How the AI number works

The big number

Every career card on Careermash carries one large number: AI EXPOSURE. It is the share of that job's day to day tasks that AI is already used for, today. Higher means more exposed.

It is a measurement of now, not a prediction. A high score does not mean the job is disappearing. It means more of the routine parts of the work are already being done with AI, so the parts a person is paid for are shifting.

Where the number comes from

The exposure score blends published AI usage research, Anthropic and OpenAI 2026, with our own UK reviews of labour market moats, robotics evolution and relevant scientific developments.

The AI usage research measures something specific: real world AI usage by occupation, observed rather than guessed at. Careermash matches each career's job title against that research, and where a title has no exact match, a keyword and subject fallback finds the closest measured occupation instead of showing nothing.

The rest of the blend is ours: a UK specific review of the legal and structural protections around each profession, which differ from the US labour market the underlying research was built in, plus a per career look at whether robotics could plausibly take on the physical side of the work, and when.

The door: how hard the career is to enter

Alongside exposure, every card shows THE DOOR: how hard that career is to get into, graded A (easy) to E (extremely hard), now and in 20 years. Door grades come from a published forecast, OpenAI's "The AI Jobs Transition Framework" (Richmond 2026, CC BY 4.0), shown exactly as that forecast states it.

A closing door rewards starting sooner. An opening one gives more time to decide. Either way, it stays labelled as a forecast, never printed as settled fact.

The 20 year column, and why it stays honest

Cards also show a 5, 10 and 20 year horizon: how far exposure and the door grade might move, on the same published forecast. This is the one part of the card that is explicitly about the future, and it is the only part allowed to be.

Everywhere else, the site sticks to present tense: what AI is used for today, not what it might do next.

What the number is not

It never says a job will vanish. It never says a person should or should not pursue it. It does not rank careers by how "safe" they are, because chasing the single safest score is not the point: understanding a real job, with real numbers, is.

Where a career's structural protection, its moat, has not yet been reviewed, the card says MOAT NOT YET CLASSIFIED rather than guessing. The exposure score is still real either way. See the moat register for what that plate does and does not mean.

Every change is on the record

Careermash keeps a permanent, public ledger of every change to the measurement or to any wording that carries a claim. Nothing is edited quietly or restated without a trace. The current ledger, and the full methodology, sit on the verdict page of every career.