The Obsolescence Audit
Where does your work stand as AI improves, and where is it heading? List what you do and the hours it takes, place each task in a room today and in three years, score your edges, then leave with your own one-page Audit and your first Shift for the next ninety days. It takes about twenty-five minutes.
Where Are You Now?
This changes the examples and the advice, not the method.
What Do You Actually Do?
List the eight to twelve things that take up most of your working or studying time, and roughly how many hours a week each one takes. Not your job title or your subjects: the tasks. A rough guess at the hours is fine.
Type your job, your business or what you study. Pick the closest match and tick the tasks you actually do, and they go straight into your list below. You can edit anything that is not quite right.
Over 500 roles and nearly 4,800 tasks. Sources
Written for this site with reference to the O*NET 29.2 Database by the U.S. Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration (USDOL/ETA), used under the CC BY 4.0 licence; the International Labour Organization’s ISCO-08 occupation groups; and M. Einian’s O*NET to ISCO-08 task crosswalk (2026). The O*NET material has been rewritten and modified, and USDOL/ETA has not approved, endorsed or tested these changes. O*NET® is a trademark of USDOL/ETA.
Put Each Task in a Room
Answer two questions for each task, about today. If you cannot tell, choose Not sure: that is an honest answer, and the Audit will give you a test to run. Then give your best guess about the next three years, for every task outside Room 1. Treat it as a scenario to check next quarter, not a prediction. Room 1 has nowhere worse to go.
How to Decide
Can AI do this well today?
Answer Yes only if all three are true:
- A tool anyone can use today, not a demonstration, does the main part of the task.
- The result is good enough to pay for, and checking it takes less time than doing the task yourself.
- An ordinary workplace could afford it and use it.
If you have never seen a tool try, choose Not sure.
Does the world insist a person owns it?
Answer Yes if any one of these is true:
- A law or licence requires a named, qualified person.
- A person is answerable if it goes wrong.
- The value is a person being there: care, touch, live performance, or a relationship people pay for.
- Customers pay more for a person, or walk away without one.
- The work has to be done and, today, only a person can do it.
Habit does not count. If you cannot tell, choose Not sure.
Not sure places the task cautiously and marks it to test: if you are unsure whether AI can do it, the Audit assumes it can; if you are unsure whether a person must own it, the Audit assumes no one insists, unless AI cannot yet do the work at all. The ratchet usually moves faster than people expect, so caution is the safer mistake.
Find Your Valuable Core
Tick the two or three tasks that are the reason anyone would pay for what you do, or will do. This is the most important answer on the page.
Score Your Four Edges
Score yourself from 1 to 5 on each. Use evidence, something that happened, rather than what you believe about yourself.
Where Are You Heading?
This step is optional. Name the work you want to be doing in five years and two or three tasks it involves, and your page will show whether your core today points that way.