COOKED
The modal help desk role is ticket triage, password and access resets, walking users through known fixes, and writing up knowledge-base articles — all text-and-screen work that chatbots plus automated provisioning already handle at acceptable quality, and ticket volume per agent has been falling for years. What holds is the deskside tier: physically imaging and swapping laptops, chasing docking stations and printers, and sitting with the executive or the frustrated user who will not self-serve. No license protects the job and the accountability sits with IT management, not the technician.
Core tasks are already automatable. Password resets, MFA re-enrollment, mailbox permission changes, VPN client reinstalls and Tier-1 triage against a documented runbook are exactly the pattern-matched, text-in/text-out steps that self-service portals and LLM agents in the ticketing system now close without a human touching the queue — a 6 rather than a 2 only because Tier-2 escalation work like reproducing an intermittent Outlook profile corruption or an obscure line-of-business app conflict still needs someone poking around a live machine.
Some physical or field component. A real fraction of the week is racking a replacement laptop, imaging it via PXE, running cable to a new desk, clearing a paper jam, or standing in a conference room fixing the HDMI/Teams Room panel before a meeting starts — that is hands-on work, but it happens in offices and wiring closets on known hardware, not in the weather or on a factory floor, which caps it at 10 rather than the high teens.
No licence, no signature requirement. There is no state licence to hold: A+, ITIL or Microsoft certs are hiring filters that any employer can waive, and when a bad change deletes a user's mail store the exposure runs to the company and the IT manager who approved the process, not to the tech who executed the ticket — hence a 1, not a 5.
Some relationship component. Named support for a specific floor, department or executive builds genuine goodwill — people ask for you by name and will wait for you rather than open a ticket — but the ticket is closed on the fix, not the relationship, and a competent replacement inherits the queue in a week, so this sits at 7 instead of the 13+ of an advisor whose client leaves with them.
Executes defined procedures on defined inputs. The decisions are bounded by the runbook, the SLA clock and the escalation matrix: you choose whether to reimage or repair, whether to escalate to networking or to the app owner, but you don't authorise the spend, approve the access, or own the outage postmortem — that discretion is real enough to keep it off the floor and narrow enough to keep it at 6.
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