Collect information about clients
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 | 10 occupations |
| Tool categories that apply | Web, data and docs, Generalist agents |
| O*NET activity | Getting Information (4.A.1.a.1) |
What this looks like on the job
Not our paraphrase. These are real task statements recorded against this activity, spread across the 10 occupations that perform it.
- Compile and interpret students' test results, along with information from teachers and parents, to diagnose conditions and to help assess eligibility for special services.
- Collect information about clients, using techniques such as testing, interviewing, discussion, or observation.
- Collect information about clients through interviews, observation, or tests.
- Collect supplementary information needed to assist client, such as employment records, medical records, or school reports.
- Identify environmental impediments to client or patient progress through interviews and review of patient records.
- Interview clients, review records, conduct assessments, or confer with other professionals to evaluate the mental or physical condition of clients or patients.
- Gather information about offenders' backgrounds by talking to offenders, their families and friends, and other people who have relevant information.
- Indicate artifacts or interferences derived from sources outside of the brain, such as poor electrode contact or patient movement, on electroneurodiagnostic recordings.
- Take fingerprints of arrestees, prisoners, or the general public.
- Confer with medical personnel to better understand the backgrounds and needs of individual residents.
- Gather information from doctors, schools, social workers, juvenile counselors, law enforcement personnel, and others to make recommendations to courts for resolution of child custody or visitation disputes.
What we would actually use
One recommendation rather than a shortlist, because a shortlist is just your problem handed back. This is what we would buy for research and retrieval work, and what it costs.
Research is the one shape of work that needs no integration at all, so a single $20 assistant with browsing is the whole stack. Add a crawler only once you are pulling hundreds of pages on a schedule rather than reading a few.
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.
Generalist agents
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.
How people actually do it
No workflow names this activity yet, but these automate the same kind of work, with the prompts to paste and what to keep for yourself.
Who does this work
10 occupations in the O*NET database perform this activity. Each one has a full breakdown of its other tasks.
- Child, Family, and School Social Workers
- Correctional Officers and Jailers
- Healthcare Social Workers
- Marriage and Family Therapists
- Mental Health and Substance Abuse Social Workers
- Mental Health Counselors
- Neurodiagnostic Technologists
- Probation Officers and Correctional Treatment Specialists
- Residential Advisors
- School Psychologists
Work that goes with it
O*NET groups these under “Collect information about patients or clients”. 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.