{
  "source": "Cooked Index — occupational AI risk register",
  "page": "https://cookedindex.com/jobs/financial-and-investment-analysts/",
  "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": "Financial and Investment Analysts",
    "soc_code": "13-2051",
    "category": "Business",
    "us_employment": 361980,
    "median_annual_wage": 102740
  },
  "verdict": "EXPOSED",
  "risk_resistance": 35,
  "contested": false,
  "near_boundary": false,
  "dimensions": {
    "task_resistance": 6,
    "embodiment": 2,
    "liability_shield": 6,
    "trust_premium": 10,
    "judgment_accountability": 11
  },
  "reasoning": {
    "task_resistance": "Building a DCF from a 10-K, spreading quarterly comps, tracking guidance changes across a coverage universe, and drafting the earnings-day note are all sequence-to-sequence work over structured filings and transcripts — the data feeds are machine-readable and the output templates are standardized, which is why this sits at 6 rather than in the mixed band where original channel checks or private-company diligence would push it.",
    "embodiment": "The job is a Bloomberg terminal, Excel, and a video call with management; the 2 rather than 0 covers site visits, plant tours, and conference attendance that a few sell-side and PE-side analysts still do, but nobody's model breaks because they couldn't be physically present.",
    "liability_shield": "Series 86/87 gates publishing research and Reg AC requires the analyst to certify the view is their own, but no statute makes an analyst personally answerable for a bad price target — enforcement lands on the firm's supervisory failures, which is why this is 6 and not the 12-plus that a CPA attesting to financials carries.",
    "trust_premium": "Buy-side clients pay for a specific analyst's access and call history, and a corporate-development analyst's standing with the CFO matters — but coverage is reassigned, ranked sell-side analysts are substituted, and most junior and internal-FP&A analysts produce output the consumer never attributes to a person, holding this at 10.",
    "judgment_accountability": "Setting the terminal growth rate, deciding a management explanation is not credible, and putting a Sell on a banking client's stock are consequential calls the analyst signs, but they route through an investment committee, a PM's position sizing, or a research director's review before capital moves — real discretion inside a mandate, not final authority over it."
  },
  "rationale": "The median financial analyst spends most of the week on tasks LLMs already do at usable quality: pulling filings and transcripts, updating three-statement models and comps, writing earnings recaps, screening universes, and formatting decks. What persists is the part where a named human takes a position, defends it to a portfolio manager or an investment committee, and absorbs the consequences when it's wrong. There is no licensure wall for most of the job — Series 86/87 registration for published research and CFA norms are thin shields compared to a CPA signature or a PE stamp.",
  "outlook": "Headcount at the junior model-and-memo tier shrinks materially over ten years while a smaller senior tier — thesis owners, PM-track analysts, client-facing advisors — grows in leverage and pay.",
  "what_would_raise_it": {
    "levers": [
      {
        "dimension": "liability_shield",
        "change": "FINRA/SEC enforcement or rule interpretation requiring that a Series 86/87-registered supervisory analyst personally review and approve any AI-generated research content before publication, with named-person liability for the AI's factual claims — FINRA's 2024 Reg Notice 24-09 on gen-AI already asserts existing supervision rules (3110, 2210) apply to AI-produced communications; a formal rule making the approving analyst's registration the required sign-off (rather than firm-level supervision) is the concrete step to watch",
        "plausibility": "plausible",
        "would_add": 4
      },
      {
        "dimension": "liability_shield",
        "change": "Fiduciary-side analog: SEC adopting a final version of the withdrawn 2023 predictive-data-analytics proposal, or state fiduciary rules requiring a documented human analyst attestation on model-derived recommendations in advisory files; would make the analyst's name the audit artifact in exams",
        "plausibility": "plausible",
        "would_add": 3
      },
      {
        "dimension": "task_resistance",
        "change": "Genuine two-tier structure: if the filings-pull / comps-update / earnings-recap tier is fully absorbed by internal copilots (already underway at large banks and asset managers), the residual job is idea origination, channel checks and private-source diligence, and defending a variant view to an IC — work with no ground-truth label to train on",
        "plausibility": "already happening",
        "would_add": 4
      },
      {
        "dimension": "judgment_accountability",
        "change": "Investment committee minutes and allocator due-diligence questionnaires (ILPA, consultant DDQs) increasingly demand a named human decision-owner per position and an explicit statement of where the human overrode the model; formalizing 'who is accountable for this call' in mandate documents raises the score without any regulation",
        "plausibility": "plausible",
        "would_add": 3
      },
      {
        "dimension": "trust_premium",
        "change": "Allocators writing AI-disclosure clauses into IMAs or refusing to pay active fees for signals a client could generate themselves — the premium survives only where the human is the differentiator; watch for consultant questionnaires asking what fraction of research output is model-generated",
        "plausibility": "plausible",
        "would_add": 2
      }
    ],
    "ceiling_note": "The realistic ceiling is mid-50s. There is no CPA- or PE-style stamp available: most of the 362k workers are buy-side or corporate analysts with no registration at all, so liability shields reachable through FINRA touch only the published-research minority. Trust premium is structurally capped because the buyer pays for returns, not for authorship, and the sell-side product is already commoditized."
  },
  "adjudication": null,
  "employment_history": {
    "points": [
      {
        "y": 2021,
        "emp": 291880,
        "wage": 91580
      },
      {
        "y": 2022,
        "emp": 291370,
        "wage": 95080
      },
      {
        "y": 2023,
        "emp": 325220,
        "wage": 99010
      },
      {
        "y": 2024,
        "emp": 340580,
        "wage": 101350
      },
      {
        "y": 2025,
        "emp": 361980,
        "wage": 102740
      }
    ],
    "from": 2021,
    "to": 2025,
    "change_pct": 24,
    "comparable_from": 2021,
    "spans_soc_revision": false
  },
  "pivots": [],
  "license": "https://cookedindex.com/terms"
}