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.
Headcount grew steadily across the period.
Median pay $63,790 → $78,760 -1.2% 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
+6.7% 941,700 → 1,004,700 on the projections basis
Exposed, but growing
AI can already do a lot of these tasks, and the BLS still expects +6.7% 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.
~87,200 openings a year on average, including replacing people who leave.
MarketerStrategistWeb AnalystTrade AnalystEvent MarketerMarket AnalystSearch ManagerWeb ConsultantDigital MarketerInternet AnalystSearch AssociateTrade SpecialistMarket ResearcherMarketing AnalystSearch ConsultantSearch SpecialistSearch StrategistDigital StrategistAdvertising AnalystDemographic AnalystMarketing AssociatePaid Search ManagerMarketing ConsultantMarketing Forecaster
Holding it up: judgment & accountability . Weakest point: liability shield .
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 (6/20 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 (2/20) is whether the law requires a licensed human to sign. Trust premium (7/20) is whether buyers specifically pay for a person. Judgment and accountability (9/20) 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 18 of this occupation's 28 points (64%).
Embodiment (4/20) 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.
Marketing Managers EXPOSED
Fundraisers EXPOSED
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 43/100 — EXPOSED.
Task-mix shift: once cross-tabs, dashboard building and deck drafting are fully automated, the residual role is research design (what question is worth asking, sampling frame validity) plus live qualitative moderation — IDIs, focus groups, ethnography — where respondent rapport and real-time probing are not yet substitutable. This raises task_resistance only for the minority who actually hold those tasks; the modal cross-tab analyst has no such tier to retreat into.
FTC substantiation enforcement is the only live route: if advertisers face penalties for unsubstantiated claims backed by synthetic or AI-generated survey data, a named human researcher may have to attest to methodology in the substantiation file. Analogous to the existing requirement that Nielsen/MRC-accredited audience measurement be human-audited (MRC accreditation already requires named auditors).
If the role is redefined so the analyst owns the go/no-go on product launch or budget reallocation rather than supplying inputs to a marketing director who owns it — i.e. absorbs a slice of the brand-manager decision as that layer thins — accountability rises. Depends entirely on org design, not on the occupation itself.
If synthetic-respondent panels (Synthetic Users, Evidenza, and similar) get publicly caught producing a bad category read, buyers may demand human-verified sampling and fielding audits — bot-detection, panel fraud review, incidence validation — which is judgment-heavy nuisance work AI cannot self-certify.
If state privacy regimes (CPRA, Colorado AIA) or the EU AI Act's profiling provisions require a named human to sign off on data protection impact assessments for consumer segmentation models, some analysts inherit an attestation duty.
Narrow route only: Insights Association / ESOMAR certification plus a client-side procurement rule requiring disclosure of whether respondents were human. Some buyers already write 'no synthetic respondents' into MSAs. This buys a premium for the fielding and qualitative side, not for the analyst who writes the deck.
The limit. Even with every lever firing, this stays in the 40s. There is no license to capture, no physical component, and the deliverable is text and tables. The liability and trust routes attach to fielding and methodology attestation — a small subspecialty — not to the ~900k modal workers who cross-tab and build decks. Nothing here rescues that majority.
| New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ | 79,290 | $100,520 +28% |
| Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA | 39,390 | $82,990 +5% |
| Boston-Cambridge-Newton, MA-NH | 32,310 | $102,390 +30% |
| Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN | 30,970 | $80,400 +2% |
| San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA | 24,120 | $123,250 +56% |
| Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV | 21,090 | $87,160 +11% |
| Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX | 20,900 | $75,240 -4% |
| Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Roswell, GA | 19,920 | $79,030 +0% |
| San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA | 12,710 | $141,960 +80% |
| San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA | 24,120 | $123,250 +56% |
| Boston-Cambridge-Newton, MA-NH | 32,310 | $102,390 +30% |
Israeli software firm Monday.com reportedly cut 20% of its workforce as part of a restructuring attributed to AI, per Calcalist.
Business Insider reported that Monday.com plans to lay off 20% of its workforce, with a co-CEO memo attributing the restructuring to an AI-driven growth strategy.
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