Will AI replace Historians?

Some of your tasks will be automated. People who use AI will have the edge.

Task exposure to today's AI

44/100

Moderate exposure

This is the occupation's typical task mix. Your own score can be up to 30 points higher or lower depending on how you work: routine share, people contact, judgment and how much you already use AI.

Get your personal score

Will AI replace Historians?

Not entirely. Today's AI tools can take on about 44% of the typical work in this occupation, mostly: organize information for publication and for other means of dissemination, such as via storage media or the internet. The parts that stay human include: Gather historical data from sources such as archives, court records, diaries, news files, and photographs, as well as from books, pamphlets, and periodicals.; Organize data, and analyze and interpret its authenticity and relative significance.; Conduct historical research, and publish or present findings and theories..

People who learn to use AI for the automatable parts keep the edge. The 3-phase plan below shows where to start.

Which tasks AI can take on

The largest tasks in this occupation, their share of the working week, and how much of each today's AI tools can do.

TaskAutomatable

Organize information for publication and for other means of dissemination, such as via storage media or the Internet. 72%

Research and prepare manuscripts in support of public programming and the development of exhibits at historic sites, museums, libraries, and archives. 55%

Organize data, and analyze and interpret its authenticity and relative significance. 50%

Conduct historical research, and publish or present findings and theories. 50%

Conduct historical research as a basis for the identification, conservation, and reconstruction of historic places and materials. 47%

Gather historical data from sources such as archives, court records, diaries, news files, and photographs, as well as from books, pamphlets, and periodicals. 25%

+ 15 more tasks (45% of the week) in the full test.

Your human edge

Gather historical data from sources such as archives, court records, diaries, news files, and photographs, as well as from books, pamphlets, and periodicals.
Organize data, and analyze and interpret its authenticity and relative significance.
Conduct historical research, and publish or present findings and theories.

AI tools to try

ChatGPT / Claude for literature and writingAI research tools (e.g. Elicit, Consensus, Semantic Scholar)Copilot for data analysis code (Python, R)

Related roles

A 3-phase AI learning plan

Phase 1

Faster literature and writing

Literature search and summaries with AI, always checked against the papers.
Drafts of methods, reports and grant text.
Reference management and formatting.

Project

Use AI to summarise 30 secondary sources for one research chapter, verify every citation against the original text, and log errors found plus hours saved versus manual reading.

Phase 2

AI for data analysis

Analysis code in Python or R written with AI help.
Visualisation and statistics explained step by step.
Reproducibility: version code and prompts.

Project

Build an AI-assisted Python or R script that charts 200 entries from a parish register or census dataset, and version the code plus prompts in a documented repository.

Phase 3

AI as a research method

Classification, extraction or modelling with AI on your data.
Validate against human labels or ground truth.
Ethics, data protection and disclosure of AI use.

Project

Train or prompt an AI model to transcribe and tag 100 digitised archival letters by theme, measure accuracy against your own hand-coded labels, and write an AI-use disclosure note.

Take the free 11-question test