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A closer look

Electrician

AI can do the load calculation. It can't crawl through your roof cavity.

Installing, wiring and inspecting on site make up most of the job, and AI barely touches six of the eight tasks. Only reading wiring diagrams and testing circuits come anywhere close, and even those are mostly out of reach.

81 / 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

3 of the 20 jobs up close

Why this score?

The ILO rated each task in this job for how much of it AI could do. They average 19.1 out of 100, so the job holds up at 100 − 19.1 = 80.9.

ILO group “Not Exposed”: None of this job's tasks scored high enough to count.

AI helps JSA 2025
57
Usually good news: more of the work gets quicker without the job going away.
AI takes over JSA 2025
16
This is what most people mean by “exposed”. We keep it apart from helping on purpose.
Hands-on O*NET 31.0
76.1
Software can't do hands-on work, but robots might one day. How far they've got isn't on this site, because nobody measures it well enough yet.

from the source Working Paper 140, Generative AI and Jobs 2025 index O*NET 31.0 Our Gen AI Transition (Gen AI Capacity Study) September 2025 detailed data release data 0.8-observed-use

Man v Bot · compare

Who holds up better?

Electrician 81

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.

  • Load calculations, compliance checks and certification paperwork.
  • Quoting, scheduling and parts ordering.
  • Fault diagnosis from a description or a meter reading.

Man

What people still do better

Judgement, trust and skilled hands. Hard to download.

  • Working inside a wall, a roof cavity or a ceiling built by somebody else.
  • Deciding whether something is safe when the rules do not quite cover it.
  • Carrying the liability for a decision nobody will ever see.

Both

What's arriving

New work that only exists because the AI does.

  • Solar, battery storage and EV charger installation.
  • Commissioning and maintaining building systems that report their own faults.
  • Electrification retrofit work created by regulation rather than by failure.

Written by a human, from the task data. 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

16 could do without you

It could take over very little of the work on its own. It could help with 57 of 100.

The robot

The wildcard. Has hands, still working out stairs.

How much it matters here: Higher

76 how hands-on

Most of this job needs hands, a body or turning up. That's robot territory, and nobody measures how far robots have got well enough to give you a number. We won't make one up.

So could a robot do the physical part?

More fine handwork, and more time in cramped or awkward spots, than a typical hands-on job. That is exactly what machines find hardest: they do best in tidy, predictable places.

Robots hate fiddly work in awkward spaces. On that measure, this job scores 59 out of 100. The higher it is, the longer the robot waits.

59 How fiddly
and cramped

Kind of hands-on work Hands-on, fiddly work in tight spaces

The small print

It isn'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. This is the closest thing we have: how much fiddly handwork and cramped, awkward work the job takes, which is what Frey and Osborne found hardest for machines.

The numbers come straight from the US job database's entry for Electricians. Its wider group, Building and related electricians, lands in the same place.

finger skill 46.4 · hand skill 46.4 · cramped spaces 85 · hands-on 76.1 · caring 2.31 of 7 · rule: hands-on 50+ · fiddly 39.4+

from the source O*NET 31.0 data 0.8-observed-use measures chosen by Frey & Osborne (2017) · the grouping is a sorting, not a measurement

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 under 0.01% of all the conversations: a tiny slice, mostly the paperwork rather than the work. People using AI for a job isn't the same as AI being able to do it.

Out of every 100 conversations

39
61

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 electricians be worried?

Short answer: not really. Put the kettle on.

Not much. Six of an electrician's eight tasks are hands-on work that rates Very Low for AI. The quoting and certification paperwork are getting quicker. Meanwhile solar, batteries, EV chargers and data centres are creating plenty of new work.

Worth remembering: we score tasks, not jobs. When AI takes on a task, the job usually reshuffles around it rather than vanishing. Bank tellers survived the cash machine. The job just got more chatty.

Where this job could lead

Fancy a rematch?

Put electricians up against another job, then send the result to someone who needs a little humbling.

Where this page's numbers come from