New poll shows the shifting conversation around blue-collar work in the age of AI

• A new poll found that Americans agree AI is less likely to replace jobs that require hands-on work.
• The poll, commissioned by the Business for Good Foundation, found that perceptions of blue-collar jobs are changing.
• Leading AI CEOs, including Elon Musk, have said jobs requiring physical work are likely to survive longer.

Americans think the future of work is in their hands.

A poll commissioned by the Business for Good Foundation, a nonprofit focused on reducing the wealth gap, found that 75% of Americans agree that "hands-on skills and practical experience matter more than formal degrees when it comes to career success."

"You've got a lot of people that have historically didn't think the American dream was for them," Ed Mitzen, cofounder of the Business for Good Foundation, told Business Insider ahead of the poll's release. "I would argue that it isn't broken, it's just moved, and it's moved to places we stop looking."

The survey, conducted by The Harris Poll, comes as leading names in AI point to a potential boom in blue-collar work as agentic AI redefines, and in some cases, replaces white-collar work.

The poll also found that 76% of respondents agree that "jobs that rely on hands-on experience are less likely to be replaced by AI."

Overall, three in four Americans said they agreed with the statement that what they consider a "good" job today is different than what it would have been five years ago. And 78% agreed with the statement "the stigma around trade or blue-collar work is declining" as society puts a greater emphasis on hands-on skills.

Researchers have found that jobs that require human interaction and physical presence are less likely to be replaced by AI.

Indeed's GenAI Skill Transformation Index recently examined how generative AI could perform jobs that require problem-solving ability and physical labor. Their findings were that nursing, childcare, and construction were the least likely to be affected by AI.

AI leaders talk up blue-collar work

AI leaders continue to debate the degree to which the revolutionary technology will upend the current workforce. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has stood by his prediction that AI could eliminate roughly half of all entry-level white-collar jobs over the next 1 to 5 years. Others, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, have questioned the extent of Amodei's dour prediction.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang recently said at the World Economic Forum that now is the perfect time to go into the trades. In part because the AI industry itself will need an influx of workers to help build the massive data centers it wants to build.

"So we're talking about six-figure salaries for people who are building chip factories or computer factories or AI factories, and we have a great shortage in that," Huang said in a conversation with BlackRock CEO Larry Fink.

xAI CEO Elon Musk previously said that any job that involves manual labor is likely to survive much longer amid the "supersonic tsunami" that is AI.

"Anything that's physically moving atoms, like cooking food or farming, anything that's physical, those jobs will exist for a much longer time," Musk told podcaster Joe Rogan in November. "But anything that is digital, which is just someone at a computer doing something, AI is going to take over those jobs like lightning."

The Business For Good Foundation commissioned The Hariss Poll to survey 2,085 adults 18 or older. Harris Poll conducted the survey online in the US from January 13th through January 15th. The overall margin or error is ±2.5 percentage points.