UK AI Exposure · Professional occupations
Archivists, conservators and curators
Archivists, conservators and curators collect, appraise and preserve collections of recorded and other material of historical interest.
- Employees (UK)
- 9k
- Median annual pay
- £33,096
- Exposure score ?
- 1.2/10 Minimal 9.0/10 Very high strict reading · with tools is 9.0/10 with-tools reading · strict is 1.2/10
- Wage exposure
- £36m £268m
Higher exposure than 61% of the 379 UK occupations we scored.
What this score means
Most of this role's work is still genuinely hard for AI to do. Physical presence, bodily skill, high-context judgment, direct human care - the things that don't translate to text.
If you're in this role, here's what to do now
You're not in the firing line today. But the frontier moves. Build enough AI fluency now that you can direct it for the parts of your work that could benefit. People in unexposed roles who understand AI become unusually valuable inside their organisations.
Almost every routine task in this role is within reach of today's language models. Roles at this level are getting rebuilt - often not by disappearing, but by one person using AI to do three or five people's output.
If you're in this role, here's what to do now
You don't need to be afraid. You need to be the person doing the rebuilding. The operators who learn to direct AI at scale in this kind of work become hugely valuable. The ones who wait to be told what to do get told what to do - and that thing is often 'we don't need as many of you anymore.'
Where a project with Alex usually starts for this role
This role's strict reading is low because its top tasks are judgment, not drafting. The three highest-stakes tasks below are still usually where we start — flip the toggle to 'With tools' to see what AI plus the right context can compress.
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Plan and organize the acquisition, storage, and exhibition of collections and related materials, including the selection of exhibition themes and designs, and develop or install exhibit materials.
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Develop and maintain an institution's registration, cataloging, and basic record-keeping systems, using computer databases.
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Plan and conduct special research projects in area of interest or expertise.
These are the highest-importance tasks AI can already handle when paired with the right tools and context. In a typical engagement the first wins come from building workflows around these — usually the difference between an LLM that can technically do the job and one that actually does it inside your business.
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Plan and organize the acquisition, storage, and exhibition of collections and related materials, including the selection of exhibition themes and designs, and develop or install exhibit materials.
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Develop and maintain an institution's registration, cataloging, and basic record-keeping systems, using computer databases.
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Plan and conduct special research projects in area of interest or expertise.
Every role has three or four wedges like these. Finding them takes an hour. Turning them into a workflow your team actually uses takes a few days. Talk to Alex about a project →
The full task breakdown
Every O*NET task for this occupation, split by what AI can already do unaided versus what still needs a human. Importance is O*NET's 1–5 rating of how central each task is to the role.
Tasks via O*NET "Curators" (25-4012.00).
What AI can already do
2 of 15 tasks · unaided
Develop and maintain an institution's registration, cataloging, and basic record-keeping systems, using computer databases.
Write and review grant proposals, journal articles, institutional reports, and publicity materials.
Where humans still hold the line
13 of 15 tasks
Plan and organize the acquisition, storage, and exhibition of collections and related materials, including the selection of exhibition themes and designs, and develop or install exhibit materials.
Plan and conduct special research projects in area of interest or expertise.
Provide information from the institution's holdings to other curators and to the public.
Negotiate and authorize purchase, sale, exchange, or loan of collections.
Study, examine, and test acquisitions to authenticate their origin, composition, history, and to assess their current value.
Inspect premises to assess the need for repairs and to ensure that climate and pest control issues are addressed.
Design, organize, or conduct tours, workshops, and instructional or educational sessions to acquaint individuals with an institution's facilities and materials.
Attend meetings, conventions, and civic events to promote use of institution's services, to seek financing, and to maintain community alliances.
Train and supervise curatorial, fiscal, technical, research, and clerical staff, as well as volunteers or interns.
Confer with the board of directors to formulate and interpret policies, to determine budget requirements, and to plan overall operations.
Arrange insurance coverage for objects on loan or for special exhibits and recommend changes in coverage for the entire collection.
Schedule events and organize details, including refreshment, entertainment, decorations, and the collection of any fees.
Establish specifications for reproductions and oversee their manufacture or select items from commercially available replica sources.
Tasks via O*NET "Curators" (25-4012.00).
What AI can already do
13 of 15 tasks · with tools
Plan and organize the acquisition, storage, and exhibition of collections and related materials, including the selection of exhibition themes and designs, and develop or install exhibit materials.
Develop and maintain an institution's registration, cataloging, and basic record-keeping systems, using computer databases.
Plan and conduct special research projects in area of interest or expertise.
Provide information from the institution's holdings to other curators and to the public.
Negotiate and authorize purchase, sale, exchange, or loan of collections.
Study, examine, and test acquisitions to authenticate their origin, composition, history, and to assess their current value.
Inspect premises to assess the need for repairs and to ensure that climate and pest control issues are addressed.
Write and review grant proposals, journal articles, institutional reports, and publicity materials.
Design, organize, or conduct tours, workshops, and instructional or educational sessions to acquaint individuals with an institution's facilities and materials.
Confer with the board of directors to formulate and interpret policies, to determine budget requirements, and to plan overall operations.
Arrange insurance coverage for objects on loan or for special exhibits and recommend changes in coverage for the entire collection.
Schedule events and organize details, including refreshment, entertainment, decorations, and the collection of any fees.
Establish specifications for reproductions and oversee their manufacture or select items from commercially available replica sources.
Where humans still hold the line
2 of 15 tasks
Attend meetings, conventions, and civic events to promote use of institution's services, to seek financing, and to maintain community alliances.
Train and supervise curatorial, fiscal, technical, research, and clerical staff, as well as volunteers or interns.
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Methodology
This role's exposure score comes from Eloundou et al's 2023 GPT task labels, aggregated by O*NET importance within each O*NET-SOC code, then bridged to UK SOC 2020 via ISCO-08 (ONS Vol 2 coding index) and US SOC 2010 (BLS crosswalk). Employment and median pay come from ONS ASHE Table 14.7a, 2025 provisional. ASHE covers employees only, so self-employed workers are not counted.
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