Review technical documents to plan 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 | 15 occupations |
| Tool categories that apply | Web, data and docs, Generalist agents |
| O*NET activity | Getting Information (4.A.1.a.1) |
What this looks like on the job
Not our paraphrase. These are real task statements recorded against this activity, spread across the 15 occupations that perform it.
- Review and approve all systems charts and programs prior to their implementation.
- Review production schedules, engineering specifications, orders, and related information to obtain knowledge of manufacturing methods, procedures, and activities.
- Study product characteristics or customer requirements to determine validation objectives and standards.
- Study design proposals and specifications to establish basic characteristics of craft, such as size, weight, speed, propulsion, displacement, and draft.
- Read and interpret blueprints, technical drawings, schematics, or computer-generated reports.
- Examine maps, deposits, drilling locations, or mines to determine the location, size, accessibility, contents, value, and potential profitability of mineral, oil, and gas deposits.
- Locate and identify symbols on topographical surveys to denote geological and geophysical formations or oil field installations.
- Examine electronic schematics and supporting documents to develop, compute, and verify specifications for drafting data, such as configuration of parts, dimensions, or tolerances.
- Read and review project blueprints and structural specifications to determine dimensions of structure or system and material requirements.
- Read blueprints, wiring diagrams, schematic drawings, or engineering instructions for assembling electronics units, applying knowledge of electronic theory and components.
- Read blueprints, schematics, diagrams, or technical orders to determine methods and sequences of assembly.
- Review project instructions and blueprints to ascertain test specifications, procedures, and objectives, and test nature of technical problems such as redesign.
- Read and interpret blueprints, schematics, work specifications, drawings, or charts.
- Review documents written by others.
- Review physicians' orders to confirm prescribed exams.
- Study operations sequence, material flow, functional statements, organization charts, and project information to determine worker functions and responsibilities.
- Review work requests and compare them with previous work completed on ships to ensure that costs are economically sound.
- Study work order requests to determine type of service, such as lighting or power, demanded by installation.
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
15 occupations in the O*NET database perform this activity. Each one has a full breakdown of its other tasks.
- Architectural and Civil Drafters
- Automotive Engineering Technicians
- Civil Engineering Technologists and Technicians
- Computer and Information Systems Managers
- Economists
- Electrical and Electronic Engineering Technologists and Technicians
- Electrical and Electronics Drafters
- Electro-Mechanical and Mechatronics Technologists and Technicians
- Industrial Engineers
- Magnetic Resonance Imaging Technologists
- Marine Engineers and Naval Architects
- Mechanical Engineering Technologists and Technicians
- Mechanical Engineers
- Mining and Geological Engineers, Including Mining Safety Engineers
- Validation Engineers
Work that goes with it
O*NET groups these under “Read documents or materials to inform work processes”. 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.