Is Your Job at Risk from AI? A Severity-Ordered Checklist
Check off any items that apply to your role—the more you check, especially further down, the higher your exposure.
🟢 Low severity — early warning signs
Parts of your work involve repetitive data entry, formatting, or copy-paste tasks
You spend meaningful time summarizing documents, emails, or meetings
Your work follows a template or standardized format most of the time
Colleagues have started using AI tools to do pieces of your job faster
🟡 Moderate severity — real exposure
Your core output is text, code, or images that can be fully specified in a written brief
Your job has a "junior" version whose tasks are mostly research, drafting, or first-pass work
The quality bar for your output is "good enough," not "best in class" (routine reports, boilerplate contracts, basic customer support)
Your role doesn't require physical presence, real-time judgment calls, or hands-on manipulation of objects
A non-expert with the right AI tool could produce a passable first draft of your work today
🟠 High severity — structural risk
Your job is one step in a pipeline where the input and output are both digital/text-based (data → analysis → report)
Your value is primarily speed and volume of a well-defined task, not judgment or relationships
Your employer has already piloted or deployed AI tools that touch your specific workflow
The skill you're paid for (writing, coding, basic design, transcription, translation, routine analysis) has a name that also describes what current AI tools are explicitly marketed to do
Your industry has publicly discussed headcount reductions tied to AI adoption
🔴 Critical severity — near-term displacement risk
Your entire job could be described in a single paragraph as "take X input, produce Y output" with no ongoing human relationship required
You have no direct client/customer relationship — you're a cost center performing a discrete task for internal stakeholders
You have little accountability or legal liability attached to your output (no license, no signature, no regulatory sign-off required)
Your task requires no physical world interaction, no real-time in-person judgment, and no exercise of authority over people
Leadership has already discussed AI as a cost-reduction lever for your function specifically (not hypothetically)
Reading your results
Mostly green: Low near-term risk — but keep an eye on tools entering your field.
Green + yellow: Some tasks will be automated; the job itself likely survives in reshaped form.
Yellow + orange: Expect real disruption to how you work within a few years; building judgment, relationship, and oversight skills matters more than raw output speed.
Any red boxes checked: This is the profile of roles already seeing real substitution — worth actively building adjacent skills (oversight, client relationships, physical/hands-on work, or domain judgment AI can't yet replicate).
Important caveat: This is a risk-awareness tool, not a prediction. Jobs with "human relationship," "accountability/liability," "physical presence," and "judgment under ambiguity" tend to be the most resistant regardless of industry — and most real jobs are a mix of automatable and non-automatable tasks, so the more useful question is often "which parts of my job are at risk," not "is my job at risk."
Change is constant, and it's coming. Tomorrow will always come, no matter how much you try to ignore it. Life offers no guarantees, nor promises of a bright future. We see good people being laid off through no fault of their own. Just because something terrible hasn't happened yet doesn't mean it won't. It can happen to anyone, at any time, anywhere. No one is guaranteed to wake up tomorrow and still have a job by evening. While many employees can read the writing on the wall, why do most assume it’s targeted at someone else? Are you now wondering, Am I Next?
