Assist customers to ensure comfort or safety
Little of this can be handed to software today.
The documentation around care is highly automatable and that is where the time goes back. The care itself needs physical presence and someone accountable for the outcome, so this work stays where it is.
| How automatable | Barely automatable |
|---|---|
| Kind of work | Direct care and assistance |
| Jobs that do it | 11 occupations |
| Tool categories that apply | Vertical agents |
| O*NET activity | Assisting and Caring for Others (4.A.4.a.5) |
What this looks like on the job
Not our paraphrase. These are real task statements recorded against this activity, spread across the 11 occupations that perform it.
- Provide headphones or earplugs to patients to improve comfort and reduce unpleasant noise.
- Provide assistance in the safe use of equipment, such as ski lifts.
- Buckle seatbelts or fasten wheelchair tie-down straps to secure passengers for transportation.
- Greet and seat customers.
- Assist with duties in other areas of the store, such as monitoring fitting rooms or bagging and carrying out customers' items.
- Reassure passengers when situations, such as turbulence, are encountered.
- Regulate heating, lighting, and ventilation systems for student comfort.
- Regulate heating, lighting, and ventilating systems for passenger comfort.
- Regulate heating, lighting, and ventilation systems for passenger comfort.
- Provide customer assistance and information, such as giving directions or handling wheelchairs.
- Secure passengers for transportation by buckling seatbelts or fastening wheelchairs with tie-down straps.
- Evacuate students from the school bus in emergency situations.
- Conduct periodic trips through the cabin to ensure passenger comfort and to distribute reading material, headphones, pillows, playing cards, and blankets.
- Call emergency responders or the proper authorities and provide motorist assistance, such as giving directions or helping jump start a stalled vehicle.
- Adjust window shades or seat cushions at the request of passengers.
- Heat and serve prepared foods.
- Take numbered tags from customers, locate vehicles, and deliver vehicles, or provide customers with instructions for locating vehicles.
- Greet customers and open their car doors.
What we would actually use
Nothing in our landscape addresses this work. That is the honest answer rather than a padded list: this activity needs a person present, or a machine rather than a software agent.
Buy nothing for the care itself. The time comes back from the documentation around it, so the stack worth building is the recording one, on the pages for that work.
Chosen for the cheapest thing that does the job, not the best funded. Nothing on this site is sponsored, and the full landscape is there when you want to disagree with us.
The rest of the category
Context, not alternatives to weigh up. We name the layer rather than promise a named product does your specific task.
Matched from the kind of work, not from vendor marketing. Check any of them can reach the system your records actually live in — that connection, not the model, is where these projects stall.
Who does this work
11 occupations in the O*NET database perform this activity. Each one has a full breakdown of its other tasks.
- Bus Drivers, School
- Bus Drivers, Transit and Intercity
- Cashiers
- Dining Room and Cafeteria Attendants and Bartender Helpers
- Flight Attendants
- Lifeguards, Ski Patrol, and Other Recreational Protective Service Workers
- Magnetic Resonance Imaging Technologists
- Parking Attendants
- Passenger Attendants
- School Bus Monitors
- Shuttle Drivers and Chauffeurs
Work that goes with it
O*NET groups these under “Provide general assistance to others, such as customers, patrons, or motorists”. In practice they tend to be done by the same person, in the same sitting.
Method. The activity, its taxonomy placement and the occupations that perform it come straight from the public-domain O*NET 30.3 database. The automatability band is ours: we map each of O*NET’s 41 generalized work activities to how much of its output current software can produce, assuming a person still reviews and owns the result. It is a coarse three-way judgment on purpose. A precise-looking percentage here would be invented.