← Risk register SOC 13-1161 · reviewed 2026-08-11

Market Research Analysts and Marketing Specialists

899,580 US workers · median $78,760/yr · Business

COOKED

The modal worker in this title spends the day writing survey instruments, cleaning and cross-tabbing response data, pulling competitor and category summaries, building dashboards, and turning it all into slide decks and campaign performance write-ups — exactly the text-and-table work generative models already do at usable quality and near-zero marginal cost. There is no license, no signature, no physical component, and the client rarely buys the person rather than the deck. What survives sits in the thin upper tier: framing which question is actually worth answering, moderating live qualitative work, and standing behind a recommendation that reallocates real budget.

10-year outlook: Expect headcount to compress sharply at the junior report-producing tier while a smaller senior cohort of research designers and executive-facing advisors keeps its pay and gains leverage.

Score — 28/100 resistance

Five dimensions, 0–20 each, summed. Higher means more protected. The arithmetic is shown so you can check it: 6 + 4 + 2 + 7 + 9 = 28.

Task resistance 6/20

Core tasks are already automatable. Writing Likert batteries, running cross-tabs and significance tests in SPSS or Qualtrics, scraping Nielsen/Mintel category reports into a competitive summary, and assembling the monthly campaign performance deck are all text-and-table transformations an LLM plus a BI connector now does end-to-end, which is why this sits at 6 rather than mid-band — the residual manual work (recruiting and moderating a focus group, negotiating a panel vendor's incidence rate) is a minority of the modal week, not half of it.

Embodiment 4/20

Fully desk- and screen-based. A 4 rather than a 0 reflects the occasional in-person duty — intercept interviews at a store entrance, sitting behind the glass at a facility, shop-alongs and IHUT setup — but the deliverable is produced entirely on a laptop, and most fielding is now online panel.

Liability shield 2/20

No licence, no signature requirement. No state licence, no board, no statutory signature; the Insights Association's PRC credential and the MRS certificate are resume decoration that no client contract requires, and when a segmentation study leads a brand into a failed launch the exposure is the agency's contract and the CMO's job, not the analyst's — hence 2, not the 5-10 band where certification actually gates the work.

Trust premium 7/20

Some relationship component. A 7 acknowledges that a client-side research lead builds a real multi-year relationship with a brand team and gets called before decisions are framed, but the modal analyst's output is a deck circulated under an agency logo and RFP'd against two competitors on cost per complete, so the relationship travels with the account, not the individual.

Judgment & accountability 9/20

Meaningful discretion. The 9 covers genuine discretion — deciding a low-incidence B2B sample doesn't support the claim leadership wants, choosing a k-means solution over latent class, calling a lift result noise rather than signal — but the analyst recommends and the brand or product owner decides, and much of the day runs on established methodology and tracker rules rather than unprecedented calls.

Confidence: high · reviewed 2026-08-11 · how scoring works

Tasks already automatable

What survives

Active moats: judgment, trust

How to future-proof this job

Escape hatches — adjacent fields with better verdicts

Computed from U.S. Dept. of Labor O*NET skill profiles: high overlap with what you already do, materially higher resistance score.

Securities, Commodities, and Financial Services Sales Agents EXPOSED · 51/100 · you already have ~77% of the skill profile

Skills to close: Management of Financial Resources

Fundraising Managers EXPOSED · 49/100 · you already have ~74% of the skill profile

Skills to close: Management of Financial Resources, Social Perceptiveness, Persuasion, Management of Material Resources

Sales Managers EXPOSED · 47/100 · you already have ~73% of the skill profile

Skills to close: Management of Personnel Resources, Negotiation, Management of Financial Resources, Management of Material Resources

Who is actually doing this

The score above is about what the work exposes. This is reporting about real deployments in this occupation — the difference between "could be automated" and "somebody automated it."

Monday.com

Field report — do you do this job?

Has AI actually changed your work?

Self-reported and unverified — a sentiment signal, not a survey. One response per person per occupation; you can change your answer.

From people who do this job

Nobody has filed one yet. If you do this work, you know things the rubric can't see.

What has actually changed in your work?

Concrete beats general: a tool that arrived, a task that moved, a headcount decision you watched happen. Don't include anything that identifies you or your employer if that would put you at risk.