Someone finally drew the map of who AI comes for first. It has your job on it.

For a year I've wanted someone in authority to do the un-glamorous thing: not predict the future of work, just draw the map of the present one. This week, someone did. The London AI and Jobs Taskforce, chaired by Martha Lane-Fox and accepted by the Mayor, has produced what it calls the largest study yet of how AI is changing work in one British city. And it does the thing I keep asking for. It names who is exposed.

Around 600,000 Londoners, it finds, work in jobs that are highly exposed to AI and have the least room to adapt. They are concentrated in clerical and administrative work. They are disproportionately women. They are paid below the London average. That is not a forecast about robots. It is a description of the people most likely to feel this first, and it matches, uncomfortably closely, the kind of work a great many of us do.

If you're reading this in Reading or Rotherham rather than Rotherhithe, don't look away because the headline says London. London went first because London had the money to look. The map it drew is the one your town hasn't had drawn yet. And the finding underneath it, that the danger isn't a sudden crash but what Lane-Fox calls a quieter drift, fewer entry-level roles and weaker career ladders, is not a London finding. It's the shape of the thing everywhere.

Here's the complication, and it's the one that keeps me honest about how loudly to cheer. A city can draw the map. It can offer training, convene employers, pair young people with firms. Khan has put £18m of new money behind exactly that, £30m counting what he'd already pledged. But the levers that decide this, what a company owes the people it automates, how skills money is raised and spent, whether there's any reward for redesigning a job rather than deleting it, are national levers. And Khan knows it. The striking thing in his response isn't the money. It's that he's asked central government to hand him the powers, and requested a meeting with a minister for AI whose cabinet job is days old.

So I find myself holding two things at once, which is usually the honest place to be. This is the most serious attempt yet, in this country, to get ahead of what's happening to work instead of apologising for it afterwards. And it's a mayor trying to do a nation's job with a city's tools, aimed mostly at the young, while the 600,000 already mid-career, the ones this names most sharply, wait to see whether "act early" is meant to include them.

What I'm watching isn't the £30m. It's two things. Whether the centre, still rebuilding itself this week, gives Khan the powers he's asked for or quietly files the request. And whether anyone draws this map for the rest of the country, before the drift Lane-Fox describes stops being a warning and turns into the weather.