← Risk register SOC 11-3012 · reviewed 2026-08-11

Administrative Services Managers

263,960 US workers · median $114,130/yr · Management

EXPOSED

The paperwork half of this job — vendor bid comparisons, budget tracking spreadsheets, records-retention policies, procurement documentation, space-utilization reports — is exactly what current AI drafts at usable quality, and the layers of coordination work that justified headcount thin out when software handles scheduling and reporting. What holds is the facilities-and-people half: walking the building, handling a burst pipe or a failed HVAC unit, negotiating with contractors on site, and personally owning whether the office actually functions. The modal worker here splits between an office/records manager (more exposed) and a facilities manager (more protected by physical presence).

10-year outlook: Headcount contracts over the next decade as reporting and procurement paperwork consolidates, with survivors concentrated in facilities, safety, and multi-site operations rather than office administration.

US employment, 2021–2025+17.5%
224,620263,960 workers

Headcount grew steadily across the period.

The job count is not the verdict

This line is counted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics — the one figure on this page that isn't a judgement of ours. Headcount moves on demand, offshoring, demographics and the business cycle, and automation is one term among several, often not the loudest.

So a falling line is not evidence that AI did it, and a rising one is not evidence that it won't. Both happen in this register: some occupations resist automation and shrink anyway, others are highly automatable and keep growing.

BLS projection, 2024–2034

+4.6% 271,200 → 283,800 on the projections basis

Exposed, but growing

AI can already do a lot of these tasks, and the BLS still expects +4.6% more of these jobs by 2034. Demand for the output is growing faster than the work is being automated away — the mechanism BLS gives for software developers, and the combination people most often misread as an error.

Different clocks. The score is what current AI could do to this work today. The projection is how many of these jobs will exist in 2034. Everything between the two — how fast employers actually adopt, whether demand grows in the meantime — is why they can point opposite ways without either being wrong.

~23,200 openings a year on average, including replacing people who leave.

One email if this score changes. Watch as many occupations as you like from the same address — no account, and nothing is sent on a schedule, only when a verdict actually moves.

Also known as — 17 job titles this covers

Titles reported by people doing this work, from the US Department of Labor's O*NET survey. If your job title is here, this page is about your work even though the name doesn't match.

AdministratorBusiness ManagerService DirectorBusiness CoordinatorBusiness Unit ManagerAdministrative ManagerAdministrative OfficerBusiness AdministratorAdministration DirectorAdministrative DirectorBusiness Office ManagerBusiness Office DirectorOperations AdministratorAdministrative CoordinatorRecords Management DirectorAdministrative Services ManagerRecords and Information Manager

Score — 39/100 resistance

Holding it up: judgment & accountability (11/20). Weakest point: liability shield (2/20).

Five dimensions, 0–20 each, summed. Higher means more protected. The arithmetic is shown so you can check it: 9 + 9 + 2 + 8 + 11 = 39. · Scored 2026-08-11, and re-examined when evidence accumulates rather than on a schedule.

Task resistance 9/20

Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier At 9, roughly half your week — RFP scoring matrices, mail and records-retention schedules, supply reorder points, monthly occupancy and cost-per-square-foot reports, meeting and travel coordination — is template work AI already produces, while the other half (a vendor who missed SLA twice, a move-add-change for 40 desks, a fire-marshal walkthrough finding) still needs someone physically accountable, which is why this sits mid-band rather than at 5.

Embodiment 9/20

Some physical or field component 9 reflects that you are in the building, not in it full-time: you walk punch lists, meet the elevator inspector, check that the badge reader on the loading dock works, and get the after-hours call when a sprinkler head goes — but you dispatch the tradespeople rather than crawl into the ceiling yourself, and the records-manager half of this SOC barely leaves a desk.

Liability shield 2/20

No licence, no signature requirement A 2 is honest: no state licenses administrative services managers, CFM and FMP are résumé assets nobody demands, and when a lease is signed or an OSHA citation lands it is the officer, the general counsel, or the licensed contractor whose name carries the exposure, not yours.

Trust premium 8/20

Some relationship component 8 is earned inside the building — the facilities lead who knows which conference room's HVAC lies and which janitorial supervisor to call at 6am is genuinely hard to swap out — but the relationship is with a set of internal stakeholders and vendors who would keep working with your replacement next quarter, so it is not the product being bought.

Judgment & accountability 11/20

Meaningful discretion 11 covers the calls you actually make alone: whether to renew a janitorial contract or rebid, whether a flooded floor gets closed for the day, how to allocate space when two departments both grew — real discretion inside a budget and a policy manual you did not write, and escalating to the CFO once the number gets large.

Confidence: medium · reviewed 2026-08-11 · how scoring works

What this job involves — and which parts are yours

The verdict above describes this occupation as a whole. Almost nobody does the typical version of a job — tick what's actually in your week and see how your own mix sits.

AI already does these at usable quality

These still need a person

Active moats on the surviving side: embodiment, judgment

How to future-proof this job

Training paths for your skill gaps: edX — performance measurement and evaluation free to audit · Coursera — negotiation, influence and persuasion courses free to audit · MIT OpenCourseWare — full course materials across every department, free free · Khan Academy — physics, chemistry and biology from the ground up free · edX — systems thinking and evaluation methods free to audit · Coursera — teaching and instructional design, audit free free to audit

All 35 skills ranked by how many jobs they open →

Where this experience transfers — occupations you could move toward

Computed from U.S. Dept. of Labor O*NET skill and knowledge profiles: high overlap with what you already do, a materially higher resistance score, no large jump in required training, and no licence you would have to start a new pipeline to get. Targets that pay meaningfully less, that are themselves COOKED, or whose own headcount is falling are excluded — a move into a shrinking trade is not an escape.

General and Operations Managers EXPOSED · 52/100 · you already have ~77% of the skill profile

Skills to close: Monitoring, Persuasion, Active Learning, Science

Medical and Health Services Managers EXPOSED · 55/100 · you already have ~71% of the skill profile

Skills to close: Science, Systems Evaluation, Instructing, Persuasion

What would move this back up — beyond any one person

The moves above are yours to make. This is the other half: what would have to change in the world for the occupation itself to score higher. None of it is in any one person's gift, but it is where the floor actually comes from. Scores here are not a one-way ratchet. Only two of the five dimensions — task resistance and embodiment — track what machines can do. The other three track law, what buyers will pay for, and who is answerable, and those move in both directions, often in response to the same pressure AI creates. If every lever below landed, this occupation would score around 55/100, still EXPOSED.

5 specific changes that would raise this score
  • already happening task resistance +3

    Task-mix shift is genuine here: if AI absorbs bid tabulation, budget rollups, space-utilization reporting and retention-schedule drafting, what remains is contractor dispute resolution, capital-project sequencing, and emergency response — the judgment tier. Watch for job postings that drop 'reporting/coordination' language and center 'vendor negotiation, capital planning, business continuity'.

  • plausible embodiment +4

    Consolidation of the office-manager and facilities-manager variants into a single site-responsible role as records work automates — plus hybrid-era churn (office reconfiguration, sublease build-outs, sensor/BAS retrofits) that requires on-site walkthroughs and contractor supervision. If the surviving modal worker is the facilities manager rather than the records manager, this dimension rises mechanically.

  • plausible liability shield +3

    Records-retention and legal-hold ownership becoming a named-custodian duty: FRCP 37(e) sanctions practice and SEC/FINRA books-and-records enforcement (e.g. the off-channel communications sweeps) already push firms to designate an accountable records officer. A court rule or regulator settlement requiring a named human custodian to attest to retention-policy execution and hold implementation would create a signature that cannot be AI-generated.

  • plausible liability shield +3

    On the facilities side, jurisdictions requiring a named responsible person for life-safety systems — NFPA-referenced 'building safety director' or fire-safety-director certificates already mandatory in NYC high-rises, and similar OSHA general-duty/emergency-action-plan accountability. Wider state adoption of a certified, personally accountable facility safety manager would attach liability to this SOC directly.

  • plausible judgment accountability +3

    If the role absorbs vendor/contract authority and business-continuity ownership currently held above it — signing authority thresholds delegated as middle coordination layers are cut, plus insurer requirements (property carriers increasingly demanding documented water-mitigation and BCP programs with a named owner) — the role owns consequential calls under ambiguity rather than executing them.

The limit. Trust premium has no plausible route: buyers of administrative and facilities services do not pay a premium for a human manager, they pay for the building working. The whole occupation also sits under a headcount ceiling — even the protected facilities half tends to be one person per site or per portfolio, so protection per worker rising is compatible with fewer such workers.

These are conditions, not forecasts — what would have to happen, not what will. Specific rules, cases and bills are named so you can go and check whether they exist and where they stand; verify before relying on any of them. Nothing here is legal or financial advice.

Where this work is, and what it pays there

BLS metro figures for 352 areas. The verdict above does not change by city — the rubric judges what the work involves, not where it happens — but pay and headcount do, and the national median hides a very wide range.

Most of these jobs

New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ 18,450 $149,990 +31%
Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA 13,310 $124,560 +9%
Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Roswell, GA 9,000 $113,230 -1%
Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN 8,600 $108,940 -5%
Boston-Cambridge-Newton, MA-NH 6,960 $120,670 +6%
Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX 6,160 $115,830 +1%
Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington, MN-WI 5,840 $144,520 +27%
Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands, TX 5,510 $111,650 -2%

Best paid

Billings, MT 40 $169,820 +49%
Denver-Aurora-Centennial, CO 1,520 $164,240 +44%
Trenton-Princeton, NJ 1,260 $154,070 +35%

Percentages are against this occupation's national median of $114,130. Counts are jobs in that metro, not vacancies. Metros where the BLS suppressed the cell are absent rather than shown as zero.

Who is actually doing this — nobody, on the record

We have no reported case of a named organisation automating this occupation. Not one deployment, not one announcement.

That is worth saying out loud next to a score of 39. The verdict above is about what the work exposes — what current AI could do to these tasks. It is not a claim that anyone has done it. For this occupation those two things have come apart completely: the capability argument is on this page, and the evidence column is empty.

Read that as a gap in the reporting we can see, not proof of absence — the dispatch runs on English-language feeds and misses plenty. If you know of a case, tell us, or add a field report from inside the job.

Quick take — do you do this job?

Has AI actually changed your work? One tap, anonymous, and the running tally is public. Nothing else is asked of you.

Self-reported and unverified — a sentiment signal, not a survey. One response per person per occupation; you can change your answer.

Field reports — what people say has changed

No field reports yet. A written account takes a paragraph rather than a tap, goes to an editor before it appears, and is the one thing on this page the rubric cannot produce on its own.

File a field report

Concrete beats general: a tool that arrived, a task that moved, a headcount decision you watched happen. Don't include anything that identifies you or your employer if that would put you at risk.

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Kept current

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