BreathingRoom
By role

AI Agents by Role

Every role below carries a share of work that runs the same way every time. Each page shows what the role actually costs, which parts of it repeat, and what an agent can carry.

RoleMedian wageLoadedUS employment
Operations Manager$105,770$151,2513,503,020
Management Analyst$101,860$145,660898,280
Accountant$83,680$119,6621,449,500
Marketing Specialist$78,760$112,627899,580
Benefits Administrator$78,210$111,840112,380
Purchasing Agent$77,710$111,125491,430
Executive Assistant$76,590$109,524459,910
HR Specialist$75,940$108,594912,430
Sales Representative$72,080$103,0741,238,190
Office Manager$69,500$99,3851,436,680
Production Planner$59,650$85,300390,160
Payroll Clerk$58,260$83,312153,140
Bookkeeper$50,670$72,4581,373,680
HR Assistant$50,610$72,37290,220
Procurement Clerk$50,580$72,32955,810
Loan Processor$50,020$71,529164,790
Document Specialist$49,280$70,47035,010
Claims Processor$49,230$70,399214,260
Billing Clerk$48,500$69,355404,060
Administrative Assistant$47,540$67,9821,706,790
Order Clerk$46,170$66,02375,200
Medical Office Administrator$45,930$65,680961,610
Customer Service Rep$44,770$64,0212,595,750
Data Entry Clerk$41,340$59,116127,080
Receptionist$38,010$54,354910,180

Median wage is used rather than mean throughout. On some of these roles the gap is large enough to change a decision — on General and Operations Managers the mean sits $29,170 above the median, because a small number of very high earners pull it up. Using the mean would make every payback figure on this site look better than it is.

What the wage column is and is not

It is the national median for the BLS occupation each role maps to, not a salary anyone is offering. Your local market may be well above or below it, and the point of showing it is comparison rather than budgeting: it is the denominator for every payback figure on this site, and publishing it means you can check our arithmetic instead of trusting it.

The loaded column adds benefits and payroll taxes at the BLS private-industry ratio. It still understates what a person costs to employ, because it excludes software seats, workspace, recruiting and the management time that goes into supervising the role. Every one of those omissions makes the case for automation look worse than it is, which is the direction we would rather err in.

Reading a role page

Each one is built around a distinction that matters more than the cost figure: the part of the role that runs the same way every time, and the part that only works because a person is doing it. The second section on every page is called what stays with the {role}, and it is written for that role specifically — the bookkeeper who catches a problem by noticing the numbers feel wrong, the payroll clerk whose job has no tolerance for a confident guess.

Then: what we would build first for that role and why that one ahead of the more obvious candidate, how an agent for that role goes wrong along with the guard against it, and what actually changes in the week afterwards. If a role page reads like it could have been written about a different role, we have failed at it.

Other ways to look at the same question

A role is one lens. If the repetitive work you are thinking about spans several people, the function pages follow the process instead and show the joins where it breaks. If you already know the specific job, the task pages are organised that way. And if you want to run the numbers on your own situation rather than a national median, the ROI calculator takes your figures.