Skip to content
man bot

Service and sales workers · code 5120

Cooks

Cooks plan, organize, prepare and cook meals, according to recipes or under the supervision of chefs, in hotels, restaurants and other eating places, on board ships, on passenger trains and in private households. Tasks include - (a) planning meals, preparing and cooking foodstuffs; (b) planning, supervising and coordinating the work of kitchen helpers; (c) checking the quality of food; (d) weighing, measuring and mixing ingredients according to recipes and personal judgement; (e) regulating the temperature of ovens, grills, roasters and other cooking equipment; inspecting and cleaning the kitchen, kitchen equipment and serving areas to ensure safe and sanitary food handling practices; (f) operating large-volume cooking equipment such as grills, deep-fat fryers, or griddles. Examples of the occupations classified here: - Cook Some related occupations classified elsewhere: - Café manager - 1412 - Restaurant manager - 1412 - Chef - 3434 - Fast food preparer - 9411 Notes Operators of small cafés, restaurants and bars for whom the management and supervision of staff is not a significant component of the work are classified in Unit Groups 5120: Cooks, 5131: Waiters or 5132: Bartenders, depending on the main tasks performed.

None of this job's tasks scored high enough to count. It ranks 124 of 427 for holding up against AI.

Also known as

  • cook

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

81.6
Holds up
against AI Not Exposed

AI could take on 18.4 of 100, on average
so it holds up at 100 − 18.4 = 81.6

That's the whole sum, and you can check it against the ILO's study.

46
How hands-on
out of 100

From O*NET, averaged across 5 US jobs

34.5
How fiddly
and cramped

finger skill 41.4 · hand skill 42.1 · cramped spaces 20 · averaged

Kind of hands-on work · hands-on under 50 Less than half hands-on

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.

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 0.7-work-setting measures chosen by Frey & Osborne (2017) · the grouping is a sorting, not a measurement

What this number leaves out This job rates 46 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.

The tasks behind the score

The score is the average of these. A job is really a bundle of tasks, and an average can hide how uneven that bundle is.

The task AI could do most of scores 28.8, while the average is 18.4. A big gap means some of this job is wide open to AI and some of it barely at all. That's quite different from a job where everything sits somewhere in the middle, even when the averages match.

  1. 28.8

    Planning, supervising and coordinating the work of kitchen helpers

    Low
  2. 25

    Regulating the temperature of ovens, grills, roasters and other cooking equipment

    Low
  3. 18.8

    Planning meals, preparing and cooking foodstuffs

    Very Low
  4. 17.3

    Checking the quality of food

    Very Low
  5. 15.4

    Inspecting and cleaning the kitchen, kitchen equipment and serving areas, to ensure safe and sanitary food handling practices

    Very Low
  6. 13.5

    Weighing, measuring and mixing ingredients according to recipes and personal judgement

    Very Low
  7. 10.2

    Operating large-volume cooking equipment such as grills, deep-fat fryers or griddles.

    Very Low

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

from the source Working Paper 140, Generative AI and Jobs 2025 index data 0.7-work-setting

Helped, or replaced?

The score above can't tell a tool that makes you faster from one that does the task instead of you. Jobs and Skills Australia looked at those two things separately, and this is their result, matched to this job.

One Australian job matches this one closely, so this is about as reliable as it gets here.

AI helps you
61
AI does it for you
22

Helping wins by 39 points.

estimated Our Gen AI Transition (Gen AI Capacity Study) September 2025 detailed data release data 0.7-work-setting matched to Australian jobs 3514

Compared with similar jobs

There are 39 jobs in the “Service and sales workers” group, averaging 74.2. This one is above that.