COOKED
The core job — keying values from forms, scans, invoices, and handwritten records into databases and spreadsheets — is exactly what OCR, intelligent document processing, and LLM extraction already do at production quality and a fraction of the cost. What remains is exception handling: the 3-8% of documents the pipeline flags as low-confidence, plus reconciling mismatches against source systems, which requires knowing the business rules rather than typing fast. Employment has been falling for two decades and the automation curve has steepened, not flattened.
Core tasks are already automatable. Keystroke-level transcription from scanned invoices, remittance advices, and survey forms is measured in keys-per-hour and verified by double-entry — a task with a machine-readable input, a machine-checkable output, and no step that requires leaving the screen, which is why it sits at 2 rather than mid-band alongside clerks who also chase people by phone.
Fully desk- and screen-based. The only physical elements are feeding a flatbed or high-speed scanner and handling paper batches at a desk, and even that disappears at any employer that has moved to emailed PDFs or portal uploads, so this is a 2 rather than a 0 only because some shops still put stacks of paper in your hands.
No licence, no signature requirement. There is no credential of any kind — no state licence, no board, no registry — and an error in a keyed field is corrected by a supervisor or caught in QA sampling, so nothing about the job legally requires that a specific named human did the keying.
Anonymous artifact production. Your output is a row in a table that the person relying on it will never trace back to you; the 2 reflects that long-tenured keyers in small back offices do get trusted with the messy vendor files nobody else can read, which is a reputation for reliability rather than a client relationship.
Executes defined procedures on defined inputs. The 6 is earned on the exception queue — deciding whether an illegible date is 2019 or 2014, which of two vendor spellings matches the master record, whether a mismatched total means transposition or a genuinely wrong source document — but these are calls made against documented business rules and escalated when unclear, not owned end to end, which keeps it at the ceiling of the procedural band rather than into real discretion.
Has AI actually changed your work?