Confer with technical personnel to prepare designs or operational plans.
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 | 21 occupations |
| Tool categories that apply | Vertical agents, Builders, Generalist agents |
| O*NET activity | Communicating with Supervisors, Peers, or Subordinates (4.A.4.a.2) |
What could do this work.
These are the categories of tool that address routine communication and explanation, 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.
Vertical agents
Builders
Generalist agents
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.
21 occupations in the O*NET database perform this activity. Each one has a full breakdown of its other tasks.
- Aerospace Engineering and Operations Technologists and Technicians
- Bioengineers and Biomedical Engineers
- Civil Engineering Technologists and Technicians
- Computer Hardware Engineers
- Electrical and Electronics Drafters
- Electrical Engineers
- Electronics Engineers, Except Computer
- Environmental Engineers
- Fuel Cell Engineers
- Health and Safety Engineers, Except Mining Safety Engineers and Inspectors
- Human Factors Engineers and Ergonomists
- Industrial Engineers
- Landscape Architects
- Manufacturing Engineers
- Marine Engineers and Naval Architects
- Materials Engineers
- Mechanical Drafters
- Mechanical Engineers
- Microsystems Engineers
- Nuclear Engineers
- Transportation Engineers
Work that goes with it.
O*NET groups these under “Communicate with others about specifications or project details”. 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.