Take heart, funeral directors. Artificial intelligence will not be replacing you anytime soon.
A recent report compiled by Microsoft found funeral service to be low in the ranks of jobs most threatened by AI, largely because it is a hands-on profession that cannot be easily replaced by artificial intelligence. Body preparation, for example, can’t be accomplished via cyber work.
That came as good news to the leader of one of the East Coast’s leading schools for mortuary science.
“While AI is transforming many industries, funeral service remains fundamentally human,” said American Academy McAllister Institute President Donald S. Cymbor Jr., who is a member of the New Jersey State Funeral Directors Association. “Our graduates enter a stable, meaningful career that cannot be automated.”
The Microsoft study found that embalmers, for example ranked the fifth lowest among the 40 professions least likely to feel a measurable impact from AI. The only jobs that ranked lower were extraction workers; painters, masons and plasterers; plant and systems operators; and oral and maxillofacial surgeons.
While the physical aspects of funeral directing may make it immune from takeover by AI, some of the informational tasks involved in the profession could be enhanced by use of machine learning. For example, AI has already made inroads in obituary writing, with some companies offering packages that include AI obituary-writing tools.
“Most occupations have at least some information work component, reflected in our finding that AI is somewhat relevant to most occupations,” the study stated.
AI making inroads into tasks such as obituary writing makes sense, according to the Microsoft report. Media and communications workers rank the highest in what the report calls an “applicability score,” which measures how much the creation, gathering and dissemination of information is part of their jobs.
The information end of the any profession, however, is not the only area where AI may prove beneficial, according to the report. Record keeping and some financial work also rank high in applicability.
The result could be an office where certain tasks become automated with machine learning, including electronic filing, some bookkeeping and report generation. That may be good news for the funeral profession, where some daily tasks have little to do with working with families, body preparation and attendance at dispositions. AI may be able to handle much of that work, freeing up staff for more meaningful interactions with consumers and freeing up resources to increase the hiring of trained and qualified funeral professionals.
“Understanding which occupations have tasks within the current frontier of AI capability is important because these jobs are most likely to see productivity boosts or a shift in their core tasks,” the study stated.
That boost could be a boon for businesses such as funeral service, which can preserve its core function while still benefiting from the use of machine learning. And that may be just fine with families who still need an empathetic voice while they deal with loss.
“What the demand for human touch does tell us is that there will always be jobs that consumers do not want AI to do,” wrote Adam Ozimek in The Atlantic. “The existence of some demand for human labor is consequential. When there is some demand for a good or a service, we can spur more.”