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A closer look

Registered nurse

AI can write up the handover. It can't notice that your patient looks wrong.

Hands-on care, like giving medication and dressing wounds, AI barely touches. Research, health education and answering patients' questions are where it gets closest, and even those are mostly out of its reach.

75 / 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: Not Exposed

7 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 25.2 out of 100, so the job holds up at 100 − 25.2 = 74.8.

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

AI helps JSA 2025
67
Usually good news: more of the work gets quicker without the job going away.
AI takes over JSA 2025
30
This is what most people mean by “exposed”. We keep it apart from helping on purpose.
Hands-on O*NET 31.0
61.1
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?

Registered nurse 75

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.

  • Charting, handover notes and discharge summaries.
  • Triage prompts and early-warning scoring.
  • Rostering and supply management.

Man

What people still do better

Judgement, trust and skilled hands. Hard to download.

  • Noticing the patient who has changed before the numbers do.
  • Physical care that requires being in the room.
  • Telling a family something they do not want to hear.

Both

What's arriving

New work that only exists because the AI does.

  • Monitoring patients remotely at a scale wards never managed.
  • Working alongside decision support and knowing when to overrule it.
  • Escalation duties created by continuous monitoring.

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

30 could do without you

It could take over very little of the work on its own. It could help with 67 of 100.

The robot

The wildcard. Has hands, still working out stairs.

How much it matters here: Higher

61 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?

Physical work where helping and caring for people is a big part of the job. For care work, whether a machine could do the movements is only half the question. The other half is whether anyone wants one to. The US data counts helping workmates too, so a few trades end up here.

Robots hate fiddly work in awkward spaces. On that measure, this job scores 38 out of 100. The higher it is, the longer the robot waits.

38 How fiddly
and cramped

Kind of hands-on work Hands-on, helping and caring for others

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 Registered Nurses. Its wider group, Nursing professionals, lands somewhere else: less than half hands-on, because the group averages several US jobs together and this one doesn't. Both are right about what they describe.

finger skill 44.6 · hand skill 42.9 · cramped spaces 25 · hands-on 61.1 · caring 5.89 of 7 · rule: hands-on 50+ · caring 4+ of 7

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 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

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 nurses be worried?

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

No. Hands-on care rates Very Low, and even the most exposed nursing tasks only reach Low. Charting, handovers and discharge summaries are where AI helps most, which could give time back to patients. New work is arriving too: remote monitoring, and knowing when to overrule the software.

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

Where this page's numbers come from