AI exposure: Bill and Account Collectors
Locate and notify customers of delinquent accounts by mail, telephone, or personal visit to solicit payment. Duties include receiving payment and posting amount to customer's account, preparing statements to credit department if customer fails to respond, initiating repossession proceedings or service disconnection, and keeping records of collection and status of accounts.
Reading this score
computed52.0% of this occupation's weighted task load is exposed, which puts Bill and Account Collectors at the 90th percentile of 923 occupations. The capability is largely there. Its average task scores 3.1 out of 4 on what a current system can produce, and the frictions that hold other jobs in place are comparatively weak here.
What holds the line here is context. Across this occupation's 15 tasks it averages 1.73 out of 3, the highest of the five friction dimensions. In plain terms, the work depends on knowledge the model cannot hold. Much of this job runs on things that were never written down: what this particular organisation does, what happened last week, what the person across the table actually meant. That context is the barrier, and it erodes as systems are given more access.
The most exposed thing this job does is Locate and notify customers of delinquent accounts by mail, telephone, or personal visits to..., at 93.3%. The least is Negotiate credit extensions when necessary, at 23.3%. A gap of 70.0% between two parts of the same job is the reason this index publishes at task level. An occupation-wide number would have hidden both.
Within office and administrative support occupations, this one is less exposed than the median of 55.9% across the group's 51 roles, with 32 scoring higher. Being in an exposed family does not make a particular job exposed, and the reverse holds too.
What would move this score. Of 15 tasks, 12 are currently banded exposed, 3 assisted and 0 untouched. For that distribution to shift materially would take systems being given deeper access to the organisation's own records and history, which is already happening. The score is re-computed every quarter against a fresh capability reference, and the change is published rather than quietly applied.
Task by task
15 tasks, O*NET 31.0| Task | Exposed | Assisted | Untouched | Importance | Band |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Locate and notify customers of delinquent accounts by mail, telephone, or personal visits to solicit payment. | 93.3% | 6.7% | 0.0% | 4.52 | exposed |
| Notify credit departments, order merchandise repossession or service disconnection, and turn over account records to attorneys when customers fail to respond to collection attempts. | 80.0% | 20.0% | 0.0% | 3.94 | exposed |
| Locate and monitor overdue accounts, using computers and a variety of automated systems. | 73.3% | 26.7% | 0.0% | 4.52 | exposed |
| Advise customers of necessary actions and strategies for debt repayment. | 66.7% | 33.3% | 0.0% | 4.44 | exposed |
| Confer with customers by telephone or in person to determine reasons for overdue payments and to review the terms of sales, service, or credit contracts. | 66.7% | 33.3% | 0.0% | 4.26 | exposed |
| Record information about financial status of customers and status of collection efforts. | 60.0% | 40.0% | 0.0% | 4.65 | exposed |
| Perform various administrative functions for assigned accounts, such as recording address changes and purging the records of deceased customers. | 60.0% | 40.0% | 0.0% | 3.64 | exposed |
| Answer customer questions regarding problems with their accounts. | 50.0% | 25.0% | 25.0% | 4.29 | exposed |
| Sort and file correspondence and perform miscellaneous clerical duties, such as answering correspondence and writing reports. | 47.4% | 19.3% | 33.3% | 3.87 | exposed |
| Trace delinquent customers to new addresses by inquiring at post offices, telephone companies, credit bureaus, or through the questioning of neighbors. | 37.5% | 25.0% | 37.5% | 3.97 | exposed |
| Receive payments and post amounts paid to customer accounts. | 26.7% | 23.3% | 50.0% | 4.19 | exposed |
| Contact insurance companies to check on status of claims payments and write appeal letters for denial on claims. | 26.7% | 23.3% | 50.0% | 3.78 | exposed |
| Arrange for debt repayment or establish repayment schedules, based on customers' financial situations. | 23.3% | 26.7% | 50.0% | 4.45 | assisted |
| Persuade customers to pay amounts due on credit accounts, damage claims, or nonpayable checks, or to return merchandise. | 23.3% | 26.7% | 50.0% | 4.28 | assisted |
| Negotiate credit extensions when necessary. | 23.3% | 26.7% | 50.0% | 3.52 | assisted |
Task text and importance ratings sourced from O*NET 31.0. Shares computed. The occupation score is the importance-weighted mean.
Where the score comes from
judgedEvery task is scored through the standardised work activities it maps to. These are this occupation’s averages on the six rubric dimensions. Capability is what AI can do; the other five are what stands in the way.
| Dimension | Mean | Scale |
|---|---|---|
| Capability | 3.08 | 0-4 |
| Embodiment | 0.41 | 0-3 |
| Presence | 1.03 | 0-3 |
| Accountability | 1.20 | 0-3 |
| Context | 1.73 | 0-3 |
| Verification cost | 1.18 | 0-3 |
What this means in practice
Where most of a role's weighted task load is exposed, the work that survives is usually the part of the job nobody wrote into the job description: deciding what should be produced rather than producing it, and being answerable for the result. The tasks lowest on this page are a better guide to where to spend your time than any general advice about the future of work.
Occupations either side of this one
The four closest scores in the same occupational family, then the four closest anywhere in the index.
Read this carefully. Exposure is not displacement. A high score means current AI systems can produce this work, not that anyone will stop paying a person to do it. Adoption depends on economics, regulation and inertia that this index deliberately does not model. How the score is built.