Job Check
Waiters and Waitresses
Take orders and serve food and beverages to patrons at tables in dining establishment.
10 main tasks · most important first
Your main tasks and AI
Importance- 01Collect payments from customers.Mostly human for now
- 02Check patrons' identification to ensure that they meet minimum age requirements for consumption of alcoholic beverages.Mostly human for now
- 03Write patrons' food orders on order slips, memorize orders, or enter orders into computers for transmittal to kitchen staff.AI could speed this up a lot
- 04Check with customers to ensure that they are enjoying their meals, and take action to correct any problems.Mostly human for now
- 05Take orders from patrons for food or beverages.Mostly human for now
- 06Prepare checks that itemize and total meal costs and sales taxes.AI could speed this up, with extra tools
- 07Remove dishes and glasses from tables or counters, and take them to kitchen for cleaning.Mostly human for now
- 08Clean tables or counters after patrons have finished dining.Mostly human for now
- 09Serve food or beverages to patrons, and prepare or serve specialty dishes at tables as required.Mostly human for now
- 10Perform cleaning duties, such as sweeping and mopping floors, vacuuming carpet, tidying up server station, taking out trash, or checking and cleaning bathroom.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
18%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 83% 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 70% 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.
- Collect payments from customers.
- Check patrons' identification to ensure that they meet minimum age requirements for consumption of alcoholic beverages.
- Check with customers to ensure that they are enjoying their meals, and take action to correct any problems.