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As the then-new CEO of the Full Employment Council of Kansas City, he needed to get a handle on the technology on his desk.“I had to learn how to do this stuff — work the computer,” McQueen told The Beacon via Zoom. “I had to go back to training, as a CEO, at a community college on my own. … Now I can do it.”
McQueen said he had to continually learn new technology just to stay up to date with the ever-evolving workforce. Today’s workers, he said, also need constant learning and skill refinement as they see the disruptive rise in generative artificial intelligence models like ChatGPT.“You’ve gotta keep your skills up to compete in the market,” McQueen said. “You can’t use the same oil in your car for a year — you’ve got to change the oil to not wear your pistons out. We’ve all got to update and change.”
In Kansas City and beyond, AI is transforming work with a combination of automation and augmentation. Automation is when an AI can fully complete a task, and AI augmentation is when a human and AI work in tandem.Jobs have started disappearing in information services, professional and business services, and office and administrative support sectors as automation and AI-assisted work have increased productivity, reducing the need for workers. Meanwhile new, but so far fewer, positions emerge in AI development and data center construction and maintenance. “This is not a maybe, sometime, Star Trek prediction,” Miles Bassett, founder of Prairie Code AI, told the 2025 Kansas Economic Outlook Conference recently. “The AI revolution is happening right now.”
AI represents an exponential change to the workforce beyond jobs lost to automation or increases in productivity. The very nature of work — the tasks that fill our days — is being rewritten in real time, and workers will need to adapt.
“If we fumble this (AI implementation) and AI doesn’t take your job directly, someone using AI will,” Bassett said.
AI disruption has started
More than 40,000 workers in Kansas City work in the 10 largest occupations most susceptible to AI automation, according to a recent analysis from Jasmine Escalera at MyPerfectResume. The career expert used data from Microsoft’s Working with AI study and cross-referenced it with occupational and employment wage statistics in the Kansas City area to reach that conclusion.
The analysis found customer service representatives to be the most vulnerable to AI in Kansas City. There are 23,750 customer service workers in the area, and 44% of their daily tasks could potentially be automated.
Escalera told The Beacon that doesn’t necessarily mean that 44% of customer service workers will lose their jobs. People will still be needed for escalated customer service issues. But she wasn’t surprised to see customer service representatives as the most vulnerable vocation since automated systems have been used by many companies for years now.
“One of my biggest irritations in life is trying to get to a customer service rep and never speaking to an actual human,” Escalera said. “We’ve been seeing the slow evolution and change of the customer service space, and we will be seeing continued impact there.”
Escalera’s analysis also found that white-collar service jobs are vulnerable to AI. Roughly 17,000 Kansas City workers like financial advisers, management analysts, public relations specialists and web developers all have at least 35% of their tasks that are potentially automatable.The University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School found that nationwide 42% of current jobs are potentially exposed to AI and that based on real-world generative AI applications, companies could expect a labor cost savings of roughly 25% from gains in efficiency.
That means that as companies see productivity increase as AI is implemented, they will require fewer workers to achieve the same results. Employers will then decide to cut employees or change their current employees’ job duties.
“There cannot be a customer service worker that comes in and all you do is answer the phone,” McQueen said. “That’s done.”
Bekah Selby-Leach, director of the Center for Economic Development and Business Research at Wichita State University, told the Kansas economic conference that the uncertainty surrounding AI — paired with inflation, tariffs and other concerns — has many businesses in “wait and see” mode over hiring for the next year.
“We’re in a period of high uncertainty,” Selby-Leach said. “Change is happening, whether we want it to or not.”
Selby-Leach noted that statewide, Kansas is expected to see employment decline for financial service workers, information service workers and business and professional services workers in the next few years due to automation and AI. Those sectors of white-collar service workers have already seen thousands of jobs lost in the Kansas City area in the last year, according to the most recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Early indications are that young people trying to start their careers are bearing the burden of the initial wave of AI’s workforce transformation.An August report from the Stanford Digital Economy Lab showed that since widespread adoption of generative AI in 2022 there has been a drop in entry-level white-collar service jobs. Those aged 22 to 25 in the most AI-exposed occupations saw a 13% decline in employment. This was while the report found that jobs numbers overall have grown during the same time period.
The study also found that employment remained steady for those who work in jobs whose tasks are augmented by AI rather than automated by AI.
“AI will be more of a complement to workers versus a substitute,” McQueen said. “If you are static, then you might get replaced, not because of AI, but because you haven’t upgraded your skill set.”
He said employers should also adapt, including by training their employees on new skills.
Construction continues on Meta’s $1 billion data center complex in northern Kansas City, with additional buildings under development after the first phase became operational in August 2025; photo by Thomas White, The Beacon
Opportunity in AI transformation
McQueen and others say that alongside the change AI brings is opportunity. McQueen points to the Full Employment Council, which recently completed a staffing search for a Northland data center.
“They are offering jobs to like 75 to 100 people,” said McQueen. “Those jobs are paying like $23 an hour, so they’re not cheap jobs.”
Data centers are springing up all over the country to house the hardware needed to power and process the large data sets needed for generative AI. Despite environmental concerns, companies have invested $40 billion in the U.S. on new data center construction between June 2024 and June 2025, according to Reuters.
Mychal Shaw, founder of Uwazi.ai, a Kansas City-based startup that looks to use AI to promote civic engagement, said that there will be short-term challenges as AI implementation scales up, but that those challenges will ultimately be worth it.
“I think we are in the Industrial Revolution phase,” Shaw said. “AI is going to be the biggest disrupter in a positive way.”
Shaw said that the change AI represents is bigger than the implementation of the internet, email and smartphones combined. He said AI has grown exponentially and will continue to as AI large language models can be used to produce even more specifically targeted large language models.
That big of a change is naturally scary, Shaw said, but AI can be used to upskill yourself. He said he taught himself to code during the pandemic but has used AI tools to advance his skills and to help build his startup.
“The fun thing about AI is the opportunity to advance your mindset, your skill set, those things, those (tools) will all be available to you,” Shaw said. “They’re a lot more accessible now than they were even just five years ago. I say that particularly to minority communities who historically have not had that available. AI is a tool that allows you to catch up.”
Bassett said that AI can also level the playing field between larger and smaller companies.
“AI acts as the great equalizer,” Bassett said. “It allows a five-person team in Manhattan, Kansas, to compete with a 500-person team in Manhattan, New York.”
Mark Esposito, professor of economics and strategy at both Hult International Business School and Harvard University, told the Kansas economic conference that over the next 50 years the economy will see a shift in value from labor production to learning systems like AI.
“The future economy will be built on algorithms, not assembly lines,” Esposito said. “AI as a new factor of production is really the new horizon of competitiveness.”
How to adapt as a worker
For Kansas City workers currently in jobs that are exposed to AI automation, Escalera said to focus on increasing skills in aspects of your job that can’t be automated. That could eventually mean a pivot in job titles like moving from a customer service representative to a customer experience specialist who strategizes how to increase customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Bassett and Shaw said white-collar workers may have no choice but to adopt the use of AI.
“I think it takes a conscious investment, especially in the white-collar space, to educate yourself on utilizing AI properly, because it can actually maximize your productivity,” Shaw said. “That makes you, in a way, unfireable.”
Bassett says that AI can’t replace strategy, vision, taste, relationship building or emotional intelligence — among many other innately human qualities — and that honing those skills will give you a leg up. He advocates for adopting AI use over time, familiarizing yourself with models incrementally, to rid yourself of repetitive “busy work.”
“Become a director, not a doer,” Bassett said. “If your day is all task work, you’re just doing AI’s job of tomorrow. In a couple of years AI is going to be doing 99% of that to-do list and doing it better than you.”
McQueen said that no matter your field you must continue to grow and hone your skills to remain competitive. If you work in a field that uses AI — the Full Employment Council also connects people to jobs that are largely unaffected by AI, like the trades — you’ll need to adapt or risk being left behind.
“AI means a market adjustment in terms of your skills and the job that you perform,” McQueen said. “You’ve got to plan for the market to adjust. It’s not going to be the same.”
