Automatable

A task performed by Social Science Research Assistants

Conduct internet-based and library research.

Green LightWorkers want it · AI can do it

Likely yes, and the people who do it want it gone. Workers rate their desire to automate this 3.33/5, and experts rate current AI capability at 4/5. That puts it in the Automation Green Light zone.

Worker desire to automate3.3/5

How much the people who do this task want AI to take it over (avg of 6 workers).

AI capability today4.0/5

How capable experts rate current AI at this task (avg of 3 experts).

How much human involvement should stay?

The Human Agency Scale (H1–H5) captures how much human direction workers think this task should keep.

H4AI assists, but humans lead

Why workers want this automated

  • Frees up time for higher-value work67%
  • Reduces human error50%
  • It's stressful33%
  • It's repetitive17%
  • It's difficult17%
  • Helps handle larger scale17%

How to automate this

Good news: this is a strong candidate to automate now.

Finding & gathering information

Make the information come to you on a schedule.

  1. 1Set up saved searches and alerts instead of checking manually (Google Alerts, feeds).
  2. 2Pull updates into one place with RSS or a no-code scraper.
  3. 3Use an AI search tool for the first pass, then verify the sources.

Tools that can help

Google Alerts / RSSBrowse AIPerplexity

Know a better way, or spot an error?

Share how you automate this in real life, or correct the data. Reviewed before publishing.

This is 1 of 5 tasks studied for Social Science Research Assistants, where workers want 80% of tasks automated.

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