EXPOSED
The analytical core of this job — demand forecasting, inventory reports, route and load optimization, RFQ paperwork, shipment tracking dashboards, KPI decks — is exactly the structured data work that optimization software and LLM agents now do faster and cheaper. What holds is the messy layer: calling a carrier at 11pm when a port closes, deciding which customer gets the short allocation, negotiating terms with a supplier who is quietly failing, and walking a distribution center to see why the numbers lie. There is no license and no signature requirement here, so the only real moats are relationship depth and being the person who owns the call when the plan breaks.
Headcount grew steadily across the period.
Median pay $74,750 → $82,320 -11.9% in real terms
This line is counted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics — the one figure on this page that isn't a judgement of ours. Headcount moves on demand, offshoring, demographics and the business cycle, and automation is one term among several, often not the loudest.
So a falling line is not evidence that AI did it, and a rising one is not evidence that it won't. Both happen in this register: some occupations resist automation and shrink anyway, others are highly automatable and keep growing. The marked year is 2020.
BLS projection, 2024–2034
+16.7% 241,000 → 281,300 on the projections basis
Exposed, but growing
AI can already do a lot of these tasks, and the BLS still expects +16.7% more of these jobs by 2034. Demand for the output is growing faster than the work is being automated away — the mechanism BLS gives for software developers, and the combination people most often misread as an error.
Different clocks. The score is what current AI could do to this work today. The projection is how many of these jobs will exist in 2034. Everything between the two — how fast employers actually adopt, whether demand grows in the meantime — is why they can point opposite ways without either being wrong.
~26,400 openings a year on average, including replacing people who leave.
PlannerEngineerSchedulerLogisticianCost EngineerDemand PlannerSupply PlannerLogistics ClerkSystem EngineerMaterial AnalystMaterial PlannerInventory AnalystLogistics AnalystLogistics PlannerSupply SpecialistSupply TechnicianLogistics EngineerProduction PlannerAcquisition AnalystLogistics AssociateProcurement AnalystDelivery CoordinatorLogistics SpecialistLogistics Technician
Holding it up: judgment & accountability . Weakest point: liability shield .
Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier An 8 reflects that the recurring deliverables — MRP runs, safety-stock recalcs, freight-spend variance reports, carrier scorecards, ASN and BOL exception queues — are already handled by TMS/WMS modules and can be assembled by an agent from ERP tables, while the residual defensible work (rerouting live freight around a strike, requalifying a second-source supplier under time pressure) is real but is a minority of the working week rather than the bulk of it.
Some physical or field component A 5 rather than a 0 is earned by the site visits that do happen — walking a DC to see why cycle counts don't match the system, watching a dock turn to time trailer loading, auditing a 3PL's putaway — but you do this in a controlled warehouse in shoes you chose, not in weather or under a truck, and most weeks you never leave the screen.
No licence, no signature requirement A 3 is right because APICS CPIM/CSCP and CLTD are resume items no customer or regulator requires; even in regulated lanes — hazmat manifests, ITAR/EAR export classification, C-TPAT filings — the legal exposure lands on the licensed customs broker, the signing officer, or the carrier, and nobody's professional license is revoked when your allocation call is wrong.
Meaningful discretion An 11 is set by the calls that are genuinely yours and genuinely ambiguous — which customer eats the shortage during an allocation, whether to air-freight at 6x cost or take the line-down risk, when to walk from a supplier you suspect is insolvent — bounded by the fact that spend above a threshold escalates to a director and the S&OP consensus, so you own the recommendation more often than the final signature.
The verdict above describes this occupation as a whole. Almost nobody does the typical version of a job — tick what's actually in your week and see how your own mix sits.
Your task mix speaks to task resistance (8/20 here) — how much of the day's work current AI already does. That is the dimension the boxes above are about.
It cannot move the other three. Liability shield (3/20) is whether the law requires a licensed human to sign. Trust premium (8/20) is whether buyers specifically pay for a person. Judgment and accountability (11/20) is whether the role exists to own consequential calls. Those are facts about the occupation's standing, not about which tasks are in your week — a paralegal who does only trial exhibits still holds no licence. Together they are 22 of this occupation's 35 points (63%).
Embodiment (5/20) is also a property of the work rather than the worker, but we don't tag individual tasks as physical or not, so the picker can't tell you anything about it. That's a limit of this tool, not a claim.
Did we get the list right? Tell us what's missing — the tasks are written from the outside, and you're reading this from the inside.
The moves above are yours to make. This is the other half: what would have to change in the world for the occupation itself to score higher. None of it is in any one person's gift, but it is where the floor actually comes from. Scores here are not a one-way ratchet. Only two of the five dimensions — task resistance and embodiment — track what machines can do. The other three track law, what buyers will pay for, and who is answerable, and those move in both directions, often in response to the same pressure AI creates. If every lever below landed, this occupation would score around 50/100, still EXPOSED.
Defense-sector and controlled-goods logistics already require named human accountability: ITAR/EAR export classification and licensing decisions, DFARS supply-chain risk attestations, and CTPAT/AEO trade-compliance certifications require a designated responsible person whose signature carries personal civil and criminal exposure. If BIS/OFAC enforcement guidance or a Section 232/UFLPA-style forced-labor traceability rule explicitly rejects algorithmic-only due diligence and names a human compliance officer as signer, logisticians in trade-compliance roles gain a real shield. Also watch FDA DSCSA (drug supply chain) chain-of-custody attestation and FSMA 204 food traceability recordkeeping, both of which name responsible persons.
Genuine two-tier structure: the reporting/forecasting/RFQ tier automates, leaving exception management, carrier escalation, supplier-distress negotiation, and physical site diagnosis. Task resistance rises mechanically as the routine tier is stripped out — but headcount falls at the same time, so the surviving role scores higher while there are fewer of them. Watch job postings shifting title from 'logistics analyst' to 'supply chain risk' or 'network resilience'.
Allocation under scarcity is the one call nobody wants an algorithm to own: which hospital gets the short ventilator lot, which dealer gets the chip allocation, which customer's contract gets breached. If a major customer-facing failure produces litigation or an FTC/DOT inquiry where 'the optimizer decided' is rejected as a defense — as happened reputationally in the 2021-22 allocation years — firms formalize a named human allocation authority with documented rationale. Force majeure declaration and cargo-abandonment decisions sit here too.
Narrow route: cross-border and sanctions-adjacent brokerage where counterparties want a named person on the phone who can be held to a commitment. Customs brokers hold an actual license (19 CFR 111) and logisticians who take that license move into a different, protected posture. Absent licensure, there is no broad consumer or B2B willingness to pay for a human logistician per se — the buyer pays for on-time delivery.
The limit. Even with every lever, this caps around mid-50s. There is no general license for logisticians, the embodiment floor is low (site walks are occasional, not daily), and the analytical bulk of the work is the exact structured-data task LLM agents handle. The protected variants — licensed customs broker, ITAR empowered official, DSCSA responsible person — are subsets, not the occupation. Most of the 251,040 sit in the automatable tier.
| Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA | 10,950 | $81,730 -1% |
| Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN | 10,220 | $79,900 -3% |
| New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ | 8,860 | $92,540 +12% |
| Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV | 8,020 | $104,330 +27% |
| Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Roswell, GA | 7,420 | $77,570 -6% |
| Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX | 7,050 | $76,510 -7% |
| Detroit-Warren-Dearborn, MI | 5,920 | $93,130 +13% |
| Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands, TX | 5,420 | $75,940 -8% |
| Lexington Park, MD | 1,350 | $131,600 +60% |
| Huntsville, AL | 2,780 | $117,060 +42% |
| San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA | 3,440 | $115,570 +40% |
We have no reported case of a named organisation automating this occupation. Not one deployment, not one announcement.
That is worth saying out loud next to a score of 35. The verdict above is about what the work exposes — what current AI could do to these tasks. It is not a claim that anyone has done it. For this occupation those two things have come apart completely: the capability argument is on this page, and the evidence column is empty.
Has AI actually changed your work? One tap, anonymous, and the running tally is public. Nothing else is asked of you.
Rather than check back: get the digest and we'll tell you what changed — or watch a single occupation from its own page.