Conduct research to inform art, designs, or other work
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 | 13 occupations |
| Tool categories that apply | Web, data and docs, Generalist agents |
| O*NET activity | Updating and Using Relevant Knowledge (4.A.2.b.3) |
What this looks like on the job
Not our paraphrase. These are real task statements recorded against this activity, spread across the 13 occupations that perform it.
- Conduct research on fire retardants and the fire safety of materials and devices.
- Conduct or direct mining experiments to test or prove research findings.
- Monitor events, trends, and other circumstances, research specific subject areas, attend art exhibitions, and read art publications to develop ideas and keep current on art world activities.
- Read publications, attend showings, and study competing products and design styles and motifs to obtain perspective and generate design concepts.
- Research the styles and periods of clothing needed for film or theatrical productions.
- Research the target audience of projects.
- Research and explore the use of new materials, technologies, and products to incorporate into designs.
- Research architectural and stylistic elements appropriate to the time period to be depicted, consulting experts for information, as necessary.
- Research production topics using the internet, video archives, and other informational sources.
- Research particular roles to find out more about a character, or the time and place in which a piece is set.
- Conduct research to obtain factual information and authentic detail, using sources such as newspaper accounts, diaries, and interviews.
- Refer to reference materials, such as dictionaries, lexicons, encyclopedias, and computerized terminology banks, as needed to ensure translation accuracy.
- Research health and safety code requirements to inform design.
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
13 occupations in the O*NET database perform this activity. Each one has a full breakdown of its other tasks.
- Commercial and Industrial Designers
- Fashion Designers
- Fine Artists, Including Painters, Sculptors, and Illustrators
- Fire-Prevention and Protection Engineers
- Graphic Designers
- Interior Designers
- Interpreters and Translators
- Mining and Geological Engineers, Including Mining Safety Engineers
- Musicians and Singers
- Poets, Lyricists and Creative Writers
- Producers and Directors
- Set and Exhibit Designers
- Writers and Authors
Work that goes with it
O*NET groups these under “Maintain current knowledge in area of expertise”. 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.