If you’re an interpreter, writer, customer service rep, or data scientist, you may want to pay attention. A Microsoft Research study found these are among the jobs people consult AI tools about.

An analysis of 200,000 conversations with Microsoft Bing Copilot found that information gathering, writing, and communicating are the most common user goals for AI assistance. The study looked at three variables for jobs to predict how ‘applicable’ AI would be to replace these roles: coverage (how many of the tasks in a particular job could be done by AI), scope (how many hours of a work day could AI cover) and completion (how well could AI complete tasks) to come up with a composite score.

Unsurprisingly, jobs deemed the ‘most at risk’ by the study were those that entailed knowledge work or communication, which is very much the domain of large language models (LLMs). Jobs that involved more manual labour or a human touch scored very low on the replacement score.

Of course, the study has caveats: it examined a single LLM and only what users asked about. But that may be the point; these are exactly the tasks people are already turning to AI for.