Will AI Replace Mechanical Engineers?
More exposed than most occupations, ranked 141 of 785. Employment is projected to grow +11.2% by 2035, from 299,000 jobs today.
Where this job sits against every other
Each column is a slice of the 785 occupations Microsoft measured for how much of their work today's AI can do. Mechanical engineers sit in the blue column.
So the two measures point in opposite directions. AI reaches a lot of this work, and the projection still has the occupation growing. Exposure is not the same thing as replacement.
What the job is made of
The biggest single piece of this job is “Develop systems or practices to mitigate or resolve environmental problems”, at 6.9% of the work. The column on the right is a different measure entirely: out of every time someone asked AI to do that activity, how often it actually got it right. It counts attempts people made, so a high number does not mean the work has moved to AI. It means AI is capable of that task when asked.
51 activities make up this occupation in the government's classification. The six here are the ones that define it most.
The numbers behind it
Employment and pay are United States figures, the only country publishing this per occupation. The work activities and the AI measurements are not country specific.
There are about 18,000 openings a year here, counting people who retire or move on as well as new positions.
This page is about the occupation. Your job is more specific than that.
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- AI exposure and work activity measurements: Tomlinson et al., Working with AI: Measuring the Applicability of Generative AI to Occupations, Microsoft Research. CC BY 4.0.
- Employment, projections and pay: US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employment Projections, 2025 to 2035. Occupation code 17-2141.