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North Star Policy Action & University of St. Thomas · February 2026

The Highest Worker Exposure in the Midwest: The Impact of Generative AI on the Minnesota Job Market

North Star Policy Action & University of St. Thomas's The Highest Worker Exposure in the Midwest: The Impact of Generative AI on the Minnesota Job Market (February 2026; fielded n/a (modeled)) found that 31.3% of Minnesota workers (800,000+) are in jobs with high exposure to generative AI.

Read the original report ↗Cite2 min read · Summary updated
Minnesota has the highest share of highly exposed workers in the MidwestPercent of workers in jobs with high GenAI exposure, eight highest of 12 Midwest states shown (BLS data)
Minnesota
31.3%
Michigan
30.4%
Wisconsin
29.3%
Missouri
28.8%
Kansas
28.5%
Illinois
28.4%
Nebraska
28.3%
Ohio
28.1%
Source: North Star Policy Action and University of St. Thomas, The Impact of Generative AI on the Minnesota Job Market, 2026, Figure 5, p. 17.

Key findings

  1. 01
    High exposure means half or more of a worker's tasks could be partly or wholly done by GenAI; exposure may mean supplementing, not replacing, jobs.
  2. 02
    Minnesota has the highest GenAI exposure rate in the Midwest and the 10th highest nationally.
  3. 03
    About 79% of Minnesota finance-industry workers are highly exposed, versus 33% in manufacturing and 28% in education.

By the numbers

31.3%of Minnesota workers (800,000+) are in jobs with high exposure to generative AI
79%of Minnesota finance-industry workers are in highly exposed jobs
100,000+Minnesota workers are in jobs where more than 75% of tasks could be exposed (a little over 4%)
Share of Minnesota workers with high GenAI exposure, by industryPercent of workers in highly exposed jobs, selected industries (8 of 20 shown; ACS data)
Finance
79.0%
Management
75.7%
Professional
66.0%
Information
61.4%
Manufacturing
33.7%
Education
28.3%
Health
20.0%
Agriculture
8.8%
Source: North Star Policy Action and University of St. Thomas, The Impact of Generative AI on the Minnesota Job Market, 2026, Figure 6, p. 19.

What it means for you Draft

For executives at $10–100M companies

Exposure is a measure of which tasks could change, not a forecast of layoffs. For a Minnesota B2B firm, the finance, customer-service and management roles flagged here are the likely places where work will shift first. It is a reasonable prompt to talk with those teams early about which tasks they would hand off and how they want to be trained.

Limitations

Medium trust.Transparent, established exposure method, but modeled (not observed) and relies on GPT-4-era scores; co-publisher is an advocacy group. Neither sells AI.

Cite the original

North Star Policy Action & University of St. Thomas. "The Highest Worker Exposure in the Midwest: The Impact of Generative AI on the Minnesota Job Market." February 24, 2026. https://northstarpolicy.org/generative-ai/

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