EXPOSED
The core work — cutting out urethane-bonded windshields, prepping pinch welds, setting glass to tolerance in a driveway or parking lot, drilling and resin-filling rock chips — is manual work in uncontrolled settings that no deployed robot performs. What AI touches is the paperwork layer around it: insurance claim intake, VIN-to-part lookup, glass quoting, route scheduling, and the photo-based damage triage that decides repair vs. replace. The growing technical edge is ADAS camera recalibration after windshield replacement, which carries real documentation and liability weight and is where the skill premium is concentrating.
Tasks largely resist digitisation. Cutting cold-knife or wire through a bonded urethane bead without gouging the pinch weld, prepping and priming bare metal, then setting a 40-pound windshield to a millimeter of gap on a curved aperture is force-feedback work performed on a different vehicle geometry every job — the only pieces software has taken are NAGS part lookup and quote generation, which is why this sits at 17 rather than the low teens.
Hands-on in uncontrolled environments. Most of the day is mobile: kneeling on asphalt in a customer's driveway or a parking garage, working in wind, rain and heat that dictate urethane cure times, handling glass overhead, reaching into door cavities to reconnect regulators — 19 reflects that there is no fixed bay and no controlled temperature, not just that the work is physical.
Certification preferred, not legally required. No state licence gates windshield installation; AGSC/AGRSS certification and adhesive-manufacturer training are voluntary and typically held by the shop rather than the individual tech, so a botched retention bond becomes the employer's and insurer's problem — the 5 rather than 0 is for those documented safe-installation and ADAS recalibration certifications that some insurers and OEMs now require by name.
Some relationship component. Work usually arrives assigned through an insurance network or a dispatch app, not by customer request, and most drivers never learn the tech's name — the 10 reflects that fleet accounts, dealership subcontracts and repeat commercial customers do get requested by name, and mobile techs who show up on time to someone's home build a referral base a body shop can't.
Meaningful discretion. Real calls get made in the field — whether a chip has spread into the driver's critical viewing area and must become a replacement, whether a rusted pinch weld can be primed or has to go back to a body shop, whether ambient temperature allows a safe drive-away time — but adhesive manufacturers publish the cure tables and OEM procedures specify recalibration, which caps this at 10.
Has AI actually changed your work?