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Service and sales workers · code 5113

Travel guides

An app can tell you the history. A good guide makes you want to hear it.

Eight of the nine tasks are mostly out of AI's reach, including describing the sights, registering visitors and running school trips. Keeping the group safe and giving first aid it barely touches.

What they actually do (and what else they get called)

Travel guides accompany individuals or groups on trips, sightseeing tours and excursions and on tours of places of interest such as historical sites, industrial establishments and theme parks. They describe points of interest and provide background information on interesting features. Tasks include - (a) escorting and guiding tourists on cruises and sightseeing tours; (b) escorting visitors through places of interest such as museums, exhibitions, theme parks, factories and other industrial establishments; (c) describing and providing information on points of interest and exhibits and responding to questions; (d) conducting educational activities for schoolchildren; (e) monitoring visitors’ activities to ensure compliance with establishment or tour regulations and safety practices; (f) greeting and registering visitors and tour participants, and issuing any required identification badges or safety devices; (g) distributing brochures, showing audiovisual presentations, and explaining procedures and operations at tour sites; (h) providing for physical safety of groups, and performing activities such as providing first aid and directing emergency evacuations; (i) resolving any problems with tour itineraries, service or accommodation. Examples of the occupations classified here: - Art gallery guide - Tour escort - Tourist guide

  • guide

Job titles from the EU's ESCO list. Search for any of them on the jobs page and you'll end up here.

68 / 100

Mostly holds up against AI

AI can take a few chores off your plate, but most of the day is still yours.

Not the odds you keep your job. It's how much of the everyday work still needs a person, out of 100.

← Robot's turf Human's turf →

The ILO's official verdict: Minimal Exposure

255 of 427 for holding up against AI

Why this score?

The ILO rated each of this job's 9 tasks for how much of it AI could do. They average 31.9 out of 100, so it holds up at 100 − 31.9 = 68.1.

That's the whole sum. No black box, no secret sauce: you can check it against the ILO's study. ILO group “Minimal Exposure”: A few tasks are affected, but the heart of the job isn't.

This job rates 40.9 out of 100 for how hands-on it is. The score above only looks at AI tools, not robots, but for work this far from the physical that matters less.

from the source Working Paper 140, Generative AI and Jobs 2025 index data 0.8-observed-use

Man v Bot · compare

Who holds up better?

Travel guides 68

v

Go on, try your partner's job. Or your sibling's. We won't tell.

Man v Bot

Where the bot helps, and where the human wins

Bot

What AI takes

The routine stuff. You may not miss it.

  • Audio guides and apps.
  • Bookings and registration.
  • Translation for visitors.

Man

What people still do better

Judgement, trust and skilled hands. Hard to download.

  • Storytelling and humour.
  • Looking after groups and problems.
  • Safety and emergencies.

Both

What's arriving

New work that only exists because the AI does.

  • Small-group and specialist tours.
  • Guides using AR and apps.
  • Tours booked through platforms.

Written by a human, from the ILO's task ratings below. Yes, we see the irony. Read it as one person's take.

Meet your two rivals

They're not the same machine. AI software can only reach the parts of a job done on a screen or in words. A chatbot can't climb a ladder. A robot might, one day, if it doesn't fall off.

The AI

Lives in a screen. Never had to fix a boiler.

Threat level: Medium

48 could do without you

It could take over some of the work, and help with more. It could help with 62 of 100.

The robot

The wildcard. Has hands, still working out stairs.

How much it matters here: Some

41 how hands-on

A fair part of this job is hands-on, so robots would be needed for that part, not just software.

So could a robot do the physical part?

Less than half of this job is hands-on. Robots still matter, but for a smaller part of the work, so we don't sort it any further.

Robots hate fiddly work in awkward spaces. On that measure, this job scores 19 out of 100. The higher it is, the longer the robot waits.

41 How
hands-on
19 How fiddly
and cramped

Kind of hands-on work Less than half hands-on

The small print

They aren't a robot score, and nothing on this page is. Nobody measures how far robots have got well enough to put a number on it. These are the closest thing we have: how hands-on the job is, and how much fiddly, cramped work it takes, which is what Frey and Osborne found hardest for machines.

From O*NET, averaged across 5 US jobs .

finger skill 19.9 · hand skill 20.8 · cramped spaces 16.8 · averaged · rule: hands-on under 50

estimated O*NET 31.0 BLS occupational crosswalk chain ISCO-08 to 2010 SOC (Aug 2012, rev. Jun 2015); 2010 to 2018 SOC (Nov 2017); O*NET-SOC 2019 taxonomy data 0.8-observed-use measures chosen by Frey & Osborne (2017) · the grouping is a sorting, not a measurement

The job, task by task

Every job is really a bundle of tasks. Here's this one unpacked, with how much of each AI could do, out of 100. The score is the average, and averages can hide a lot.

AI's favourite task here scores 49, against an average of 32. The bigger the gap, the more lopsided the job: some of it wide open to AI, some of it barely touched.

  1. 49

    Describing and providing information on points of interest and exhibits and responding to questions

    Low
  2. 44

    Greeting and registering visitors and tour participants, and issuing any required identification badges or safety devices

    Low
  3. 39

    Resolving any problems with tour itineraries, service, or accommodation.

    Low
  4. 31

    Escorting visitors through places of interest such as museums, exhibitions, theme parks, factories and other industrial establishments

    Low
  5. 31

    Distributing brochures, showing audiovisual presentations, and explaining procedures and operations at tour sites

    Low
  6. 29

    Escorting and guiding tourists on cruises and sightseeing tours

    Low
  7. 28

    Monitoring visitors' activities to ensure compliance with establishment or tour regulations and safety practices

    Low
  8. 26

    Conducting educational activities for school children

    Low
  9. 12

    Providing for physical safety of groups, and performing activities such as providing first aid and directing emergency evacuations

    Very Low

9 tasks · the High to Very Low labels are the ILO's

from the source Working Paper 140, Generative AI and Jobs 2025 index data 0.8-observed-use

Sidekick or replacement?

A tool that makes you faster is a very different thing from one that does the task while you watch. Jobs and Skills Australia measured the two separately, which is handy.

AI helps you
62
AI does it for you
48

Sidekick wins, by 14 points.

How good a match is this?

One Australian job matches, but only partly: not everyone in it does this job. Treat the numbers as a rough guide.

estimated Our Gen AI Transition (Gen AI Capacity Study) September 2025 detailed data release data 0.8-observed-use matched to Australian jobs 4514

Meanwhile, in real life…

Everything else here is about what AI could do. This is what people actually did. When they asked Claude for help with this kind of work, did they hand the whole task over, or roll their sleeves up and work through it together?

Tiny sample alert This job makes up 0.05% of all the conversations: a tiny slice. People using AI for a job isn't the same as AI being able to do it.

Out of every 100 conversations

36
64

worked through it together handed it over

The small print

Anthropic publishes this about its own product, and it doesn't feed into any score here. These are people who use Claude, not workers in general, so little use here doesn't mean AI can't reach the job.

The data is sorted by US job, and this one matches 4 of them. We've combined them, counting each by how often it comes up in the conversations, so the busiest one counts most.

These two add up to 100. The bars elsewhere on the page don't, because each is scored on its own, so we don't put them side by side.

observed use Anthropic Economic Index release 2026-06-26, period beginning 2026-05-01 data 0.8-observed-use 2026-05-01 · Anthropic, about its own product

So, should tour guides be worried?

Short answer: not much. Some of the chores will change, and good riddance.

Somewhat. Giving information, registering visitors, solving problems, escorting and presenting are the most exposed tasks, all Low; group safety and first aid rate Very Low. Audio guides and apps compete with the information part, so storytelling and personality matter more.

Worth remembering: we score tasks, not jobs. When AI takes on a task, the job usually reshuffles around it rather than vanishing.

Where this job could lead

None of the new jobs we've written up start from here yet. Could be you're the first. See the jobs AI is creating →

How are the neighbours doing?

There are 39 jobs in the “Service and sales workers” family, averaging 75. This one is below the family average.

Pit this against any other job →