Job Check
Embalmers
Prepare bodies for interment in conformity with legal requirements.
10 main tasks · most important first
Your main tasks and AI
Importance- 01Conform to laws of health and sanitation and ensure that legal requirements concerning embalming are met.Mostly human for now
- 02Apply cosmetics to impart lifelike appearance to the deceased.Mostly human for now
- 03Join lips, using needles and thread or wire.Mostly human for now
- 04Close incisions, using needles and sutures.Mostly human for now
- 05Incise stomach and abdominal walls and probe internal organs, using trocar, to withdraw blood and waste matter from organs.Mostly human for now
- 06Clean and disinfect areas in which bodies are prepared and embalmed.Mostly human for now
- 07Dress bodies and place them in caskets.Mostly human for now
- 08Make incisions in arms or thighs and drain blood from circulatory system and replace it with embalming fluid, using pump.Mostly human for now
- 09Remove the deceased from place of death and transport to funeral home.Mostly human for now
- 10Perform the duties of funeral directors, including coordinating funeral activities.Mostly human for now
Tasks from O*NET® 31.0 (US Department of Labor, CC BY 4.0, changed by us), most important first. “Already use” comes from Anthropic’s data on real work chats with Claude; “could speed up” from task ratings made with GPT-4 in 2023.
Four studies, side by side
None is a forecast of job lossToo little dataNot enough work use was seen to measure. This does not mean the job is safe from AI.Anthropic, 2026
4%of this job’s tasks an AI model could do in half the time, counting tasks that need extra tools as half (rated in 2023).Eloundou, Manning, Mishkin and Rock, 2023
Above 4% of jobsin how often and how well AI helped with this job’s work in Microsoft Copilot chats (2024 data).Microsoft Research (Tomlinson et al.), 2025
Above 48% of jobsin how much of this job’s physical work robots have been shown to do, from factories to homes (2026).Anthropic, 2026
Your human edge
The main tasks with no real AI use seen and no big speed-up expected. This is where your skill counts most today.
- Conform to laws of health and sanitation and ensure that legal requirements concerning embalming are met.
- Apply cosmetics to impart lifelike appearance to the deceased.
- Join lips, using needles and thread or wire.