cells suppressed in the public data, so their occupation mixes — and scores — are the most heavily estimated in the atlas. Together these counties hold 1.0% of state employment; the imputed share peaks at 86.4% in Gilpin County.
Interpretation
What the numbers suggest
The author's reading of the figures — labeled as interpretation, distinct from the measured data above.
What the numbers suggest
This section is interpretation, not data. Every figure in it comes from the atlas’s published dataset, but the reading of those figures is the author’s, and the rest of this site keeps measurement and opinion apart — this is where the opinion goes, labeled as such. Start with one pair of numbers. Occupations in the atlas’s top two exposure tiers — where at least a large minority of tasks overlap current AI capability, score 45 or above — hold 27.4 percent of Colorado’s jobs but 34.8 percent of its estimated payroll (payroll weighted at national average wages; see the methodology’s limitation 10). When the exposed share of payroll runs above the exposed share of jobs, the exposed jobs pay above-average wages. The work that overlaps most with current AI capability is work Colorado pays well for — accounting, administration, software, finance, law — the office work of the Front Range.
That is a reversal of the last automation cycle’s geography. The automation studies of the 2010s pointed at routine manual and clerical work — factory floors and back offices, disproportionately outside the big metros — and their maps shaded rural and industrial counties. This measure points the other way. Broomfield’s 35.3 percent is the state’s highest county share, and eight of the thirteen counties in the top band are Front Range metros, while the counties whose economies run on farms, feedlots, mines, and visitors sit at the bottom. Gilpin’s 15.9 percent is the state’s lowest, on 86.4 percent imputed employment — the highest imputed share in the atlas, so most of what that number describes was estimated rather than observed. Pueblo, the state’s old steel town and the kind of place the last scare was about, sits at 20.6 percent: below the typical Colorado county, and well under the metro shares.
If the change this atlas maps arrives anywhere first, it arrives in Front Range offices. Denver, Arapahoe, El Paso, Jefferson, and Boulder counties together hold 64.0 percent of Colorado’s 784,367 jobs in the top two tiers, and the eight metro counties in the top band hold 77.1 percent. The bands count counties, not jobs, so small counties can and do land in the top one. Bent, Crowley, Dolores, Mineral, and Park hold 1,638 exposed jobs between them — two-tenths of one percent of the state total — and four of the five have more than half their employment imputed. The workforce in the path of change first is metropolitan, professional and administrative, and salaried — not the plains workforce that state economic-development policy has spent decades worrying about. A response built for the last cycle’s geography would start in the wrong counties.
None of this is a displacement forecast. Exposure measures task overlap, and overlap becomes augmentation as readily as automation — in the one observed week of consumer AI usage the methodology cites, Colorado’s usage leaned slightly toward augmentation (54/46). Whether exposed work shrinks, changes shape, or grows depends on adoption, regulation, and decisions firms have not made yet, none of which is in this data. What the numbers support is narrower: if AI changes work in Colorado, the change starts in the metro office economy, whatever it turns out to look like.
Interpretation by the author; figures from this atlas’s dataset (2026 edition, v1.2). Nothing above uses data not published on this site.