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.
Roughly flat across the period, with year-to-year wobble.
Median pay $35,470 → $45,670 +3.0% 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
-7.8%
Percentage only. The projection counts a different population from the 192,260 above — it includes self-employed workers, which for this occupation is most of them, so the two headcounts are not comparable.
Exposed, and shrinking
Both signals point the same way: the tasks are largely automatable and the BLS projects -7.8% by 2034. This is the case where the score and the forecast agree, and it is the one worth taking seriously.
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.
~21,300 openings a year on average, including replacing people who leave.
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The BLS uses Office and Administrative Support Workers, All Other for work that doesn't fit any named occupation, so it covers roles that have little in common with each other. Two consequences worth knowing before you read anything below:
Holding it up: task resistance . Weakest point: liability shield .
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.
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.
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 (1/20) is whether the law requires a licensed human to sign. Trust premium (5/20) is whether buyers specifically pay for a person. Judgment and accountability (4/20) 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 10 of this occupation's 22 points (45%).
Embodiment (6/20) 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 36/100 — EXPOSED.
Task-mix shift toward exception handling: as document-processing and correspondence tiers are automated, the residual job becomes chasing non-responders, reconciling records that disagree across systems, and unblocking cases the workflow rejects. This is a genuine two-tier occupation, but the judgment tier is thin and typically gets folded into one supervisor rather than sustaining headcount.
Consolidation of the role into on-site facilities/front-desk duties — badge issuance and visitor escorting under building security policy, wet-signature and notarized document handling, secure physical records custody (HIPAA/CJIS-style paper controls, court clerk paper filings). Where an employer merges the clerical residue into a physical-presence post, the embodiment share of the day rises.
Formal designation as the named human in the loop for automated decisions — e.g. Colorado SB 24-205 and EU AI Act Art. 14 style requirements that a person review and be able to override adverse automated determinations affecting individuals (benefits eligibility, scheduling denials, records corrections). If a clerical post is the designated reviewer of record, the role starts owning consequential calls it currently only routes.
Narrow routes exist only for specific sub-roles: state notary commissions (and the state-by-state remote online notarization rules that keep a commissioned human in the loop), and court-clerk or election-clerk statutory duties where a named human must certify a filing or chain of custody. If an employer requires the clerk to hold a notary commission or a CJIS/HIPAA-designated records-custodian designation, a small personal-accountability floor appears.
The limit. No realistic route to a higher trust premium: buyers do not choose a vendor or agency because a human did the form processing, and the work is invisible to the end customer. The liability and human-in-the-loop levers also tend to concentrate accountability in one designated person per office rather than preserving the current headcount, so scores can rise for the surviving role while the occupation still shrinks sharply. Realistic ceiling is low 40s and only for the sub-slice that becomes notary/custodian/reviewer-of-record.
| Baltimore-Columbia-Towson, MD | 11,050 | $48,010 +5% |
| Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA | 7,130 | $52,780 +16% |
| Miami-Fort Lauderdale-West Palm Beach, FL | 6,730 | $45,420 -1% |
| Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX | 6,210 | $46,690 +2% |
| Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV | 5,910 | $57,160 +25% |
| Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington, MN-WI | 5,100 | $37,660 -18% |
| Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands, TX | 4,820 | $42,970 -6% |
| Orlando-Kissimmee-Sanford, FL | 3,770 | $37,100 -19% |
| Santa Cruz-Watsonville, CA | 150 | $72,830 +59% |
| Buffalo-Cheektowaga, NY | 60 | $67,490 +48% |
| Des Moines-West Des Moines, IA | 1,340 | $66,710 +46% |
Gulf News reports that Standard Chartered plans to cut 7,800 jobs, with AI adoption in back-office operations cited as the driver.
LatestLY reports Standard Chartered will cut its back-office workforce by 15% as part of a restructuring attributed to AI adoption.
Les Echos reports that HSBC is reportedly targeting large-scale job cuts linked to its adoption of artificial intelligence.
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