COOKED
The core loop — receiving orders by phone, email, or fax, keying them into an ERP or order-management system, checking stock and pricing, confirming ship dates, and tracking shipment status — is exactly what EDI, e-commerce portals, and now LLM-based document extraction already do end to end. Employment has been falling for two decades because customers increasingly place their own orders; AI removes the remaining human-in-the-middle for unstructured inputs like emailed PDFs and voicemail. What survives is the exception tier: expediting a stuck order, untangling a pricing or allocation dispute, and holding an account relationship together when the system fails.
Core tasks are already automatable. Keying a PO into SAP or NetSuite, checking availability against on-hand inventory, applying a contract price list, and emailing an order acknowledgment are all deterministic lookups against structured records — that's a 3 rather than a 0 only because emailed PDFs, handwritten faxes and voicemail orders still occasionally need a human to read intent before the extraction step gets it right.
Fully desk- and screen-based. The job is a headset, a keyboard and two monitors; the 2 rather than 0 covers order clerks who walk to the warehouse floor to eyeball a pallet or pull a physical file when the system count and the actual count disagree.
No licence, no signature requirement. There is no licence, no certification body, and no statute naming order clerks — a mispriced or misrouted order is absorbed by the employer's credit memo process, not by anything you personally signed.
Anonymous artifact production. Repeat B2B buyers do learn your name and will call you directly to expedite, which is worth 5 — but the account belongs to the sales rep, purchase decisions are made on price and lead time, and the customer will place the same order through a web portal the moment it's faster.
Executes defined procedures on defined inputs. Discretion is bounded by published price lists, credit-hold flags and allocation rules set upstream; the 3 reflects real calls like which of two backordered customers gets the last case, but those decisions escalate to a supervisor or sales manager as soon as any dollar figure gets interesting.
Has AI actually changed your work?