EXPOSED
The core work — cutting out urethane-bonded windshields, prepping pinch welds, setting glass to tolerance in a driveway or parking lot, drilling and resin-filling rock chips — is manual work in uncontrolled settings that no deployed robot performs. What AI touches is the paperwork layer around it: insurance claim intake, VIN-to-part lookup, glass quoting, route scheduling, and the photo-based damage triage that decides repair vs. replace. The growing technical edge is ADAS camera recalibration after windshield replacement, which carries real documentation and liability weight and is where the skill premium is concentrating.
Roughly flat across the period, with year-to-year wobble.
Median pay $35,790 → $47,630 +6.5% in real terms
This line is counted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics — the one figure on this page that isn't a judgement of ours. Headcount moves on demand, offshoring, demographics and the business cycle, and automation is one term among several, often not the loudest.
So a falling line is not evidence that AI did it, and a rising one is not evidence that it won't. Both happen in this register: some occupations resist automation and shrink anyway, others are highly automatable and keep growing. The marked year is 2020.
BLS projection, 2024–2034
+3.6% 20,400 → 21,100 on the projections basis
Growing, and only partly exposed
The BLS expects +3.6% more of these jobs by 2034, and at 61/100 the work is only partly exposed — some tasks are automatable, the core of the job is not. Nothing here is in tension.
Different clocks. The score is what current AI could do to this work today. The projection is how many of these jobs will exist in 2034. Everything between the two — how fast employers actually adopt, whether demand grows in the meantime — is why they can point opposite ways without either being wrong.
~1,400 openings a year on average, including replacing people who leave.
TinterGlass FitterGlass SetterWindow TinterAuto TechnicianGlass InstallerDirect InstallerGlass TechnicianWindow InstallerAutomotive TinterRepair SpecialistAutomobile InstallerWindshield InstallerAutomotive TechnicianWindshield TechnicianAutomotive Window TinterVehicle Glass TechnicianGlass Installer TechnicianWindshield Repair TechnicianWindow Tech (Window Technician)Automotive Glazier (Auto Glazier)Automotive Glass Mechanic (Auto Glass Mechanic)Automotive Glass Installer (Auto Glass Installer)Automotive Glass Specialist (Auto Glass Specialist)
Holding it up: embodiment . Weakest point: liability shield .
Tasks largely resist digitisation Cutting cold-knife or wire through a bonded urethane bead without gouging the pinch weld, prepping and priming bare metal, then setting a 40-pound windshield to a millimeter of gap on a curved aperture is force-feedback work performed on a different vehicle geometry every job — the only pieces software has taken are NAGS part lookup and quote generation, which is why this sits at 17 rather than the low teens.
Hands-on in uncontrolled environments Most of the day is mobile: kneeling on asphalt in a customer's driveway or a parking garage, working in wind, rain and heat that dictate urethane cure times, handling glass overhead, reaching into door cavities to reconnect regulators — 19 reflects that there is no fixed bay and no controlled temperature, not just that the work is physical.
Certification preferred, not legally required No state licence gates windshield installation; AGSC/AGRSS certification and adhesive-manufacturer training are voluntary and typically held by the shop rather than the individual tech, so a botched retention bond becomes the employer's and insurer's problem — the 5 rather than 0 is for those documented safe-installation and ADAS recalibration certifications that some insurers and OEMs now require by name.
Meaningful discretion Real calls get made in the field — whether a chip has spread into the driver's critical viewing area and must become a replacement, whether a rusted pinch weld can be primed or has to go back to a body shop, whether ambient temperature allows a safe drive-away time — but adhesive manufacturers publish the cure tables and OEM procedures specify recalibration, which caps this at 10.
The verdict above describes this occupation as a whole. Almost nobody does the typical version of a job — tick what's actually in your week and see how your own mix sits.
Your task mix speaks to task resistance (17/20 here) — how much of the day's work current AI already does. That is the dimension the boxes above are about.
It cannot move the other three. Liability shield (5/20) is whether the law requires a licensed human to sign. Trust premium (10/20) is whether buyers specifically pay for a person. Judgment and accountability (10/20) is whether the role exists to own consequential calls. Those are facts about the occupation's standing, not about which tasks are in your week — a paralegal who does only trial exhibits still holds no licence. Together they are 25 of this occupation's 61 points (41%).
Embodiment (19/20) is also a property of the work rather than the worker, but we don't tag individual tasks as physical or not, so the picker can't tell you anything about it. That's a limit of this tool, not a claim.
Did we get the list right? Tell us what's missing — the tasks are written from the outside, and you're reading this from the inside.
No occupation passed every test: close enough to automotive glass installers and repairers on skills and subject matter, at least 10 points more resistant, no big jump in training, no new licence, no pay cut, and not shrinking on its own. That happens for 223 of the 654 occupations here that aren't SAFE, and it is worth stating plainly rather than leaving the section off.
The usual reason is that exposure travels with the skill profile. The jobs most similar to yours tend to be exposed for the same reasons yours is, so the near neighbours don't clear the gap — and the ones that do are a different kind of work, not a transfer of what you already know. Read that as a limit of this method, not a verdict that you're stuck: it only compares whole occupations, and it cannot see specialisation, industry, or anything you'd bring that isn't in a federal skill survey.
Here is that claim on your own job rather than in the abstract. These are the three occupations closest to this one by skill and subject matter — the places the work would most naturally transfer — with what the register scores them:
That is the whole problem in three lines. The nearest work is not meaningfully safer, so there is no move here that trades a similar skill set for a better verdict. This is not us running out of ideas — it is what the neighbourhood looks like.
The moves above are yours to make. This is the other half: what would have to change in the world for the occupation itself to score higher. None of it is in any one person's gift, but it is where the floor actually comes from. Scores here are not a one-way ratchet. Only two of the five dimensions — task resistance and embodiment — track what machines can do. The other three track law, what buyers will pay for, and who is answerable, and those move in both directions, often in response to the same pressure AI creates. If every lever below landed, this occupation would score around 76/100 — SAFE.
Task-mix shift within a genuinely two-tier job: chip repair and commodity replacement are the routine tier under price and scheduling automation pressure; ADAS recalibration, OEM-glass diagnostics and rust/structural remediation are the judgment tier. If ADAS-equipped share of the fleet keeps climbing, the surviving day's work is disproportionately the tier no deployed system does.
State-level ADAS recalibration licensing or certification mandates — e.g. a state adopting rules requiring a certified technician to sign a recalibration verification document after any windshield replacement on an ADAS-equipped vehicle, with personal attestation. Auto Glass Safety Council's ANSI/AGSC ROLAGS standard and AGSC ADAS certification are the existing hooks; insurer contracts (Safelite/Belron network requirements) and OEM position statements (Honda, Toyota, Subaru) already demand documented static recalibration. If a state board or an insurer network makes named-technician sign-off a condition of payment, this rises materially.
As photo-triage AI takes over the routine repair-vs-replace call, the human decision that remains is the contested one: corroded pinch weld, prior improper install, aftermarket glass that fails camera calibration, whether a recalibrated vehicle is safe to release. If crash litigation begins naming the installing technician on failed recalibration (already an emerging theory in auto glass negligence suits), ownership of that release decision becomes explicit.
Narrow route only: OEM dealer-network channels and luxury/EV owners paying for certified-shop calibration rather than a mobile commodity install. This is a premium for certification and OEM authorization, not for humanness as such — the buyer is not choosing a person over a machine.
The limit. Embodiment is already near ceiling at 19 and cannot meaningfully rise. Trust premium has no real route to high scores: buyers overwhelmingly follow insurer networks and price, and no one shops for a human windshield installer. The realistic ceiling here is roughly the low 70s, driven almost entirely by ADAS recalibration liability and certification, and that same edge is captured by a minority of technicians — the commodity chip-repair and mobile-install tier does not benefit.
| Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA | 570 | $46,200 -3% |
| Miami-Fort Lauderdale-West Palm Beach, FL | 530 | $49,910 +5% |
| Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands, TX | 500 | $47,920 +1% |
| Columbus, OH | 480 | $61,900 +30% |
| Phoenix-Mesa-Chandler, AZ | 450 | $46,060 -3% |
| Denver-Aurora-Centennial, CO | 410 | $47,140 -1% |
| Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA | 340 | $62,490 +31% |
| Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater, FL | 320 | $49,070 +3% |
| Providence-Warwick, RI-MA | 60 | $65,190 +37% |
| Fayetteville, NC | 60 | $62,500 +31% |
| Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA | 340 | $62,490 +31% |
We have no reported case of a named organisation automating this occupation. Not one deployment, not one announcement.
That is worth saying out loud next to a score of 61. The verdict above is about what the work exposes — what current AI could do to these tasks. It is not a claim that anyone has done it. For this occupation those two things have come apart completely: the capability argument is on this page, and the evidence column is empty.
Has AI actually changed your work? One tap, anonymous, and the running tally is public. Nothing else is asked of you.
Rather than check back: get the digest and we'll tell you what changed — or watch a single occupation from its own page.