Monitor current trends
Part of the output can be produced by software today.
A scheduled check against a live source, with an alert when something moves, is one of the cheapest things on this page to automate, and software will watch far more indicators than a person can hold in their head. What it does not do is notice the thing nobody thought to watch for, or decide that a reading is worth acting on.
| How automatable | Partly automatable |
|---|---|
| Kind of work | Monitoring and oversight |
| Jobs that do it | 11 occupations |
| Tool categories that apply | Builders, Tools and auth |
| O*NET activity | Monitoring Processes, Materials, or Surroundings (4.A.1.a.2) |
What this looks like on the job
Not our paraphrase. These are real task statements recorded against this activity, spread across the 11 occupations that perform it.
- Research craft trends, venues, and customer buying patterns to inspire designs and marketing strategies.
- 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.
- Attend fashion shows and review garment magazines and manuals to gather information about fashion trends and consumer preferences.
- Attend training sessions or corporate planning meetings to obtain new ideas for product launches.
- Attend or view productions to maintain knowledge of available actors.
- Monitor the field of dance to remain aware of current trends and innovations.
- Seek influences from other art forms, such as theatre, the visual arts, and architecture.
- Develop ideas or material for columns or commentaries by analyzing and interpreting news, current issues, or personal experiences.
- Analyze developments in specific field to determine need for revisions in previously published materials and development of new material.
- Review advertising trends, consumer surveys, and other data regarding marketing of goods and services to determine the best way to promote products.
- Visit textile showrooms to keep up-to-date on the latest fabrics.
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 monitoring and oversight, and what it costs.
Monitoring is a scheduled check plus an alert, which is the cheapest thing on this site to build: Make from $9 a month, or n8n for nothing if you host it yourself. A dedicated monitoring product is very rarely worth the line item.
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.
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 “Monitor external affairs, trends, or events”. In practice they tend to be done by the same person, in the same sitting.
| Activity | Jobs |
|---|---|
| Monitor market conditions or trends | 9 |
| Monitor external affairs or events affecting business operations | 8 |
| Monitor external factors impacting operations | 1 |
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.