{
  "source": "Cooked Index — occupational AI risk register",
  "page": "https://cookedindex.com/jobs/data-entry-keyers/",
  "methodology": "https://cookedindex.com/methodology",
  "notice": "Verdicts are re-examined as evidence accumulates. Re-fetch before relying on this; the page above always carries the current score.",
  "scored_at": "2026-08-11",
  "model": "claude-opus-5",
  "occupation": {
    "title": "Data Entry Keyers",
    "soc_code": "43-9021",
    "category": "Office",
    "us_employment": 127080,
    "median_annual_wage": 41340
  },
  "verdict": "COOKED",
  "risk_resistance": 12,
  "contested": false,
  "near_boundary": false,
  "dimensions": {
    "task_resistance": 2,
    "embodiment": 2,
    "liability_shield": 0,
    "trust_premium": 2,
    "judgment_accountability": 6
  },
  "reasoning": {
    "task_resistance": "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.",
    "embodiment": "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.",
    "liability_shield": "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.",
    "trust_premium": "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.",
    "judgment_accountability": "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."
  },
  "rationale": "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.",
  "outlook": "Expect continued double-digit percentage employment decline over ten years, with survivors reclassified as data quality or exception-handling specialists inside smaller teams.",
  "what_would_raise_it": {
    "levers": [
      {
        "dimension": "task_resistance",
        "change": "Task-mix shift is genuinely bilevel here: if bulk keying is fully absorbed by IDP pipelines, the surviving headcount is exception-queue work — adjudicating low-confidence extractions, resolving source-system mismatches, and correcting handwritten/damaged records that OCR flags. That residual work is harder per-unit and requires business-rule knowledge. This raises the score of the remaining job while shrinking the job count; it is not a jobs reprieve.",
        "plausibility": "already happening",
        "would_add": 4
      },
      {
        "dimension": "liability_shield",
        "change": "Sector-specific rules that require a named human to verify machine-extracted values before they enter a system of record: e.g. FDA 21 CFR Part 11 electronic-records requirements in clinical trial data entry (double-data-entry and human verification of source documents), and CMS/state Medicaid rules on encounter-data attestation. If such attestation requirements are extended explicitly to AI-extracted fields rather than to keyed fields generally, a human verifier becomes structurally required in regulated domains (clinical research coordination, court e-filing dockets, land/deed recording).",
        "plausibility": "plausible",
        "would_add": 4
      },
      {
        "dimension": "judgment_accountability",
        "change": "Exception adjudicators becoming the documented human-in-the-loop for automated decision systems — e.g. under Colorado SB 24-205 or the EU AI Act's Article 14 human-oversight duty, where a person who overrides or confirms a low-confidence extraction that feeds an eligibility or benefits determination is the recorded decision-maker. This turns keying into an auditable override role.",
        "plausibility": "plausible",
        "would_add": 4
      },
      {
        "dimension": "embodiment",
        "change": "Physical handling of fragile, classified, or non-digitizable source material — county deed vaults, sealed court records, archival paper that cannot leave a room or be scanned by vendor equipment. This is a small niche and applies to a minority of positions.",
        "plausibility": "unlikely",
        "would_add": 2
      }
    ],
    "ceiling_note": "Even with every lever, this occupation stays low. The liability and oversight routes preserve a thin layer of verifier roles inside regulated verticals, not the 127,000-person occupation; historical employment decline continues regardless. There is no realistic trust-premium route — no buyer pays extra for human-typed data, and the value proposition was always speed and cost."
  },
  "adjudication": null,
  "employment_history": {
    "points": [
      {
        "y": 2017,
        "emp": 180100,
        "wage": 30930
      },
      {
        "y": 2018,
        "emp": 174930,
        "wage": 32170
      },
      {
        "y": 2019,
        "emp": 159930,
        "wage": 33490
      },
      {
        "y": 2020,
        "emp": 151520,
        "wage": 34440
      },
      {
        "y": 2021,
        "emp": 147170,
        "wage": 35630
      },
      {
        "y": 2022,
        "emp": 157380,
        "wage": 36190
      },
      {
        "y": 2023,
        "emp": 154230,
        "wage": 37790
      },
      {
        "y": 2024,
        "emp": 135280,
        "wage": 39850
      },
      {
        "y": 2025,
        "emp": 127080,
        "wage": 41340
      }
    ],
    "from": 2017,
    "to": 2025,
    "change_pct": -29.4,
    "comparable_from": 2019,
    "spans_soc_revision": true
  },
  "pivots": [
    {
      "slug": "court-reporters-and-simultaneous-captioners",
      "title": "Court Reporters and Simultaneous Captioners",
      "verdict": "EXPOSED",
      "risk_resistance": 34,
      "median_wage": 72420,
      "overlap": 74,
      "skills_to_close": [
        "Operation and Control",
        "Troubleshooting",
        "Active Listening",
        "Equipment Maintenance"
      ]
    },
    {
      "slug": "tax-examiners-and-collectors-and-revenue-agents",
      "title": "Tax Examiners and Collectors, and Revenue Agents",
      "verdict": "EXPOSED",
      "risk_resistance": 34,
      "median_wage": 62370,
      "overlap": 62,
      "skills_to_close": [
        "Mathematics",
        "Speaking",
        "Critical Thinking",
        "Negotiation"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "license": "https://cookedindex.com/terms"
}