Metro Phoenix has long been America's back office. AI is leaving its cubicle jobs in the dust.

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The Wall Street Journal
‪@wsj.com‬

Metro Phoenix has long been America’s back office. But AI is leaving its cubicle jobs in the dust—with major ramifications for the working class.

Phoenix Built an Empire of Cubicle Jobs. AI Is Coming to Tear It Down.
Careers in customer service, accounting and data entry once paved the way to the middle class. Now, workers are “literally digging my own grave.”
on.wsj.com
9:09 PM · May 26, 2026

Metro Phoenix has long been America’s back office. But AI is leaving its cubicle jobs in the dust—with major ramifications for the working class.

— The Wall Street Journal (@wsj.com) 2026-05-27T01:09:30.930499Z

Phoenix Built an Empire of Cubicle Jobs. AI Is Coming to Tear It Down.

The metropolis is the country’s call-center capital—for now. Artificial Intelligence is piling on offshoring losses, decimating careers that were once a sure path to the middle class.


Phoenix’s cubicle boom is over, and workers face an uncertain future.

By Konrad Putzier | Photography by Reuben J. Brown for WSJ
May 26, 2026 at 9:00 pm ET

PHOENIX—All around this desert city’s sprawling metro area, low-rise office parks with tinted windows and vast parking lots stretch to the horizon. This is America’s back office.

Abundant land and cheap labor made Phoenix a premier place for companies to stash lower-paid office workers who don’t need to be physically close to clients or headquarters. The cubicle-based jobs—customer service, data entry, payroll processing—created a vital ladder to the middle class, helping replace factory work lost to overseas competition.

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