Buyer School Research · For writers and editors

Media sheet: AI exposure research

Three findings you can quote, how they were produced, and what they do not show.

Buyer School modeled estimate. Please keep that label with any score, rank or count taken from this research.

First published: October 5, 2026 Analysis prepared: October 4, 2026. Staffing data: BLS OEWS, May 2025.

Three supported findings

1. Legal services rank first of 137 coverage-qualified U.S. industries for occupational AI exposure, at 87.0 exposure points. Four insurance and credit categories follow, and accounting-related services rank sixth. (Buyer School modeled estimate; top 25 table.)
2. Which industries make the top 25 is steadier than their exact order. 22 of the 25 also appear in the top 25 of an alternate task-based model, but legal services move from first to sixth. (Buyer School modeled estimate; sensitivity checks.)
3. Coverage limits the list. 74 of 211 industries are unranked because too little employment could be matched, and only 10 of the top 25 would qualify under a stricter 90% gate. Unranked is not zero exposure. (Buyer School modeled estimate; unranked list.)

From the companion report: dental offices lead a separate office-opportunity index among 83 mostly in-person industries at 17.2 points, while physician offices range from rank 2 to rank 41 depending on definitions. (Buyer School modeled estimate; report.) The two indexes are different constructs and should not be combined into one scale.

Accurate and inaccurate wording

Supported: "Buyer School identifies the top 25 occupationally AI-exposed industries in a 137-industry, coverage-qualified comparison."

Not supported: "the 25 businesses AI will destroy", "87% of legal revenue is at risk", any claim that every U.S. industry was ranked, or any framing of the list as the best or worst businesses to buy.

Method in brief

BLS May 2025 staffing for private four-digit industries is joined to published academic occupational exposure scores. Each industry's score is the employment-weighted average of its occupations' exposure percentiles. Industries are ranked only when at least 85% of employment is matched in two separate exposure measures. Full detail: methodology.

Limits to carry with any citation

• Exposure does not forecast job loss, revenue loss, business failure or savings.
• The exposure measures predate current AI systems; the staffing data are from May 2025.
• Some top-25 categories are institutional or nonprofit, not ordinary small businesses for sale.
• Four-digit categories mix different businesses. There is no separate HVAC, plumbing or electrical ranking.
• BLS and Census supplied underlying data and did not review or endorse the findings. The work is not peer reviewed.

Charts and data

• Chart: top 25 by occupational AI exposure (PNG)
• Chart: office opportunity, selected industries (PNG)

• Report PDF: AI Exposure Across U.S. Industries: The Top 25, edition 2.0 application/pdf
• Report PDF: AI Office-Efficiency Opportunity in Physical-Service Businesses, edition 1.0 application/pdf
• Top 25 ranked industries (CSV, 25 rows) text/csv
• All 137 ranked industries (CSV, 137 rows) text/csv
• Full dataset, 211 industries including 74 unranked (CSV) text/csv
• Full dataset, 211 industries (JSON, generated from the CSV at build time) application/json

Charts and excerpts may be reproduced with the credit "Buyer School Research, businessbuyerschool.com" and a link to the report page.

How to cite this research

Buyer School (2026). AI Exposure Across U.S. Industries: The Top 25, edition 2.0, prepared October 4, 2026. First published October 5, 2026. Business Buyer School. https://businessbuyerschool.com/research/ai-exposure-by-industry/. Buyer School modeled estimates using BLS OEWS May 2025 staffing and published occupational exposure measures.

• Author and publisher: Buyer School Research, the research imprint of Business Buyer School (businessbuyerschool.com), operated by Dig Inc LLC. Organizational authorship; no individual author is named.
• Attribution: describe scores, ranks, coverage figures and cohort counts as "Buyer School modeled estimate". Employment totals are BLS statistics.
• Review status: prepared with AI assistance and programmatic calculations from public sources. Not independently peer reviewed. No DOI has been assigned.
• Reuse: a data license has not been published. Short quotations of findings with attribution and a link to this page are welcome.
• Corrections and versions: see the version history. This URL stays stable across editions.