AI exposure: Personal Care Aides
Provide personalized assistance to individuals with disabilities or illness who require help with personal care and activities of daily living support (e.g., feeding, bathing, dressing, grooming, toileting, and ambulation). May also provide help with tasks such as preparing meals, doing light housekeeping, and doing laundry. Work is performed in various settings depending on the needs of the care recipient and may include locations such as their home, place of work, out in the community, or at a daytime nonresidential facility.
Reading this score
computedAt 18.3% of weighted task load, Personal Care Aides sits at the 32th percentile, below the point where a job's centre of gravity has moved. 68.3% 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 11 tasks it averages 1.95 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 Prepare and maintain records of client progress and services performed, reporting changes in..., at 66.7%. The least is Plan, shop for, or prepare nutritious meals or assist families in planning, shopping for, or..., at 0.0%. A gap of 66.7% 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 healthcare support occupations, this one is more exposed than most. The median across the 19 roles in the group is 11.4%, and only 4 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 11 tasks, 4 are currently banded exposed, 0 assisted and 7 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 | 1.23 | 0-4 |
| Embodiment | 1.95 | 0-3 |
| Presence | 1.82 | 0-3 |
| Accountability | 1.50 | 0-3 |
| Context | 1.59 | 0-3 |
| Verification cost | 1.77 | 0-3 |
Task by task
11 tasks, O*NET 31.0| Task | Exposed | Assisted | Untouched | Importance | Band |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Prepare and maintain records of client progress and services performed, reporting changes in client condition to manager or supervisor. | 66.7% | 33.3% | 0.0% | 4.65 | exposed |
| Participate in case reviews, consulting with the team caring for the client, to evaluate the client's needs and plan for continuing services. | 50.0% | 25.0% | 25.0% | 4.45 | exposed |
| Instruct or advise clients on issues, such as household cleanliness, utilities, hygiene, nutrition, or infant care. | 30.0% | 20.0% | 50.0% | 4.42 | exposed |
| Train family members to provide bedside care. | 30.0% | 20.0% | 50.0% | 4.56 | exposed |
| Care for individuals or families during periods of incapacitation, family disruption, or convalescence, providing companionship, personal care, or help in adjusting to new lifestyles. | 6.7% | 18.3% | 75.0% | 4.39 | untouched |
| Transport clients to locations outside the home, such as to physicians' offices or on outings, using a motor vehicle. | 6.7% | 18.3% | 75.0% | 3.73 | untouched |
| Perform healthcare-related tasks, such as monitoring vital signs and medication, under the direction of registered nurses or physiotherapists. | 2.1% | 10.4% | 87.5% | 4.46 | untouched |
| Administer bedside or personal care, such as ambulation or personal hygiene assistance. | 0.0% | 0.0% | 100.0% | 4.65 | untouched |
| Perform housekeeping duties, such as cooking, cleaning, washing clothes or dishes, or running errands. | 0.0% | 0.0% | 100.0% | 4.19 | untouched |
| Provide clients with communication assistance, typing their correspondence or obtaining information for them. | 0.0% | 0.0% | 100.0% | 4.18 | untouched |
| Plan, shop for, or prepare nutritious meals or assist families in planning, shopping for, or preparing nutritious meals. | 0.0% | 0.0% | 100.0% | 4.03 | 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.