COOKED
The core loop — feed materials, monitor fill weights and seals, log counts, clear jams, run changeovers — sits inside a controlled, repeatable factory environment, which is exactly where conventional automation and machine vision already win; AI mainly accelerates the inspection and scheduling layers that used to justify a human tender. Physical presence still matters for jam clearing, tooling changeovers, sanitation and material handling, which is why the job doesn't vanish overnight, but headcount per line keeps falling as vision-based QC and auto-changeover systems get cheaper. No license, no client relationship, and almost no discretionary authority to fall back on.
Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier. Checkweighers, vision seal inspection and PLC recipe recall already cover the monitored steps, and the counting and downtime logging that used to be your clipboard now writes itself into the MES — what keeps this at 8 rather than 3 is that a bag jam in a VFFS former, a film splice, or swapping change parts for a different bottle diameter still needs hands and feel that no line has bought out yet.
Hands-on in uncontrolled environments. You are on the floor for a full shift: reaching into guarded machine sections after lockout to pull crushed cartons, wet-sanitation washdown on food lines, lifting film reels and cases, standing on concrete near moving conveyors — 13 not higher because it is your plant, your fixed line, with known layout and controlled temperature, not a construction site or a customer's roof.
No licence, no signature requirement. There is no operator license for a filler; a forklift cert or food-handler card and internal SOP sign-offs are the ceiling, and when a lot ships underweight or with a bad seal it is the QA manager and the plant's HACCP or FDA-registered facility responsibility on the line, not your name — hence 2 rather than 0, since documented GMP training does exist.
Anonymous artifact production. The buyer sees a sealed case, never you; the only relationship is with the maintenance tech and the supervisor down the hall, and either could be handed your line next shift with a two-page changeover sheet.
Executes defined procedures on defined inputs. Your calls are bounded ones — stop the line, adjust a fill target within tolerance, tag out a bad head, call maintenance — all with a defined trigger and a spec sheet behind them, and the 4 reflects that you decide when to pull the andon and quarantine product rather than being a pure button-pusher.
Roof Bolters, Mining EXPOSED
Has AI actually changed your work?