Job Check
Highway Maintenance Workers
Maintain highways, municipal and rural roads, airport runways, and rights-of-way. Duties include patching broken or eroded pavement and repairing guard rails, highway markers, and snow fences. May also mow or clear brush from along road, or plow snow from roadway.
10 main tasks · most important first
Your main tasks and AI
Importance- 01Set out signs and cones around work areas to divert traffic.Mostly human for now
- 02Flag motorists to warn them of obstacles or repair work ahead.Mostly human for now
- 03Perform preventative maintenance on vehicles and heavy equipment.Mostly human for now
- 04Drive trucks to transport crews and equipment to work sites.Mostly human for now
- 05Erect, install, or repair guardrails, road shoulders, berms, highway markers, warning signals, and highway lighting, using hand tools and power tools.Mostly human for now
- 06Clean and clear debris from culverts, catch basins, drop inlets, ditches, and other drain structures.Mostly human for now
- 07Drive heavy equipment and vehicles with adjustable attachments to sweep debris from paved surfaces, mow grass and weeds, remove snow and ice, and spread salt and sand.Mostly human for now
- 08Haul and spread sand, gravel, and clay to fill washouts and repair road shoulders.Mostly human for now
- 09Inspect, clean, and repair drainage systems, bridges, tunnels, and other structures.Mostly human for now
- 10Remove litter and debris from roadways, including debris from rock and mud slides.Mostly human for now
Tasks from O*NET® 31.0 (US Department of Labor, CC BY 4.0, changed by us), most important first. “Already use” comes from Anthropic’s data on real work chats with Claude; “could speed up” from task ratings made with GPT-4 in 2023.
Four studies, side by side
None is a forecast of job lossToo little dataNot enough work use was seen to measure. This does not mean the job is safe from AI.Anthropic, 2026
2%of this job’s tasks an AI model could do in half the time, counting tasks that need extra tools as half (rated in 2023).Eloundou, Manning, Mishkin and Rock, 2023
Above 3% of jobsin how often and how well AI helped with this job’s work in Microsoft Copilot chats (2024 data).Microsoft Research (Tomlinson et al.), 2025
Above 97% of jobsin how much of this job’s physical work robots have been shown to do, from factories to homes (2026).Anthropic, 2026
Your human edge
The main tasks with no real AI use seen and no big speed-up expected. This is where your skill counts most today.
- Set out signs and cones around work areas to divert traffic.
- Flag motorists to warn them of obstacles or repair work ahead.
- Perform preventative maintenance on vehicles and heavy equipment.