Confer with organizational members to accomplish work activities
Part of the output can be produced by software today.
Software drafts well and sends at volume, and vertical support agents now resolve a large share of inbound questions end to end. What does not transfer is the relationship, and the judgment about when a message should not be sent at all.
| How automatable | Partly automatable |
|---|---|
| Kind of work | Routine communication and explanation |
| Jobs that do it | 22 occupations |
| Tool categories that apply | Vertical agents, Builders |
| O*NET activity | Communicating with Supervisors, Peers, or Subordinates (4.A.4.a.2) |
What this looks like on the job
Not our paraphrase. These are real task statements recorded against this activity, spread across the 22 occupations that perform it.
- Confer with board members, organization officials, or staff members to discuss issues, coordinate activities, or resolve problems.
- Confer with colleagues to formulate positions and strategies pertaining to pending issues.
- Confer with department heads or staff to discuss topics such as contracts, selection of advertising media, or product to be advertised.
- Consult with product development personnel on product specifications, such as design, color, or packaging.
- Confer or consult with department heads to plan advertising services and to secure information on equipment and customer specifications.
- Confer with labor relations managers to develop internal communications that keep employees informed of company activities.
- Meet with department heads, managers, supervisors, vendors, and others, to solicit cooperation and resolve problems.
- Review operations and confer with technical or administrative staff to resolve production or processing problems.
- Confer with marketing and sales departments to define client requirements and expectations.
- Collaborate with other departments to integrate logistics with business systems or processes, such as customer sales, order management, accounting, or shipping.
- Confer with supply chain planners to forecast demand or create supply plans that ensure availability of materials or products.
- Confer with management and conduct surveys to identify training needs based on projected production processes, changes, and other factors.
- Confer with other academic staff to explain and formulate admission requirements and course credit policies.
- Confer with management, production, or marketing staff to discuss project specifications or procedures.
- Confer and cooperate with other managers to ensure coordination of hotel activities.
- Confer with health care professionals to determine the best recruitment practices for studies.
- Meet with boards of directors and committees to discuss and resolve legal and environmental issues or disputes between neighbors.
- Collaborate with other officials to prepare and analyze damage assessments following disasters or emergencies.
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 routine communication and explanation, and what it costs.
Drafting replies costs nothing beyond the assistant you already pay for. Only move to a support agent billed per resolution once the inbound volume is large enough that the per-resolution price beats the hour it takes you.
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.
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
22 occupations in the O*NET database perform this activity. Each one has a full breakdown of its other tasks.
- Advertising and Promotions Managers
- Architectural and Engineering Managers
- Bioinformatics Technicians
- Chief Executives
- Clinical Research Coordinators
- Compliance Managers
- Computer and Information Systems Managers
- Education Administrators, Postsecondary
- Emergency Management Directors
- First-Line Supervisors of Entertainment and Recreation Workers, Except Gambling Services
- Industrial Production Managers
- Legislators
- Lodging Managers
- Marketing Managers
- Property, Real Estate, and Community Association Managers
- Public Relations Managers
- Quality Control Systems Managers
- Regulatory Affairs Managers
- Sales Managers
- Supply Chain Managers
- Training and Development Managers
- Transportation, Storage, and Distribution Managers
Work that goes with it
O*NET groups these under “Communicate with others about operational plans or activities”. 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.