{ "source": "Cooked Index — occupational AI risk register", "page": "https://cookedindex.com/jobs/electrical-and-electronics-repairers-commercial-and-industrial-equipment/", "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": "Electrical and Electronics Repairers, Commercial and Industrial Equipment", "soc_code": "49-2094", "category": "Trades", "us_employment": 65010, "median_annual_wage": 74090 }, "verdict": "SAFE", "risk_resistance": 67, "contested": false, "near_boundary": true, "dimensions": { "task_resistance": 16, "embodiment": 19, "liability_shield": 7, "trust_premium": 11, "judgment_accountability": 14 }, "reasoning": { "task_resistance": "Chasing an intermittent fault on a 20-year-old VFD or a legacy Allen-Bradley PLC5 means physically wiggling terminations, scoping waveforms at the drive output, and swapping suspect boards to isolate — the diagnosis lives in what your hands and meter find on undocumented, retrofitted equipment, which is why this sits at 16 rather than the 10-12 of technicians whose gear self-reports faults over a standard bus.", "embodiment": "You are inside energized cabinets, on lifts at conveyor level, behind machine guards in hot and dusty plants, doing LOTO on gear that was never installed to drawing — 19 not 20 only because bench repair of pulled boards and cards is a real slice of the work and does happen in a controlled shop.", "liability_shield": "No state requires a license to troubleshoot a servo drive or replace a controller card; what you carry is NFPA 70E arc-flash qualification, employer-issued qualified-person status, and manufacturer certifications on specific drive and PLC families — that keeps you above the uncertified 0-4 band but nowhere near an electrical contractor's or PE's personal signature.", "trust_premium": "Plant maintenance managers call the tech who already knows which of their four presses has the rewired cabinet and can be trusted not to bring the line down at shift change, and OEM service contracts often name individuals — but the work order is still fundamentally about the equipment getting fixed, so an unfamiliar competent tech gets the job at 11.", "judgment_accountability": "Calling whether a warm switchgear section can run until the scheduled outage or must be dropped now, and deciding to re-energize after a repair, are your calls with an arc-flash and a six-figure downtime bill on either side of them — 14 rather than 17 because a plant engineer or the OEM signs off on major replacements and the scope of the ambiguity is one machine, not a whole facility." }, "rationale": "The core of this job is putting hands and meters on motor controls, PLCs, drives, switchgear, and industrial electronics in live plants — tracing intermittent faults, pulling boards, reterminating, and calibrating in dirty, energized, non-standardized environments that robotics cannot enter. AI absorbs the paperwork layer: interpreting schematics, suggesting fault trees, drafting service reports, and predicting failures from sensor data, which raises the diagnostic floor but does not replace the technician. The soft spot is licensure — most states require no specific license for equipment repair, so the moat is skill and physical access rather than a legal signature.", "outlook": "Demand holds or grows as plants add automation and sensors that still break in physical ways, but AI-assisted diagnostics will compress the value of pure fault-code lookup and reward technicians who can program, commission, and take responsibility for energized work.", "what_would_raise_it": { "levers": [ { "dimension": "liability_shield", "change": "State electrical licensing boards closing the 'maintenance/repair exemption' that currently lets industrial equipment repairers work energized gear without a journeyman or maintenance-electrician license — several states (e.g. Ohio, Texas, Washington) periodically revisit this exemption in board rulemaking. If repair of switchgear and motor control centers above a voltage threshold requires a licensed individual, the signature moat appears where there is none.", "plausibility": "plausible", "would_add": 5 }, { "dimension": "liability_shield", "change": "Energized-work permits under NFPA 70E / OSHA 1910.333 becoming an insurer-audited artifact: property carriers (FM Global, Zurich) conditioning arc-flash and equipment-damage coverage on a named 'qualified person' signing the permit, the incident-energy analysis, and post-repair verification. This is already how some large plants operate contractually; generalizing it makes the named human legally exposed rather than merely competent.", "plausibility": "already happening", "would_add": 3 }, { "dimension": "liability_shield", "change": "IEC 62443 / NERC CIP-style OT cybersecurity regimes extending to plant floors, requiring a named, credentialed technician to attest to firmware and PLC logic changes made on-site — because an AI-suggested drive parameter or ladder-logic edit becomes an auditable configuration change requiring human attestation.", "plausibility": "plausible", "would_add": 3 }, { "dimension": "trust_premium", "change": "OEM-authorized-service structures tightening: manufacturers (Rockwell, Siemens, ABB) voiding warranty or blocking firmware/licence keys unless repair is performed by a factory-certified individual technician. Buyers then pay specifically for the credentialed person, not the cheapest hands. Already partly in force on drives and safety PLCs.", "plausibility": "already happening", "would_add": 3 }, { "dimension": "task_resistance", "change": "Task-mix shift as AI absorbs the schematic-reading, fault-tree, and report tier: the residual day becomes intermittent-fault chasing, undocumented legacy retrofits, and calls where sensor data and the AI's prediction are wrong. Genuine two-tier occupation, but headroom is small because the score is already 16 and the physical tier was never the automatable part.", "plausibility": "already happening", "would_add": 2 }, { "dimension": "judgment_accountability", "change": "Formal lockout/tagout and return-to-service authority being vested in the individual technician by union or site contract — the person who energizes owns the call, including overriding an AI 'safe to restart' recommendation. Visible in some IBEW and USW maintenance agreements and in pharma/food GMP requalification sign-offs.", "plausibility": "plausible", "would_add": 3 } ], "ceiling_note": "Capability dimensions are near saturation; realistic upside is 8-12 points and lives almost entirely in liability_shield, which is the one dimension a state board or an insurer can change by writing a rule. Trust premium is capped because the buyer is a plant maintenance manager buying uptime, not a consumer buying humanness." }, "adjudication": { "method": "two independent runs agreed on the verdict", "outcome": "corroborated", "run_totals": [ 67, 67 ], "run_verdicts": [ "SAFE", "SAFE" ] }, "employment_history": { "points": [ { "y": 2017, "emp": 64380, "wage": 57190 }, { "y": 2018, "emp": 59520, "wage": 58110 }, { "y": 2019, "emp": 58930, "wage": 59300 }, { "y": 2020, "emp": 55200, "wage": 62010 }, { "y": 2021, "emp": 50780, "wage": 61730 }, { "y": 2022, "emp": 51650, "wage": 64030 }, { "y": 2023, "emp": 58320, "wage": 66680 }, { "y": 2024, "emp": 59990, "wage": 71300 }, { "y": 2025, "emp": 65010, "wage": 74090 } ], "from": 2017, "to": 2025, "change_pct": 1, "comparable_from": 2019, "spans_soc_revision": true }, "pivots": [], "license": "https://cookedindex.com/terms" }