COOKED
This is the BLS catch-all bucket for clerical roles that don't fit elsewhere — form processing, data lookup and entry, correspondence drafting, scheduling, records maintenance, routing requests through internal systems. Nearly all of that is text-and-screen work that current AI plus workflow automation already handles at usable quality, and none of it requires a license or personal accountability. What holds on is the physical and interpersonal residue: walking documents around, handling badge access and visitors, chasing people who ignore the system, and fixing the cases where the workflow breaks.
Core tasks are already automatable. The daily loop — keying intake forms, looking up account or record status, drafting routine correspondence from templates, updating trackers, routing tickets to the right department — is exactly what document-understanding and workflow tools ship today, and a 6 rather than a 2 only reflects the exception cases: the form that arrives half-legible, the request that fits no category in the system, the internal process nobody documented that lives in your head.
Some physical or field component. You are on your feet some of the day — carrying signature packets between floors, pulling and refiling physical records, stocking supply cabinets, escorting visitors, jamming the copier and unjamming it — but that movement happens on a known floorplan with predictable objects, which puts it at 6 rather than the 13+ of field work where the environment itself is unpredictable.
No licence, no signature requirement. There is no license, no registration, no continuing-education requirement standing between your job and someone else doing it; if a form you processed was wrong, the manager or the licensed professional who relied on it answers for it, and the 1 rather than 0 is only because some postings ask for a certificate or notary commission that anyone can obtain in weeks.
Anonymous artifact production. Coworkers know your name and route hard requests to you because you know which supervisor actually approves things — that internal reputation is real — but the external customer or client rarely knows who processed their paperwork and would not notice a different name on the reply, which caps this at 5.
Executes defined procedures on defined inputs. Your discretion is bounded: choosing which queue a request belongs in, deciding whether an incomplete submission gets bounced back or fixed in-house, flagging something odd upward — the consequential calls on approval, spending, and policy exceptions go to a supervisor, and a 4 rather than 8 reflects how narrow that band of independent decision is.
Has AI actually changed your work?