Aquiles La Grave: AI is reshaping Boulder’s economy. Our candidates aren’t talking about it

This commentary is by Aquiles La Grave, a Boulder-based business owner who served as a delegate at the 2026 Colorado Democratic assembly.

There’s a clip of David Bowie from the late 1990s that’s been circulating again. A reporter asks him whether people are making too much of the internet. Bowie pauses, then reminds the reporter that hype cycles happen every generation. A hundred years earlier, a U.S. president predicted a day when every American town would have a telephone.

Classic Bowie. Classic reporter. Classic mistake.

Artificial intelligence is not another tech cycle. It is not being overhyped. If anything, it is being radically underhyped. Because the real pattern with technological revolutions is not excitement. It is complacency.

I can’t shake the feeling that many of us look a lot like the British aristocracy in the late 19th century. Industrialization had already reorganized the economy. Cities were filling. Agricultural labor was collapsing. The engine of wealth had moved. Yet the people sitting on top of the old order behaved as if the structure underneath them hadn’t changed.

The orchestra had stopped. No one bothered putting out chairs.

I kept returning to that word “complacency” last Saturday as I sat as a delegate at the Boulder County Democratic assembly. For hours, I listened to candidates and surrogates make their cases across a range of races. The overwhelming theme was experience, endorsements, and relationships. Who had served longest. Who was best liked. Who had the most impressive list of supporters.

Few, and that’s to say almost no one, mentioned artificial intelligence. Almost no one talked about what it is already doing to the labor market, to entry-level hiring, to the structure of the organizations that employ the people in their districts. The silence was deafening.

One local candidate, a CU regent candidate at that, did make it the center of his message. One. Out of an entire convention’s worth of races and speeches, a single person treated the most significant economic transformation of our lifetimes as something voters should actually be thinking about. The rest carried on as if the ground underneath us hadn’t shifted.

That should concern every voter in Boulder County.

The World Economic Forum reports that 41% of employers plan to reduce workforce size where AI can replicate roles. More than a third of worker skill sets are expected to be fundamentally transformed within four years. Entry-level hiring is already contracting in AI-exposed fields. A recent study shows job-finding rates for workers ages 22 to 25 falling roughly 14% in the most exposed occupations. And AI is cited as the driver behind more than 50,000 announced job reductions at U.S. corporations.

The door is narrowing before the building looks damaged.

I see this inside my own company, here on Pearl Street. Over the past few months, our organization should have grown two or three times over based purely on the opportunity in front of us.

It has not.

Those are 12 to 24 good-paying, mostly junior roles for recent graduates that Boulder will never see. AI already performs a meaningful share of the work that historically required analysts, operators, researchers, coordinators, and account executives. Research compresses. Strategy compresses. Development compresses. Execution cycles compress. The org chart shrinks before anyone admits it, and none of it shows up in jobs reports or unemployment figures.

History gives us a model for what happens next.

When the English tenant farm system collapsed under industrialization, rural workers flooded cities like Manchester and Birmingham. By 1851, Britain had become the first urban-majority society in history. But those workers did not find prosperity on the other side of displacement. They found factory labor. It took nearly a century before that migration translated into broad household wealth. Studies of industrial England show working-class poverty still above 30% in the 1930s. Only after the postwar system matured in the 1950s did productivity begin consistently raising household income.

Roughly 100 years. Technological revolutions reorganize labor quickly. Shared prosperity arrives slowly.

Which is why the real question around AI is not whether the technology works. It is whether we are building the new economic ladders fast enough.

The University of Colorado is the single most important institution in this community for answering that question. It is where our workforce is trained. It is where research is translated into economic opportunity. It is where the next generation either gets the tools to navigate what is coming—or doesn’t. And the Board of Regents governs it.

I would urge every voter evaluating candidates this cycle, for regent, for county commissioner, treasurer, for every seat that touches education, revenue or workforce policy, to use a single lens:

Does this person understand what is about to happen? And do they have a plan to help our institutions meet the moment?

Right now, we look like the tail end of an outdated order before it gets hollowed out. The synthetic labor engine is already running. We will face a moment when the awareness needed to convert that productivity into stable livelihoods falls squarely within these candidates’ tenure, and they are not keeping pace.

History suggests that gap can last a century.

The smart move is not pretending the orchestra is still playing. It’s figuring out where the chairs go next.