AI exposure: Cooks, Private Household
Prepare meals in private homes. Includes personal chefs.
Reading this score
computedAt 25.4% of weighted task load, Cooks, Private Household sits at the 47th percentile, below the point where a job's centre of gravity has moved. 65.1% of what this role does is untouched, meaning current systems cannot produce that work at all, whatever the commercial incentive.
What holds the line here is embodiment. Across this occupation's 13 tasks it averages 2.08 out of 3, the highest of the five friction dimensions. In plain terms, the work has to happen in physical space. A language model cannot move matter. Until the robotics to do this work is both good enough and cheap enough to deploy widely, capability in software does not reach it.
The most exposed thing this job does is Plan menus according to employers' needs and diet restrictions, at 80.0%. The least is Travel with employers to vacation homes to provide meal preparation at those locations, at 0.0%. A gap of 80.0% 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 food preparation and serving occupations, this one is more exposed than most. The median across the 16 roles in the group is 16.1%, and only 3 of them score higher than this. Occupational families are not uniform, and the spread inside them is often wider than the gap between them.
What would move this score. Of 13 tasks, 4 are currently banded exposed, 0 assisted and 9 untouched. For that distribution to shift materially would take robotics cheap and reliable enough to deploy at scale, not a better language model. The score is re-computed every quarter against a fresh capability reference, and the change is published rather than quietly applied.
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 | 1.27 | 0-4 |
| Embodiment | 2.08 | 0-3 |
| Presence | 0.62 | 0-3 |
| Accountability | 0.73 | 0-3 |
| Context | 1.35 | 0-3 |
| Verification cost | 0.92 | 0-3 |
Task by task
13 tasks, O*NET 31.0| Task | Exposed | Assisted | Untouched | Importance | Band |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Plan menus according to employers' needs and diet restrictions. | 80.0% | 20.0% | 0.0% | 4.69 | exposed |
| Shop for or order food and kitchen supplies and equipment. | 80.0% | 20.0% | 0.0% | 4.65 | exposed |
| Keep records pertaining to menus, finances, and other business-related issues. | 73.3% | 26.7% | 0.0% | 4.46 | exposed |
| Create and explore new cuisines. | 30.0% | 20.0% | 50.0% | 3.58 | exposed |
| Plan and prepare food for parties, holiday meals, luncheons, special functions, and other social events. | 22.5% | 15.0% | 62.5% | 3.64 | untouched |
| Direct the operation and organization of kitchens and all food-related activities, including the presentation and serving of food. | 10.0% | 15.0% | 75.0% | 4.08 | untouched |
| Peel, wash, trim, and cook vegetables and meats, and bake breads and pastries. | 0.0% | 0.0% | 100.0% | 4.81 | untouched |
| Cool, package, label, and freeze foods for later consumption and provide instructions for reheating. | 0.0% | 0.0% | 100.0% | 4.77 | untouched |
| Prepare meals in private homes according to employers' recipes or tastes, handling all meals for the family and possibly for other household staff. | 0.0% | 0.0% | 100.0% | 4.52 | untouched |
| Stock, organize, and clean kitchens and cooking utensils. | 0.0% | 0.0% | 100.0% | 4.42 | untouched |
| Specialize in preparing fancy dishes or food for special diets. | 0.0% | 0.0% | 100.0% | 4.08 | untouched |
| Serve meals and snacks to employing families and their guests. | 0.0% | 0.0% | 100.0% | 3.21 | untouched |
| Travel with employers to vacation homes to provide meal preparation at those locations. | 0.0% | 0.0% | 100.0% | 2.18 | untouched |
Task text and importance ratings sourced from O*NET 31.0. Shares computed. The occupation score is the importance-weighted mean.
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.
What this means in practice
Most of this work is not reachable by current systems, so the immediate pressure is on the administrative edges of the role rather than its core: the scheduling, the reporting, the written records. That is where time is recovered.