Top 5 Jobs in Government That Are Most at Risk from AI in Chile - And How to Adapt

Chile's public sector faces a clear inflection point: a Stanford Impact Labs deep dive finds Generative AI could accelerate roughly 31% of public-sector tasks, while the related SSRN working paper estimates about 4.7 million Chilean workers could significantly speed up more than 30% of their tasks - a productivity upside so large it's compared to a potential 12% of national GDP in a best‑case scenario.

Practical “quick wins” named by the study include automating data entry, customer support, report and visualization generation, and information retrieval so routine bureaucracy gives way to higher‑value citizen service; success will hinge on familiarization with tools, local adaptation of systems, and stronger human skills training.

For public employees and managers in Chile who want hands‑on upskilling, consider targeted programs like the AI Essentials for Work bootcamp to learn prompt writing and job‑based AI skills in a practical 15‑week format.

“Decent work deficits can be brutal for those who rely on informal work to live and feed their families. That's almost 60% of employed people in the world today – or two billion people.”

Selection paired a task-level lens with national readiness: starting from the Stanford Impact Labs deep-dive that deconstructed the 100 most common occupations in Chile - covering 5.69 million workers, or about 62% of the workforce - the methodology scored jobs by how many constituent tasks generative AI could significantly accelerate (with roughly 30%+ task‑acceleration used as a practical threshold), then prioritized roles heavy on admin, customer‑facing interaction, reporting/visualization, and information retrieval - those “quick wins” where time-savings are easy to measure.

Shortlisted roles were cross-checked against Chile's strategic context from the ILIA 2024 index, which confirms Chile's lead in infrastructure, talent development and AI governance and therefore a higher capacity to adopt and scale pilots locally.

The final top‑five focused on positions with clear, measurable efficiency gains, realistic training pathways, and strong public‑sector impact potential so agencies can move from pilot to measurable benefit fast.

“Having an index of this kind helps us move forward with sound policies and is critical for the success of these strategies... The challenges are infinite and having a tool like this is fundamental.”

Municipal administrative assistants - those municipal clerks who still spend long stretches transcribing forms, routing permit files and hunting paper records - are among the clearest “quick wins” for AI and automation in Chilean local government: modern document-management platforms turn piles of paper into searchable archives, citizen-facing e-forms and automated workflows so routine approvals and data entry happen without manual rekeying, while OCR and ML extract invoice, permit and vital‑record fields for instant processing.

Tools built for the public sector show how this plays out: GovPilot's end-to-end digital forms and routing reduce repetitive follow‑up and speed responses, DocuWare's cloud records and workflow automation make retrieval “seconds” instead of days, and Laserfiche's AI-backed platform centralizes content and prebuilt processes so staff can focus on exceptions, redaction and higher‑value citizen service instead of clerical drudgery.

For Chilean municipal teams, the practical shift is clear - move from filing and typing toward supervising automated workflows, auditing outputs, and managing complex cases that still need a human touch.

“I knew that if we could realize more efficiency in handling our records and reporting that my staff could devote more time to serving the people of Porter County. Implementing DocuWare allowed us to streamline time-intensive administration tasks and helps prepare us for the next century.”

Citizen service agents - the public-facing call‑center staff who field permits, benefits queries and urgent case updates - are prime candidates for AI-powered relief in Chile: tools like virtual agents and multilingual chatbots can take the “repeat and route” work off human plates, predictive staffing smooths seasonal surges, and real‑time agent assist plus automated quality checks help coaches spot training needs faster while preserving compliance and institutional knowledge.

Capacity's guide shows how a virtual assistant rescued a 35‑person center that was answering barely half of roughly 30,000 weekly calls, and similar models - paired with a centralized Answer Engine and careful pilot planning - let Chilean agencies scale 24/7 self‑service for routine FAQs while keeping humans for complex, empathetic cases.

For managers, the first practical moves are clear: pilot a single high‑volume use case, equip agents with AI coaching, and link systems to one shared knowledge base (see a practical 90‑day AI starter plan for Chilean agencies to move from idea to pilot).

The result? Faster citizen responses, fewer escalations, and more time for staff to resolve what really needs a human voice.

“Businesses will not only benefit from reduced operational costs but will also unlock new revenue streams through personalized AI-driven engagements,” Cooper said.

Finance and payroll clerks in Chile's public sector are classic quick win candidates for AI: repetitive invoice and timesheet entry, routine reconciliations, and the steady stream of citizen inquiries are all prime for automation so staff can focus on audits and exception management instead of keystroke work.

That shift matters in a country where transparency tools like the GEO‑CGR public finance transparency portal let residents drill down to local projects and expect clean, verifiable accounts - automation can improve consistency while humans keep final oversight.

Practical first steps include piloting a single high‑volume use case (for example, automated payroll extraction plus an approvals workflow), pairing a citizen‑facing public‑service chatbot to handle routine pay and benefit queries, and following a tested 90‑day AI starter plan for government automation to set metrics and procurement checkpoints; imagine a clerk who once spent a morning poring over ledgers now alerted to one highlighted anomaly that needs human judgment - more time for analysis, less for copying numbers.

Junior policy analysts who draft reports and keep the documentation engine running in Chilean agencies are squarely in the “can gain a lot - but must adapt” bucket: generative AI can speed literature reviews and produce neat first‑draft syntheses or “gists,” yet publishers and research offices warn these outputs are only starting points and can include incorrect or fabricated citations unless carefully checked.

Practical guardrails from Elsevier - require disclosure of AI use, human oversight of all AI‑generated text, and care with data privacy - and UIUC‑style best practices - use AI for high‑level summaries and editorial tasks, archive prompts and outputs, and vet tool terms of service - give a clear playbook for analysts balancing efficiency with integrity.

For Chilean teams, a useful approach is to let AI handle the repetitive assembly of background material and tables of contents, then apply human analysis, local policy knowledge and provenance checks to every referenced fact; the vivid takeaway: a ten‑page brief that once took days can arrive as a one‑hour draft, but one misleading footnote can undo public trust if not caught.

Managers should require disclosure, protect confidential inputs, and train staff in prompt hygiene and verification so junior analysts become quality controllers rather than blind reproducers - see Elsevier's generative AI journal guidance and UIUC's best practices for research, and note the GAO's evidence that generative AI use in government is growing rapidly across mission and support functions.

IT support technicians who handle routine programming and data‑visualization work are squarely in the “quick win” zone for Chilean public agencies: Stanford Impact Labs flags computer programming and the creation of visualizations and reports among the task types Generative AI can accelerate, meaning a technician who once spent a morning stitching CSVs into a dashboard can often produce a polished, interactive draft in minutes with prompt‑based tools (Stanford Impact Labs report on generative AI's impact in Chile).

That shift doesn't erase the need for local expertise - it raises the premium on verification, pipeline ownership and secure data practices - and it dovetails with Chile's push for technological sovereignty as CENIA works on a national language model that can better understand Chilean Spanish and local datasets (Chile's national language model development and AI independence).

Practical pilots should pair agentic AI and visualization accelerators with procurement and governance safeguards learned from real Chilean projects so tools augment technicians rather than outpace oversight; procurement missteps at agencies like SUSESO show why buy‑in, explainability and human‑in‑the‑loop designs matter when automating code generation or dashboarding (procurement and governance lessons from Chile's SUSESO).

The tangible payoff is simple: fewer repetitive builds, more time for debugging, auditing and turning insights into policy action.

“Success” might be defined another way.

Chile's next practical move is clear: align agency roadmaps with the May 2024 draft AI law by mapping existing systems to the bill's risk taxonomy, documenting development and oversight, and running focused pilots for limited‑risk automations while treating any tool that might be “high‑risk” or fall into prohibited categories (for example social‑scoring or manipulative systems) with strict human‑in‑the‑loop controls and validation (AI regulation in Chile - May 2024 draft overview).

Parallel actions include conducting formal risk assessments, building an AI governance structure that logs testing and decisions, using regulatory sandboxes and policy prototyping to learn fast (regional guidance urges experimentation and shared learning), and investing in workforce readiness so staff become informed verifiers rather than passive users.

Practical upskilling - short, role‑focused training that teaches prompt hygiene, verification and documentation - helps agencies meet transparency and oversight requirements; one concrete path is a job‑focused program like Nucamp's AI Essentials for Work to get teams audit‑ready and productive fast (Nucamp AI Essentials for Work syllabus - Practical AI skills for any workplace, Register for Nucamp AI Essentials for Work).