Collect data about customer needs.
Most of the output can be produced by software today.
An agent can find, read and summarise the sources this work depends on, and it can cover far more of them than a person would ever open. What it does not do is decide which sources deserve trust, or what the findings mean for your situation.
| How automatable | Mostly automatable |
|---|---|
| Kind of work | Research and retrieval work |
| Jobs that do it | 11 occupations |
| Tool categories that apply | Web, data and docs, Generalist agents, Builders, Models and routing |
| O*NET activity | Getting Information (4.A.1.a.1) |
What could do this work.
These are the categories of tool that address research and retrieval work, with a few live examples from our landscape. We name the category rather than promise that a specific product does your specific task, because that promise would not be true.
Web, data and docs
Generalist agents
Builders
Models and routing
Categories are matched from the kind of work, not from vendor marketing. Before committing to any of them, check that the tool can reach the system your record actually lives in. That connection, not the model, is where most of 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.
Work that goes with it.
O*NET groups these under “Collect data about consumer needs or opinions”. 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.