Skip to content
man bot
Compare

Service and sales workers · code 5120

Cooks

AI can write the menu. It can't taste the soup.

AI barely touches five of the seven tasks, including measuring and mixing ingredients and working the grill and fryer. Supervising kitchen helpers and setting oven temperatures are mostly out of its reach too.

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

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.

  • cook

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

82 / 100

Strongly holds up against AI

Most of this job still needs an actual human. AI would mostly be making the tea.

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: Not Exposed

124 of 427 for holding up against AI

Why this score?

The ILO rated each of this job's 7 tasks for how much of it AI could do. They average 18.4 out of 100, so it holds up at 100 − 18.4 = 81.6.

That's the whole sum. No black box, no secret sauce: you can check it against the ILO's study. ILO group “Not Exposed”: None of this job's tasks scored high enough to count.

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.

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?

Cooks 82

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.

  • Menu planning and costing.
  • Stock and ordering.
  • Smart oven settings and food safety logs.

Man

What people still do better

Judgement, trust and skilled hands. Hard to download.

  • Cooking and tasting.
  • Running a kitchen under pressure.
  • Judging food quality.

Both

What's arriving

New work that only exists because the AI does.

  • Smart ovens and kitchen sensors.
  • Delivery and dark kitchens.
  • Allergen and dietary menus.

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: Low

22 could do without you

It could take over very little of the work on its own. It could help with 61 of 100.

The robot

The wildcard. Has hands, still working out stairs.

How much it matters here: Some

46 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 35 out of 100. The higher it is, the longer the robot waits.

46 How
hands-on
35 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 41.4 · hand skill 42.1 · cramped spaces 20 · 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 29, against an average of 18. The bigger the gap, the more lopsided the job: some of it wide open to AI, some of it barely touched.

  1. 29

    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. 19

    Planning meals, preparing and cooking foodstuffs

    Very Low
  4. 17

    Checking the quality of food

    Very Low
  5. 15

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

    Very Low
  6. 14

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

    Very Low
  7. 10

    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 0.8-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
61
AI does it for you
22

Sidekick wins, by 39 points.

How good a match is this?

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

estimated Our Gen AI Transition (Gen AI Capacity Study) September 2025 detailed data release data 0.8-observed-use matched to Australian jobs 3514

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 0.01% 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

58
42

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.

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 cooks be worried?

Short answer: not really. Put the kettle on.

No. The most exposed tasks are supervising kitchen helpers and regulating oven temperatures, both Low; cooking, checking and mixing rate Very Low. Kitchen software and smart ovens help, but cooking stays hands-on.

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 74. This one is above the family average.

Pit this against any other job →