Top 5 Jobs in Education That Are Most at Risk from AI in Columbus - And How to Adapt

AI is moving from theory to policy in Ohio and that matters for Columbus education jobs: the Ohio budget now requires every K–12 district to adopt AI-use policies by July 1, 2026, Columbus City Schools is already drafting local rules, and statewide efforts - from Ohio State's plan to embed “AI fluency” into degrees to federal guidance on teacher training - mean routine tasks (data entry, basic grading, scripted lesson drafting) are the most exposed while staff who learn to write prompts, check outputs for bias, and supervise AI gain new leverage; local educators and administrative staff can shore up employability with practical upskilling like Nucamp's AI Essentials for Work bootcamp and by following Ohio's model policy rollout for district planning.

EdWeek report on Ohio's statewide K–12 AI policy mandate and Nucamp AI Essentials for Work bootcamp registration offer immediate next steps.

“the ‘AI genie' as something that cannot be put back in the bottle” - Columbus City Schools CIO Christopher Lockhart

Selection prioritized local relevance and measurable exposure: national Gallup data anchored the risk lens (sample n=2,232; 60% of U.S. teachers used AI and weekly users saved up to six hours), while Ohio-focused reporting - including district examples and higher local uptake - guided which roles in Columbus face the most immediate displacement pressure; roles dominated by repeatable tasks (lesson templating, routine grading, data entry, scheduling) rose to the top because the research shows those tasks are already common AI use cases and yield the clearest time savings and automation benefits.

Criteria included prevalence of task usage in classrooms, concrete time-savings that make automation attractive to districts, gaps in AI policy and training that increase risk for lower-skilled staff, and urban–rural adoption differences that could widen inequities.

To keep recommendations actionable for Columbus, paired national survey findings with Ohio district practices and local uptake rates to score vulnerability and adaptation potential for each job category.

See the underlying Gallup survey and Ohio classroom reporting for the core metrics used.

“It's never going to mean that students are always going to be taught by artificial intelligence and teachers are going to take a backseat. But I do like that they're testing the waters and seeing how they can start integrating it and augmenting their teaching activities rather than replacing them.” - Zach Hrynowski, Gallup research director

Curriculum writers and instructional authors in Columbus face one of the clearest shifts: generative AI can rapidly produce aligned course outlines and activity templates but often needs a human to verify alignment with learning objectives and textbook material, so the most resilient writers will specialize in prompt design, bias checks, and curricular validation rather than raw drafting; a USF comparison of ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot found ChatGPT strongest at alignment and textbook integration, Gemini richer for ideation, and Copilot useful for mapping whole-course outlines, while each tool also showed reliability gaps that require human review and rubrics for hallucination checks - practical steps local districts can adopt now to protect instructional quality and preserve skilled roles (USF study on AI in curriculum design, and see Nucamp's Nucamp AI Essentials for Work LLM testing and scoring rubrics for curriculum implementation for local implementation guidance).

“AI tools seem to promise to speed up and generate high-quality educational materials.”

Administrative staff in Columbus - registrars and data-entry clerks - are particularly exposed because routine tasks such as enrollment verification, attendance recording, grade uploads, and transcript updates are centralized in systems that can be automated: Columbus City Schools' Student Information System (Infinite Campus) is managed by the district's Division of Student Information Systems, while Canvas pulls enrollment and course data from that same SIS, so anything that can be standardized in Infinite Campus (enrollments, daily attendance, grades, transcripts, demographic records) is a clear candidate for AI-driven automation; to stay valuable, registrars should pivot toward SIS governance, data-quality auditing, compliance training, and supervising AI outputs - roles the Office of Information Management already handles through its training and support divisions (Columbus City Schools Office of Information Management: SIS training and support) - and districts can accelerate the shift by upskilling staff in practical AI oversight and LLM testing rubrics (see Columbus City Schools Canvas integration and implementation resources and Nucamp AI Essentials for Work syllabus and workforce AI materials).

Front-desk and customer-service staff in Columbus schools already face direct automation pressure because routine communications are routinely automated: Columbus International High School notes that automated phone calls (robocalls) deliver daily and weekly updates, recognitions, academic reminders, and student/parent opportunities and asks families to keep Infinite Campus contact information current (call 614‑365‑4054 to update); when arrival questions, calendar notices, and simple enrollment checks can be pushed through robocall systems and parent portals, receptionists whose work is mostly transactional become the obvious targets for cost-cutting.

The practical “so what?” is immediate: becoming indispensable means shifting from gatekeeper to supervisor - owning Infinite Campus data quality, designing and auditing automated messages, and triaging exceptions that require human judgment - skills that pair well with basic LLM testing and scoring practices schools can adopt now.

For concrete starting points, review local automated-communication guidance and parent-portal instructions and consider short upskilling in LLM oversight such as Nucamp's AI Essentials for Work testing rubrics for education teams (Nucamp AI Essentials for Work syllabus and testing rubrics).

“International exists to provide an authentic and diverse cultural experience that develops competitive, well-rounded graduates.”

Teaching assistants and routine graders in Columbus face immediate exposure because AI already automates the exact repeatable tasks they handle - scoring quizzes, flagging grammar, and generating template feedback - especially in large lecture sections and online courses; pilots and studies report marking-speed gains of roughly 70–80% and growing university adoption of AI scoring, so the “so what” is blunt: routine grading hours are the easiest budget target unless TAs move up the value chain to human-in-the-loop roles (rubric calibration, bias audits, exception review, and student coaching).

Practical safeguards include insisting on instructor review workflows, embedding AI tools into Canvas or Brightspace with clear rubrics, and owning data‑privacy and FERPA-compliance checks so that districts like Columbus can keep skilled staff supervising systems rather than simply replacing them - see the LearnWise guide on AI-powered feedback and grading for implementation and ethical checkpoints and the Assessment Automation statistics roundup for adoption and time‑savings evidence.

“It (AI) has the potential to improve speed, consistency, and detail in feedback for educators grading students' assignments.” - Rohim Mohammed, Lecturer, University College Birmingham

School librarians and instructional resource curators in Columbus sit at the intersection of two clear trends: Ohio's push for district AI policies and the same repeatable tasks - cataloging, metadata entry, routine reference queries, and automated resource recommendations - that districts want to streamline are the ones AI handles best, so the immediate risk is tangible; the practical “so what?” is that librarians who learn to validate AI outputs, run LLM testing and scoring rubrics, and audit recommendation bias can move from transactional work to supervisory roles that protect collection integrity and lead digital‑literacy training for students and teachers.

Districts can partner with local providers and consultants to integrate these changes while capturing cost savings and service improvements; for hands‑on steps, use Nucamp's LLM testing and scoring rubrics for education teams and consult local AI vendors in Columbus to plan safe tool adoption (LLM testing and scoring rubrics for education teams, AI consulting firms in Columbus for K–12 schools).

Ohio is already moving from debate to action, and Columbus must match policy with practical workforce change: the State of Ohio's AI framework gives districts a governance roadmap (Ohio State AI Policy framework) while local reporting shows Columbus City Schools and other central‑Ohio districts are drafting rules to manage real classroom impacts (nearly half of K–12 students report weekly chatbot use, per local coverage) - so the immediate, practical response is predictable and achievable: adopt flexible, NEOLA‑style policies, require human‑in‑the‑loop oversight for grading and student data, and fund short, skills‑focused training so registrars, librarians, TAs and receptionists shift from transaction processing to AI supervision, bias audits, and prompt engineering; for busy districts, scalable options exist now - see local reporting on policy rollout and consider cohort training like Nucamp's AI Essentials for Work to build prompt‑writing and LLM testing skills for staff (Columbus Dispatch: how local school is thinking about AI, Nucamp AI Essentials for Work syllabus) - the so‑what: with chatbots already widespread, districts that pair clear rules with a few trained human overseers can preserve jobs by turning replaceable tasks into supervised, higher‑value roles.

“You can't put the genie back in the bottle.” - Christopher Lockhart, Columbus City Schools CIO