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Elementary occupations · code 9112

Cleaners and helpers in offices, hotels and other establishments

Cleaners and helpers in offices, hotels and other establishments perform various cleaning tasks in order to keep clean and tidy the interiors and fixtures of hotels, offices and other establishments, as well as of aircraft, trains, buses and similar vehicles. Tasks include - (a) sweeping or vacuum cleaning, washing and polishing floors, furniture and other fixtures in buildings, coaches, buses, trams, trains and aircraft; (b) making beds, cleaning bathrooms, supplying towels, soap and related items; (c) cleaning kitchens and generally helping with kitchen work, including dishwashing; (d) picking up rubbish, emptying garbage containers and taking contents to waste areas to removal. Examples of the occupations classified here: - Aircraft cleaner - Hotel cleaner - Lavatory attendant - Office cleaner Some related occupations classified elsewhere: - Domestic housekeeper - 5152 - Building caretaker - 5153 - Domestic cleaner - 9111 - Dishwasher - 9412 - Kitchen helper - 9412 - Street sweeper - 9613 Note Workers who perform cleaning and helping tasks only in kitchens and other food preparation areas are classified in Unit Group 9412: Kitchen Helpers.

None of this job's tasks scored high enough to count. It ranks 30 of 427 for holding up against AI.

Also known as

  • aircraft groomer
  • room attendant
  • building cleaner
  • furniture cleaner
  • toilet attendant
  • train cleaner

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

88.1
Holds up
against AI Not Exposed

AI could take on 11.9 of 100, on average
so it holds up at 100 − 11.9 = 88.1

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

53.6
How hands-on
out of 100

From O*NET, averaged across 3 US jobs

33.1
How fiddly
and cramped

finger skill 35.1 · hand skill 35.7 · cramped spaces 28.3 · averaged

Kind of hands-on work · hands-on 50+ · fiddly under 39.4 Hands-on, less fiddly work

Less fine handwork and fewer cramped spaces than a typical hands-on job. That clears one hurdle for machines. It doesn't mean machines are doing this work yet.

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

This number is probably too high

This score only looks at AI tools like chatbots. It doesn't look at robots at all — and this job rates 53.6 out of 100 for how hands-on it is, which is exactly where robots come in.

Have a look at the tasks below and judge for yourself. The ILO scored them low because a chatbot can't do them. Whether a machine with hands could is a different question, and we can't answer it yet.

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 13.8, while the average is 11.9. 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. 13.8

    Making beds, cleaning bathrooms, supplying towels, soap and related items

    Very Low
  2. 13.5

    Picking up rubbish, emptying garbage containers and taking contents to waste areas to removal.

    Very Low
  3. 11.5

    Cleaning kitchens and generally helping with kitchen work, including dishwashing

    Very Low
  4. 8.8

    Sweeping or vacuum cleaning, washing and polishing floors, furniture and other fixtures in buildings, coaches, buses, trams, trains and aircraft

    Very Low

4 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.

3 Australian jobs match this one, and we've simply averaged them. Treat the numbers as a rough guide.

AI helps you
43.7
AI does it for you
19

Helping wins by 24.7 points.

estimated Our Gen AI Transition (Gen AI Capacity Study) September 2025 detailed data release data 0.7-work-setting matched to Australian jobs 4319, 8112, 8114

Compared with similar jobs

There are 33 jobs in the “Elementary occupations” group, averaging 84.9. This one is above that.