Advertising Sales Agents have 5 per cent protected work. Parts Salespersons have 63 per cent. The difference is whether the product is information or an object on a shelf.
Exposure means published research judged an AI could halve the time a task takes, at the same quality. It is not a prediction about any job. How to read this
This is the largest occupation in the entire report. Twenty-nine per cent of its listed tasks are reachable with a chat window, and 50 per cent cannot be sped up at all.
That is a much more protected profile than most commentary about retail would suggest, and the reason is in the task list: a great deal of it is being present with a customer.
Advertising Sales Agents are the least protected occupation in the group. Their work is proposals, pitches, media plans and follow-ups, which is text with a commercial purpose.
Sales as a category tells you nothing. What the salesperson physically does all day tells you everything.
Solid is reachable with a chat window today, pale needs software building first, grey cannot be sped up. Task counts are shown because several of these rest on fewer than twenty.
Sourcing, pitching a role, keeping a candidate warm and closing an offer are sales activities, and this chapter suggests they behave like sales in the data: the conversation is protected, the written work around it is not.
That matches what the People chapter found about hiring, from a completely different starting point.
There is no data here on what anybody actually does with AI. A dataset that appears to measure it was removed from this report because its meaning could not be stated. The reasoning is on the limits page.
The exposure ratings cover all 441 tasks in these 22 occupations with no gaps, and were made in 2023 against the model capabilities of that year. Read every figure as a floor.
Exposure ratings from Eloundou, Manning, Mishkin and Rock, GPTs are GPTs: Labor market impact potential of LLMs, Science 384, 1306–1308, 2024, used under the MIT licence. This page includes information from the O*NET Database by the U.S. Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration (USDOL/ETA), used under the CC BY 4.0 license. O*NET® is a trademark of USDOL/ETA. People Team AI has modified all or some of this information. USDOL/ETA has not approved, endorsed, or tested these modifications. Employment figures from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.