Provide information to coworkers
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.
- Provide clerks with information to print on price tags, such as price, mark-ups or mark-downs, manufacturer number, season code, or style number.
- Conduct film screenings for directors and members of production staffs.
- Identify and share research, recommendations, or other information regarding legal liabilities, risk management, or quality of care.
- Carry messages or documents between departments.
- Provide staff with assistance in performing difficult or complicated duties.
- Make recommendations to management concerning such issues as staffing decisions or procedural changes.
- Notify credit departments, order merchandise repossession or service disconnection, and turn over account records to attorneys when customers fail to respond to collection attempts.
- Post stop-payment notices to prevent payment of protested checks.
- Provide information to employees and managers on payroll matters, tax issues, benefit plans, and collective agreement provisions.
- Maintain knowledge of all organizational and governmental rules affecting purchases, and provide information about these rules to organization staff members and to vendors.
- Provide social workers with pertinent information gathered during applicant interviews.
- Find, retrieve, and make copies of information from files in response to requests and deliver information to authorized users.
- Advise housekeeping staff when rooms have been vacated and are ready for cleaning.
- Notify departments when supplies of specific items are low, or when orders would deplete available supplies.
- Advise personnel about traffic problems, such as construction areas, accidents, congestion, weather conditions, or other hazards.
- Distribute production schedules or work orders to departments.
- Remove from stock products or loads not meeting quality standards, and notify supervisors or appropriate departments of discrepancies or shortages.
- Submit articles and information from searches to attorneys for review and approval for use.
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.
- Bill and Account Collectors
- Billing and Posting Clerks
- Data Entry Keyers
- Dispatchers, Except Police, Fire, and Ambulance
- Eligibility Interviewers, Government Programs
- File Clerks
- Film and Video Editors
- First-Line Supervisors of Non-Retail Sales Workers
- First-Line Supervisors of Office and Administrative Support Workers
- Hotel, Motel, and Resort Desk Clerks
- Insurance Claims and Policy Processing Clerks
- Legal Secretaries and Administrative Assistants
- Office Clerks, General
- Office Machine Operators, Except Computer
- Order Clerks
- Orderlies
- Patient Representatives
- Payroll and Timekeeping Clerks
- Procurement Clerks
- Production, Planning, and Expediting Clerks
- Weighers, Measurers, Checkers, and Samplers, Recordkeeping
- Wholesale and Retail Buyers, Except Farm Products
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.