AI exposure: Sales Representatives of Services, Except Advertising, Insurance, Financial Services, and Travel
Sell services to individuals or businesses. May describe options or resolve client problems.
Reading this score
computedSales Representatives of Services, Except Advertising, Insurance, Financial Services, and Travel sits in the top 4% of every occupation measured. 61.2% of what this job consists of, weighted by how important each task is to the role, is work current AI systems can produce with little standing in the way. Very few occupations score this high. The ones that do tend to share a trait: the output is a document, a calculation or a message, and nobody has to be in a particular room for it to count.
What holds the line here is context. Across this occupation's 15 tasks it averages 1.77 out of 3, the highest of the five friction dimensions. In plain terms, the work depends on knowledge the model cannot hold. Much of this job runs on things that were never written down: what this particular organisation does, what happened last week, what the person across the table actually meant. That context is the barrier, and it erodes as systems are given more access.
The most exposed thing this job does is Answer customers' questions about services, prices, availability, or credit terms, at 80.0%. The least is Distribute promotional materials at meetings, conferences, or trade shows, 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 sales occupations, this one is more exposed than most. The median across the 22 roles in the group is 49.4%, and only 1 of them score higher than this. Occupational families are not uniform, and the spread inside them is often wider than the gap between them.
What would move this score. Of 15 tasks, 14 are currently banded exposed, 0 assisted and 1 untouched. For that distribution to shift materially would take systems being given deeper access to the organisation's own records and history, which is already happening. The score is re-computed every quarter against a fresh capability reference, and the change is published rather than quietly applied.
Task by task
15 tasks, O*NET 31.0| Task | Exposed | Assisted | Untouched | Importance | Band |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Answer customers' questions about services, prices, availability, or credit terms. | 80.0% | 20.0% | 0.0% | 4.37 | exposed |
| Develop sales presentations or proposals to explain service specifications. | 80.0% | 20.0% | 0.0% | 4.35 | exposed |
| Contact prospective or existing customers to discuss how services can meet their needs. | 80.0% | 20.0% | 0.0% | 4.22 | exposed |
| Identify prospective customers using business directories, leads from clients, or information from conferences or trade shows. | 80.0% | 20.0% | 0.0% | 3.99 | exposed |
| Consult with clients after sales or contract signings to resolve problems and provide ongoing support. | 73.3% | 26.7% | 0.0% | 4.40 | exposed |
| Maintain customer records using automated systems. | 73.3% | 26.7% | 0.0% | 4.02 | exposed |
| Emphasize or recommend service features based on knowledge of customers' needs and vendor capabilities and limitations. | 73.3% | 26.7% | 0.0% | 3.97 | exposed |
| Compute and compare costs of services. | 73.3% | 26.7% | 0.0% | 3.90 | exposed |
| Monitor market conditions, innovations, and competitors' services, prices, and sales. | 67.1% | 20.4% | 12.5% | 3.56 | exposed |
| Quote prices, credit terms, contract terms, or fulfillment dates for services. | 55.0% | 20.0% | 25.0% | 4.05 | exposed |
| Create forms or agreements to complete sales. | 45.0% | 30.0% | 25.0% | 4.25 | exposed |
| Inform customers of contracts or other information pertaining to purchased services. | 45.0% | 30.0% | 25.0% | 3.97 | exposed |
| Attend sales or trade meetings or read related publications to obtain information about market conditions, business trends, regulations, or industry developments. | 33.3% | 16.7% | 50.0% | 3.72 | exposed |
| Negotiate prices or terms of sales or service agreements. | 30.0% | 20.0% | 50.0% | 4.19 | exposed |
| Distribute promotional materials at meetings, conferences, or trade shows. | 0.0% | 0.0% | 100.0% | 3.77 | untouched |
Task text and importance ratings sourced from O*NET 31.0. Shares computed. The occupation score is the importance-weighted mean.
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 | 3.23 | 0-4 |
| Embodiment | 0.27 | 0-3 |
| Presence | 0.43 | 0-3 |
| Accountability | 0.67 | 0-3 |
| Context | 1.77 | 0-3 |
| Verification cost | 1.03 | 0-3 |
What this means in practice
Where most of a role's weighted task load is exposed, the work that survives is usually the part of the job nobody wrote into the job description: deciding what should be produced rather than producing it, and being answerable for the result. The tasks lowest on this page are a better guide to where to spend your time than any general advice about the future of work.
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.