EXPOSED
The core act — conditioning stems, wiring boutonnieres, building a balanced arrangement in a vase that won't tip, and installing an arch on site — is delicate manual work in unpredictable material conditions that no current robot handles. What AI does take is the surrounding layer: mood boards and design concepts, proposal and quote writing, Instagram content, order intake and substitution scripting, and the seasonal-availability research designers used to do by hand. The bigger threat to this occupation is not AI but retail consolidation and mass-market pre-made bouquets; AI mostly speeds that up by making cheap sellers look designed.
Roughly flat across the period, with year-to-year wobble.
Median pay $28,040 → $37,360 +6.6% 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
-5.9% 43,800 → 41,200 on the projections basis
Shrinking, but not obviously because of AI
The BLS projects -5.9% by 2034, but at 50/100 this work is only moderately exposed — not the profile of a job current AI can simply do. Occupations shrink for many reasons, and the score does not point at automation as this one's cause.
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.
~5,100 openings a year on average, including replacing people who leave.
FloristDesignerDesign MakerFloral ClerkCorsage MakerCustom FramerFloral ArtistFloral ArrangerFloral DesignerFlower ArrangerFlower DesignerWedding FloristFloral AssistantFloral AssociateFloral DecoratorFlorist DesignerDesign ConsultantFloral SpecialistFlorist AssistantWedding DecoratorFlorist's DecoratorDesign Studio SpecialistArtificial Foliage ArrangerFloral Designer Salesperson
Holding it up: embodiment . Weakest point: liability shield .
Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier Wiring a boutonniere, taping a bridal bouquet handle, and hydrating and conditioning stems that vary in thickness and rigidity from box to box sits at 13 rather than 17 because the front half of the job — sketching concepts, writing proposals, pricing a recipe, posting the finished photo — is already being done by generative tools, and much of walk-in volume is now pre-made stems dropped into a sleeve.
Hands-on in uncontrolled environments A 16 reflects work that moves between a cooler at 34°F, a wet bench with knives and stem strippers, and a client's venue where you are on a ladder zip-tying a mechanic to a rented arch before doors open — uncontrolled sites, live loads, and perishable stock, though it stays short of the 18-20 band because much of the week is still at a fixed shop bench.
No licence, no signature requirement No state licenses floral design; anyone can open a shop tomorrow, and AIFD accreditation is a credential customers rarely ask about and no statute requires, which is why this sits at 1 instead of the 5-10 certification band.
Meaningful discretion The discretion is real but bounded: you decide substitutions when the peonies arrive blown, adjust proportions to the vessel, and read a grieving family's budget without asking — calls that matter to the customer but carry no safety or legal consequence, which puts it at 8 rather than the 14+ reserved for irreversible high-stakes decisions.
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 (13/20 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 (1/20) is whether the law requires a licensed human to sign. Trust premium (12/20) is whether buyers specifically pay for a person. Judgment and accountability (8/20) 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 21 of this occupation's 50 points (42%).
Embodiment (16/20) 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 floral designers 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 59/100, still EXPOSED.
Task-mix shift: if concepting, quoting, substitution scripting and social content are fully absorbed by software, the residual paid job is on-site install, mechanics under real conditions, and live substitution decisions when a shipment arrives short — the tier robots and models do not touch. This raises the score of what remains without any new law.
Wedding and event venues increasingly require named, insured on-site florists with a contract and site-visit walkthrough (already common in venue-approved-vendor lists); a visible 'designed and installed by a named local designer' expectation in the luxury/event tier — parallel to the AIFD accreditation and 'Certified Florist' marks state associations push — would let event work price away from mass-market stems. This only touches the event tier, not daily orders.
Event-scale installs (suspended arches, ceiling structures) carrying rigging/load responsibility written into venue contracts and event-insurance riders — some venues already require proof of liability coverage and rigging sign-off for hung floral. If insurers make a named designer answerable for structural install, the consequential-call ownership rises.
The limit. No plausible licensure route: no US state licenses floral design (Louisiana's florist exam was the last, and it was narrowed in 2010), so liability_shield realistically stays near 1. The dominant threat is retail consolidation and pre-made bouquets, which no dimension here defends against.
| New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ | 2,310 | $45,760 +22% |
| Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA | 1,330 | $48,200 +29% |
| Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN | 1,230 | $36,200 -3% |
| Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX | 1,120 | $36,170 -3% |
| Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington, PA-NJ-DE-MD | 940 | $37,190 +0% |
| Miami-Fort Lauderdale-West Palm Beach, FL | 860 | $37,740 +1% |
| Boston-Cambridge-Newton, MA-NH | 670 | $47,220 +26% |
| San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA | 580 | $46,520 +25% |
| Kahului-Wailuku, HI | 60 | $52,570 +41% |
| Salinas, CA | 40 | $49,220 +32% |
| Oxnard-Thousand Oaks-Ventura, CA | 80 | $48,740 +30% |
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 50. 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.