Every independent I meet is carrying some version of the same quiet worry: is this stuff coming for the work I do? It usually gets answered badly — a scary headline, a confident stranger on LinkedIn, or your own worst guess at 2am.
This week Anthropic made it answerable a better way. They added a connector that opens their Economic Index — a running measure of how people are actually using AI across the economy — right inside Claude. There’s nothing to install. You open the connectors menu in claude.ai, switch it on, and ask questions in plain English: which jobs use AI the most, what do people in my field actually use it for, what kinds of tasks are being automated, and how has that shifted over the past year. You get answers grounded in real data, and you can ask it to show you the numbers behind any one.
For a solopreneur, that’s more useful than it first looks. You don’t have a strategy team to tell you where the ground is moving. What you have is an hour here and there and a nagging question. This turns the question into something you can actually do: sit down, interrogate the source, and come away with a grounded read instead of a mood.
Two things make it worth your time rather than just reassuring. First, use it on your own work — not “will AI replace writers” in the abstract, but the specific tasks that fill your week, and which of those the data shows people already handing over. That is where the real decision about what to automate lives. Second, read what it can’t see. Anthropic is upfront that the Index reflects how people use Claude, not the whole job market, and Claude points you back to that as you dig.
That habit — point the AI at a real dataset, pull a grounded answer, then check its limits — is the actual superpower here. Not knowing which jobs are “safe.” Knowing how to find out for yourself.
Replace the vibe with a query. Then check what the query can’t see.