AI in Los Angeles

Summary

I wanted a clear read on how far AI has reached into the Los Angeles economy, so I pulled nine public data sets together and put LA against the U.S. on each one. The charts below come from those tables.

Start with the whole economy. LA County's private employers have jobs, and the industries the region is known for are concentrated here: motion picture and video at 10.5 times its national share of jobs, apparel manufacturing at 9.4, sound recording at 7.2, port operations at 5.2 and aerospace at 3.1. Weighted by LA's mix of industries, the share of firms using AI nationally comes to , against for the U.S. mix.

Across the LA metro's 6.2 million jobs, Anthropic's observed exposure score averages 0.132, the same as the U.S. The range underneath is wide. Animators, graphic designers and editors score well above average; actors, musicians, cooks, truck drivers and sewing machine operators score near zero.

On the AI-producing side, Los Angeles is big enough to rank near the top on raw counts. LA County is of U.S. counties on jobs in four AI-producing industries, and the LA metro has the fourth-most data scientists of any metro. It has 115 public companies whose 2026 annual reports use an AI phrase, and 114 of them use the words "artificial intelligence."

On concentration the picture changes. LA County holds about 2.9% of the U.S. population but only 1.3% to 2.2% of U.S. jobs in each AI-producing industry. Every one of the six AI occupations tracked here is less common in the LA metro than in the U.S. as a whole, and every one pays more. In the latest reading, California firms used AI at the national rate, after running ahead of it most of the year.

Three of the charts carry a projection past the last published value. A dashed line and shading mark where the data ends and the model begins. Set against the national curves in AI Demand and Potential, LA's firm adoption tracks the national S-curve, and the AI share of job postings is rising at the national pace, which doubled in the past year.

The chart below puts every measure on one scale. A dot to the right of the line means LA is ahead of its benchmark.

LA's industries

Los Angeles County's private economy has jobs. Health care is the largest sector, with 883,668, followed by accommodation and food services with 428,459. The sectors LA is best known for are smaller in jobs but far more concentrated here than in the rest of the country.

The Census Bureau doesn't publish firm AI use by county or by detailed industry, but it does publish it by sector for the U.S. Information, the sector that holds film, television, music and publishing, has the highest rate: 46.4% of firms used AI in the latest two weeks. It is also LA's most specialized large sector, at 2.2 times the national share of jobs. Professional services is at 43.8%. Transportation and warehousing, home to the port and freight jobs, is at 13.5%, and accommodation and food services is at 10.7%.

Weight each sector's national rate by LA's mix of jobs and LA comes out at , against for the U.S. mix. LA's tilt toward information and health care lifts it slightly; its smaller finance sector pulls it back.

LA's jobs

The LA metro has 6.2 million jobs across 754 occupations. Anthropic's economists score each occupation for what they call observed exposure. Of the tasks a language model could in principle speed up, it measures how much of an occupation's time goes to tasks that already show up in work-related Claude use, counting automated use fully and assistive use at half. A score of 0.30 means about 30% of the work, weighted by time. The score describes AI use, not job loss: the March 2026 paper that introduced it found no systematic rise in unemployment among highly exposed workers since late 2022.

Weighted by jobs, the LA metro scores 0.132 and the U.S. 0.131. About 1.03 million LA jobs, or 19.2%, are in occupations that score 0.30 or higher, against 18.9% nationally.

The averages hide how different LA's signature work is. Arts, design and media jobs are 2.2 times as concentrated in LA as nationally, 182,910 of them. Within that family the scores split. Special effects artists and animators score 0.36, graphic designers 0.37, editors 0.25 and film and video editors 0.22. Actors score 0.10, producers and directors 0.09, and musicians and sound engineering technicians 0. Because LA's creative workforce leans toward performance and production, its arts family averages 0.16, below the national arts average of 0.18.

Most of the jobs that move LA's goods and feed its visitors barely register. Hospitality, food and tourism has about 907,000 LA jobs and scores 0.01. Logistics and transportation has about 572,000 and scores 0.01; manufacturing has about 279,000 and scores 0.009. Aerospace engineers, 5,200 of them at 1.9 times the national concentration, score 0.08.

AI-industry jobs

The rest of this post looks at the companies and workers who build AI. No industry code isolates AI. The four used here are where AI companies and AI jobs sit: computer systems design, data processing and hosting, scientific research and development, and software publishing. Together they employ people in LA County, which puts the county of . King County, Wash., and Santa Clara County, Calif., lead the list.

LA County is in the top 10 by size and below average by concentration. BLS location quotients compare each industry's share of local jobs with its share nationally, and all four are below 1.0 in LA County. Computer systems design, the largest of the four, is 0.45.

Pay runs the other way in two of the four. Data processing and hosting pays $6,099 a week in LA against $4,332 nationally.

The Census business count points the same way. LA County has a larger share of the country's AI-industry businesses than of its people, especially software publishers, at 3.9% of U.S. establishments against 2.9% of U.S. population. Those businesses are smaller, though: a software publisher in LA employs 37 people on average, against 55 nationally.

AI talent

The occupation data counts people by what they do, wherever they work. A software developer at a studio counts here even though the studio is not in an AI industry. On headcount the LA metro ranks in the top 10 for all six AI occupations, and fourth for data scientists with 9,850.

Every one of the six is less concentrated in LA than nationally, and every one pays more. Software developers earn a median $160,920 in the LA metro, 18% above the U.S. median. Data scientists come closest to the national concentration, at 0.93.

Public companies

So far in 2026, 114 of the 177 public companies headquartered in LA County that filed a 10-K annual report used the phrase "artificial intelligence." That is 64%, up from 4% in 2019. Across California the share is 70%.

LA has closed most of that gap on the broad phrase. It has not on the newer ones. 18% of LA filers mention "generative AI" against 30% statewide, and one LA filer mentions "AI agent" against 24 in California. Widen the net to "agentic," "agentic AI" and "AI agents" and the 2026 count is four LA filers, ServiceTitan, BlackLine, Onar and XMax, against 67 across California. LA has about a fifth of the state's filers, so a proportional share would be about 13.

I projected "artificial intelligence" forward with a logistic curve, which assumes that use of a phrase levels off once most filers have adopted it. On that curve it appears in the reports of about 78% of LA filers in 2027 and 86% in 2028, in step with California. "Generative AI" is too new to fit a curve. At the five to eight points a year it has gained since 2024, it would reach roughly 29% to 34% of LA filers by 2028, if filers keep using the phrase rather than newer terms. The other two phrases have too few filers to project.

The companies span far more than tech. Banks, utilities, landlords, a toy maker, restaurant chains and biotech firms all mention AI in their filings. Outside the city of Los Angeles, Santa Monica has the most filers, followed by Westlake Village and Beverly Hills.

Job postings by sector

The Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation tracked LA County job postings that mention AI. They went from 1,873 in 2015 to 18,919 in 2024. As a share of all postings, AI went from 0.3% to 2.4%. The count fell in 2023 and returned in 2024 to near its 2022 peak.

LAEDC has not published 2025 or 2026, so the chart carries two estimates. The better guide is demand data from outside LA. Indeed's tracker of U.S. postings that mention AI doubled in the past year, from 3.6% in September 2025 to 7.2% in September 2026, and it averaged 2.2% in 2024, 3.3% in 2025 and 5.8% through September 2026. The AI Demand and Potential post charts that series. Scale LA's 2024 share by the change in the national series and LA comes out near 3.5% in 2025 and 6.8% in 2026. If the national pace of the past one to three years holds, LA reaches 11% to 13% in 2027. That curve has not bent yet: a logistic fit to the national series finds no ceiling in the data, so it is still exponential.

The diamonds extend LA's own 2015 to 2024 trend, which only knows LA's past. It puts the share near 3.6% in 2026 and 4.4% in 2027, with wide ranges, and it blends a flat 2019 to 2023 with the 2024 jump. Lightcast's national figure, 2.5% in 2025 and up 55% in a year, agrees with Indeed that LA's own trend runs low. The count is not projected, because it moves with the hiring cycle: in 2023 postings fell from 19,133 to 10,906 while the share only slipped from 1.5% to 1.2%.

By sector, information, communication and digital media postings mention AI at 15.4%, three times the next sector. Film and video editors are among the 10 middle-skill occupations with the highest AI share, at 6.1%. Retail, hospitality and tourism sits at 0.3%.

Business adoption

The Census Bureau asks businesses every two weeks whether they used AI in any of their business functions. Census broadened that question in November 2025, which raised the reported rate, so this series starts there. It publishes the answer by state, not by metro, so California stands in for LA here. In the period ending , 24.6% of California firms said yes. So did 24.6% of U.S. firms.

California ran ahead of the U.S. in 23 of the last 24 periods, by as much as 2.7 points in February, and matched it in the latest reading. It ranks 21st of 50 states and D.C. on the latest period. Asked about the next six months, 29.1% of California firms expect to use AI, against 28.6% nationally. The gap between the two, about 4.5 points of California firms, is the near-term pipeline for anyone selling AI into the state.

Read the level as a floor. BTOS counts every firm equally, and most firms are small. Surveys that weight by employment or sample larger companies report far higher adoption.

Rather than draw one line, I simulated a thousand six-month futures for each series. Each path draws a pace from what the past year supports, 0.3 to 0.5 points every two weeks depending on the window, lets that pace drift, and adds the survey's own two-week noise. The middle path puts California near 29% by April 2027 and the U.S. near 28%, and 80% of the paths land within about a point and a half of that. The Census Bureau's six-month expectation question puts them at 29.1% and 28.6%. The series is a year old, so the summer rise cannot be separated from seasonality, and the same simulation run on the first half of the year would have missed the latest reading by 1.6 points for California and 2.8 for the U.S., low both times.

The S-curve fitted to the national series in AI Demand and Potential, dotted on the chart, puts the U.S. at 28.9% in April 2027 and 34% by October. The simulation's median sits on it through April. The steep part of that curve is still ahead: it crosses half of firms in 2029, so the pace should keep rising from about 0.35 points a period now toward 0.45.

Claude usage by state

The Anthropic Economic Index measures observed use of Claude. Its usage index is a state's share of Claude usage divided by its share of working-age population, so 1.0 means usage in line with population. California is at 1.62, second only to D.C. It is a measure of how much people use one AI tool, not of jobs.

The two measures disagree. California is 21st on how many firms use AI and second on how much people use Claude. The scatter below shows every state on both.

The kind of work people bring to Claude in California looks like the national mix. Computer and math tasks lead at 21.1%, the same as the U.S. Arts, design, entertainment and media tasks are 12.9%, also the same as the U.S. Work accounts for 41.5% of California conversations and 41.3% nationally.

Implications for Los Angeles

For a company selling AI into LA's own industries, the opening is uneven. Film, music, advertising and design work already shows real AI use, and those industries are where LA is most specialized. The largest blocs of LA jobs, in health care, hospitality, logistics and manufacturing, score near zero on observed exposure, so the AI products that reach them will look different from the writing and coding tools that dominate Claude use today.

For a company selling AI products or services in LA, the market is large and spread out. The region has the people and the businesses, but they are scattered across small firms and across industries that are not tech. Software publishers average 37 employees. The 115 public companies that mention AI include banks, utilities, real estate trusts and restaurant chains.

A company hiring AI talent in LA should expect to pay above national rates. Every AI occupation pays more here than nationally, and the region has fewer of those workers per job than the U.S. Data scientists are the exception that comes closest to even.

For anyone tracking where LA leads, the posting data points to media. Digital media and ICT postings mention AI more than six times as often as LA postings overall, and film and video editors make the list of middle-skill jobs most exposed to AI tools. The public-company filings point to a gap. LA filers adopted "artificial intelligence" as a phrase at nearly California's rate but lag on "generative AI" and "AI agent."

Brookings placed the Los Angeles metro among 28 "Star Hubs" in its July 2025 AI readiness study, the second of six tiers behind San Francisco and San Jose. The data here is consistent with that tier: large in total, behind the leaders on concentration.