UK AI Exposure · Professional occupations
Production and process engineers
Production and process engineers advise on and direct technical aspects of production programmes to ensure cost-effectiveness and efficiency. This unit group incorporates: planning and quality control engineers who plan production schedules, work sequences, and manufacturing and processing procedures to ensure accuracy, quality and reliability; and chemical engineers who undertake research on commercial scale chemical processes and processed products, design and provide specifications and direct the construction, operation, maintenance and repair of chemical plants and control systems.
- Employees (UK)
- 53k
- Median annual pay
- £47,711
- Exposure score ?
- 1.9/10 Minimal 9.3/10 Very high strict reading · with tools is 9.3/10 with-tools reading · strict is 1.9/10
- Wage exposure
- £480m £2.35bn
Higher exposure than 79% 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
These are the highest-importance tasks a language model can already handle directly today. In a typical engagement the first wins come from building workflows around these, so they stop eating your team's time.
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Conduct interviews or surveys of users or customers to collect information on topics, such as requirements, needs, fatigue, ergonomics, or interfaces.
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Prepare reports or presentations summarizing results or conclusions of human factors engineering or ergonomics activities, such as testing, investigation, or validation.
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Write, review, or comment on documents, such as proposals, test plans, or procedures.
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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Collect data through direct observation of work activities or witnessing the conduct of tests.
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Conduct interviews or surveys of users or customers to collect information on topics, such as requirements, needs, fatigue, ergonomics, or interfaces.
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Advocate for end users in collaboration with other professionals, including engineers, designers, managers, or customers.
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 "Human Factors Engineers and Ergonomists" (17-2112.01).
What AI can already do
4 of 26 tasks · unaided
Conduct interviews or surveys of users or customers to collect information on topics, such as requirements, needs, fatigue, ergonomics, or interfaces.
Prepare reports or presentations summarizing results or conclusions of human factors engineering or ergonomics activities, such as testing, investigation, or validation.
Write, review, or comment on documents, such as proposals, test plans, or procedures.
Perform statistical analyses, such as social network pattern analysis, network modeling, discrete event simulation, agent-based modeling, statistical natural language processing, computational sociology, mathematical optimization, or systems dynamics.
Where humans still hold the line
22 of 26 tasks
Collect data through direct observation of work activities or witnessing the conduct of tests.
Advocate for end users in collaboration with other professionals, including engineers, designers, managers, or customers.
Inspect work sites to identify physical hazards.
Recommend workplace changes to improve health and safety, using knowledge of potentially harmful factors, such as heavy loads or repetitive motions.
Perform functional, task, or anthropometric analysis, using tools, such as checklists, surveys, videotaping, or force measurement.
Provide technical support to clients through activities, such as rearranging workplace fixtures to reduce physical hazards or discomfort or modifying task sequences to reduce cycle time.
Assess the user-interface or usability characteristics of products.
Establish system operating or training requirements to ensure optimized human-machine interfaces.
Integrate human factors requirements into operational hardware.
Review health, safety, accident, or worker compensation records to evaluate safety program effectiveness or to identify jobs with high incidence of injury.
Design or evaluate human work systems, using human factors engineering and ergonomic principles to optimize usability, cost, quality, safety, or performance.
Train users in task techniques or ergonomic principles.
Conduct research to evaluate potential solutions related to changes in equipment design, procedures, manpower, personnel, or training.
Provide human factors technical expertise on topics, such as advanced user-interface technology development or the role of human users in automated or autonomous sub-systems in advanced vehicle systems.
Develop or implement human performance research, investigation, or analysis protocols.
Develop or implement research methodologies or statistical analysis plans to test and evaluate developmental prototypes used in new products or processes, such as cockpit designs, user workstations, or computerized human models.
Estimate time or resource requirements for ergonomic or human factors research or development projects.
Design cognitive aids, such as procedural storyboards or decision support systems.
Analyze complex systems to determine potential for further development, production, interoperability, compatibility, or usefulness in a particular area, such as aviation.
Investigate theoretical or conceptual issues, such as the human design considerations of lunar landers or habitats.
Operate testing equipment, such as heat stress meters, octave band analyzers, motion analysis equipment, inclinometers, light meters, thermoanemometers, sling psychrometers, or colorimetric detection tubes.
Apply modeling or quantitative analysis to forecast events, such as human decisions or behaviors, the structure or processes of organizations, or the attitudes or actions of human groups.
Tasks via O*NET "Human Factors Engineers and Ergonomists" (17-2112.01).
What AI can already do
23 of 26 tasks · with tools
Collect data through direct observation of work activities or witnessing the conduct of tests.
Conduct interviews or surveys of users or customers to collect information on topics, such as requirements, needs, fatigue, ergonomics, or interfaces.
Advocate for end users in collaboration with other professionals, including engineers, designers, managers, or customers.
Inspect work sites to identify physical hazards.
Prepare reports or presentations summarizing results or conclusions of human factors engineering or ergonomics activities, such as testing, investigation, or validation.
Recommend workplace changes to improve health and safety, using knowledge of potentially harmful factors, such as heavy loads or repetitive motions.
Perform functional, task, or anthropometric analysis, using tools, such as checklists, surveys, videotaping, or force measurement.
Provide technical support to clients through activities, such as rearranging workplace fixtures to reduce physical hazards or discomfort or modifying task sequences to reduce cycle time.
Assess the user-interface or usability characteristics of products.
Establish system operating or training requirements to ensure optimized human-machine interfaces.
Review health, safety, accident, or worker compensation records to evaluate safety program effectiveness or to identify jobs with high incidence of injury.
Design or evaluate human work systems, using human factors engineering and ergonomic principles to optimize usability, cost, quality, safety, or performance.
Write, review, or comment on documents, such as proposals, test plans, or procedures.
Conduct research to evaluate potential solutions related to changes in equipment design, procedures, manpower, personnel, or training.
Provide human factors technical expertise on topics, such as advanced user-interface technology development or the role of human users in automated or autonomous sub-systems in advanced vehicle systems.
Develop or implement human performance research, investigation, or analysis protocols.
Develop or implement research methodologies or statistical analysis plans to test and evaluate developmental prototypes used in new products or processes, such as cockpit designs, user workstations, or computerized human models.
Estimate time or resource requirements for ergonomic or human factors research or development projects.
Design cognitive aids, such as procedural storyboards or decision support systems.
Analyze complex systems to determine potential for further development, production, interoperability, compatibility, or usefulness in a particular area, such as aviation.
Investigate theoretical or conceptual issues, such as the human design considerations of lunar landers or habitats.
Perform statistical analyses, such as social network pattern analysis, network modeling, discrete event simulation, agent-based modeling, statistical natural language processing, computational sociology, mathematical optimization, or systems dynamics.
Apply modeling or quantitative analysis to forecast events, such as human decisions or behaviors, the structure or processes of organizations, or the attitudes or actions of human groups.
Where humans still hold the line
3 of 26 tasks
Integrate human factors requirements into operational hardware.
Train users in task techniques or ergonomic principles.
Operate testing equipment, such as heat stress meters, octave band analyzers, motion analysis equipment, inclinometers, light meters, thermoanemometers, sling psychrometers, or colorimetric detection tubes.
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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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