What this occupation does
Telemarketers contact businesses or individuals by telephone to solicit sales of goods or services or to request donations, and capture the resulting customer and order information. The role spans scripted outbound calling, product and price explanation, order entry, and contact record-keeping across sales and fundraising campaigns.
The exposure score in context
The ILO 2025 refined Generative AI Occupational Exposure Index places telemarketers in the very high exposure gradient. ILO 2025 places telephone-based sales and clerical roles in the highest exposure gradient. Scripted outbound solicitation, order capture, and record-keeping are technically and contextually feasible for current generative and conversational AI; the human-led remainder is complex objection handling and relationship building.
The mapping uses ISCO-08 code 5244 (BLS-published SOC-to-ISCO crosswalk). The full methodology, including the dominant-match rule for one-to-many crosswalks, is at /methodology/#algorithm.
The top five tasks, classified
The top five O*NET 30.2 tasks for this occupation, each tagged Displaceable / Changing / Growing per the Brookings 2024 task-level rubric. The tag definitions are at /glossary/#displaceable-task, /glossary/#changing-task, and /glossary/#growing-task.
- Displaceable: Contact businesses or private individuals by telephone to solicit sales for goods or services, or to request donations for charitable causes. Scripted outbound solicitation is technically and contextually feasible for current conversational and voice AI; automated calling systems already perform this at scale.
- Displaceable: Obtain customer information such as name, address, and payment method, and enter orders into computers. Information capture and order entry are routine data tasks technically and contextually feasible for current generative AI.
- Changing: Explain products or services and prices, and answer questions from customers. Standard product and price Q&A is increasingly AI-handled; complex objection handling and persuasion remain human-led.
- Changing: Record names, addresses, purchases, and reactions of prospects contacted. Recording contact outcomes is AI-augmented; qualitative lead-quality judgement remains human-reviewed.
- Displaceable: Maintain records of contacts, accounts, and orders. Routine record maintenance is technically and contextually feasible for current generative AI.
What is growing in this role
The BLS Employment Projections 2024-2034 outlook for telemarketers is decline (-22.1% projected change, -14.9k jobs). Source: BLS Employment Projections 2024-2034.
Per the WEF Future of Jobs Report 2025, the top three growing skills relevant to this role are: AI and big data, Empathy and active listening, Resilience, flexibility and agility. The skills are mapped to the occupation's O*NET skills profile.
Brookings 2024 finds telephone-sales and order-processing tasks among the most-exposed; the augmentation-prone remainder is complex objection handling, lead-qualification judgement, and relationship selling.
Telemarketers in the WEF Future of Jobs Report 2025
The WEF Future of Jobs Report 2025 ranks telemarketers 15th on its list of the 15 fastest-declining job roles worldwide by employer expectations to 2030, alongside clerical and other customer-facing roles the report ties to automation and digitalisation. Source: World Economic Forum, Future of Jobs Report 2025 (January 2025). The WEF lists are occupation-family level and global, ranked by change to 2030; they are distinct from the BLS 2024-2034 US projection above. The full named declining and growing lists are on what is growing.
AI's impact on telemarketing jobs: 2025-2026 outlook and statistics
Telemarketing is one of the faster-declining occupations the US Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks. BLS projects telemarketer employment to fall about 22 percent from 2024 to 2034, roughly 14,900 fewer jobs from a 2024 base of about 66,400, and reports a median annual wage of $36,340 (May 2024). It is not the single fastest-declining role, clerical typists, telephone operators and data-entry roles are projected to shrink faster, but it sits well inside the steepest-declining group.
The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025 reaches the same conclusion from a different dataset, ranking telemarketers 15th on its list of the 15 fastest-declining roles worldwide by 2030. Both trends line up with what has already reshaped outbound calling: automated dialling, conversational voice AI, and digital ad targeting now perform much of the scripted solicitation and order capture that once needed a human on the line.
The near-term picture for 2025 and 2026 is compression rather than a clean wipe-out. Scripted calling, order entry, and record-keeping are the most exposed tasks; the work that holds up is complex objection handling, relationship selling, and judgement about lead quality. Even a declining occupation keeps generating openings from turnover, and telemarketers who move toward consultative sales or customer-success work sit on the more defensible side of the split.
Sources: BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook, Data for Occupations Not Covered in Detail; WEF Future of Jobs Report 2025.
Similar occupations
O*NET 30.2 lists the following related roles. Each links to its own deep dive where one is published.
- Customer Service Representatives
- Sales Representatives, Wholesale and Manufacturing
- Cashiers
- Administrative Assistants
- Data Entry Keyers
Industry context
This role sits primarily in the Retail industry. The industry-level rollup includes the cross-occupation exposure profile and the BLS-published industry-level outlook.
How this assessment was made
The full methodology is at /methodology/: ILO 2025 refined index for the gradient, Brookings 2024 rubric for the task tags, BLS 2024-2034 for the growth outlook, WEF 2025 for the skills demand. The pre-empted critiques are at /how-to-argue-with-this/.