COOKED
This catch-all clerical category is built from record lookup, form intake, data verification, filing, and answering routine inquiries by phone, email, or counter — the exact work that document AI, chatbots, and self-service portals already do at acceptable quality. There is no licensure, no signature requirement, and almost no discretion beyond applying a written procedure to a submitted form. The modal worker sits at a screen in a records office; the small in-person counter component is the only part that resists.
Core tasks are already automatable. Pulling a record by ID, keying fields off a submitted form, cross-checking that they match the file, and emailing back a status — these are the four things that fill the day, and OCR plus a records-database query already does each one without a person, which is why this sits at 4 rather than in the mixed band.
Fully desk- and screen-based. The only physical work is walking to a file cabinet or shelf, handing paper across a counter, and occasionally scanning a batch — real, but confined to a climate-controlled records room, so it earns 4 rather than 0 and nowhere near a field role.
No licence, no signature requirement. No state licence, no certification exam, no notary seal required to look up a record or accept an intake form; if a record is wrong the agency or employer answers for it, and the clerk's name appears nowhere binding — hence 1, not 0 only because some records positions require a background check to touch the system.
Anonymous artifact production. Some counter regulars and internal departments learn which clerk actually finds things, and that familiarity has value, but the requester wants the record, not you — swap the person behind the window and nobody cancels their request, which caps this at 5.
Executes defined procedures on defined inputs. Decisions are of the form "is field 7 blank" and "does this request match the release-of-information rules in the manual" — escalate anything unusual to a supervisor; the 3 reflects that you do choose when to escalate, but you never own the outcome of the ambiguous call.
Has AI actually changed your work?