AI exposure: Packers and Packagers, Hand
Pack or package by hand a wide variety of products and materials.
Reading this score
computedAt 8.1% of weighted task load, Packers and Packagers, Hand sits at the 10th percentile, below the point where a job's centre of gravity has moved. 89.1% of what this role does is untouched, meaning current systems cannot produce that work at all, whatever the commercial incentive.
What holds the line here is embodiment. Across this occupation's 12 tasks it averages 2.83 out of 3, the highest of the five friction dimensions. In plain terms, the work has to happen in physical space. A language model cannot move matter. Until the robotics to do this work is both good enough and cheap enough to deploy widely, capability in software does not reach it.
The most exposed thing this job does is Record product, packaging, and order information on specified forms and records, at 80.0%. The least is Transport packages to customers' vehicles, at 0.0%. A gap of 80.0% between two parts of the same job is the reason this index publishes at task level. An occupation-wide number would have hidden both.
Within transportation and material moving occupations, this one is less exposed than the median of 24.3% across the group's 52 roles, with 48 scoring higher. Being in an exposed family does not make a particular job exposed, and the reverse holds too.
What would move this score. Of 12 tasks, 1 are currently banded exposed, 0 assisted and 11 untouched. For that distribution to shift materially would take robotics cheap and reliable enough to deploy at scale, not a better language model. The score is re-computed every quarter against a fresh capability reference, and the change is published rather than quietly applied.
Where the score comes from
judgedEvery task is scored through the standardised work activities it maps to. These are this occupation’s averages on the six rubric dimensions. Capability is what AI can do; the other five are what stands in the way.
| Dimension | Mean | Scale |
|---|---|---|
| Capability | 0.38 | 0-4 |
| Embodiment | 2.83 | 0-3 |
| Presence | 0.29 | 0-3 |
| Accountability | 0.42 | 0-3 |
| Context | 0.67 | 0-3 |
| Verification cost | 0.67 | 0-3 |
Task by task
12 tasks, O*NET 31.0| Task | Exposed | Assisted | Untouched | Importance | Band |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Record product, packaging, and order information on specified forms and records. | 80.0% | 20.0% | 0.0% | 4.24 | exposed |
| Examine and inspect containers, materials, or products to ensure that product quality and packing specifications are met. | 4.2% | 8.3% | 87.5% | 4.50 | untouched |
| Measure, weigh, and count products and materials. | 0.0% | 0.0% | 100.0% | 4.40 | untouched |
| Seal containers or materials, using glues, fasteners, nails, and hand tools. | 0.0% | 0.0% | 100.0% | 4.23 | untouched |
| Assemble, line, and pad cartons, crates, and containers, using hand tools. | 0.0% | 0.0% | 100.0% | 4.09 | untouched |
| Obtain, move, and sort products, materials, containers, and orders, using hand tools. | 0.0% | 0.0% | 100.0% | 4.08 | untouched |
| Mark and label containers, container tags, or products, using marking tools. | 0.0% | 0.0% | 100.0% | 4.00 | untouched |
| Clean containers, materials, supplies, or work areas, using cleaning solutions and hand tools. | 0.0% | 0.0% | 100.0% | 3.85 | untouched |
| Remove completed or defective products or materials, placing them on moving equipment, such as conveyors, or in specified areas, such as loading docks. | 0.0% | 0.0% | 100.0% | 4.28 | untouched |
| Place or pour products or materials into containers, using hand tools and equipment, or fill containers from spouts or chutes. | 0.0% | 0.0% | 100.0% | 4.03 | untouched |
| Load materials and products into package processing equipment. | 0.0% | 0.0% | 100.0% | 3.96 | untouched |
| Transport packages to customers' vehicles. | 0.0% | 0.0% | 100.0% | 3.88 | untouched |
Task text and importance ratings sourced from O*NET 31.0. Shares computed. The occupation score is the importance-weighted mean.
Occupations either side of this one
The four closest scores in the same occupational family, then the four closest anywhere in the index.
Read this carefully. Exposure is not displacement. A high score means current AI systems can produce this work, not that anyone will stop paying a person to do it. Adoption depends on economics, regulation and inertia that this index deliberately does not model. How the score is built.
What this means in practice
Most of this work is not reachable by current systems, so the immediate pressure is on the administrative edges of the role rather than its core: the scheduling, the reporting, the written records. That is where time is recovered.