Jobs / Architecture and engineering
Can agents do architecture and engineering work?
Architects, drafters, and engineers across civil, mechanical, electrical, and more.
- US jobs
- 2,617,130 (1.7% of employment)
- Typical wage
- $101K a year (employment-weighted mean of occupation medians)
- Occupations
- 59 in O*NET 31.0
- Evidence
- 3 benchmarks from 4 institutions
Task level
Unexplored
No task-level benchmark in our collection tests architecture or engineering design work, such as CAD modeling or engineering calculations.
No benchmark covers this work yet.
Project level
Not yet
Whole projects are mostly out of reach. The Remote Labor Index includes 3D, CAD, and architecture projects; across all its projects, the best agent completed 15.8% to a standard a client would accept. GDPval includes mechanical engineers, and its deliverables score higher, but those tasks are one-shot and fully specified.
Evidence: Remote Labor Index, GDPval, GDPval-AA — by Artificial Analysis, CAIS, OpenAI, and Scale AI. Reading dated 23 Sep 2026.
The best agents fail most tasks on the best available benchmarks.
Benchmarks for this work
Also relevant
These benchmarks cover part of this family's work.
- 1846 EloClaude Opus 5.5 (Adaptive Reasoning, Max Effort, Default Fallback) · 23 Sep 2026Unrated
Functions: Professional deliverablesFreelance projects
What we do not know
- Benchmarks measure tasks, not whole jobs. A job is a bundle of tasks, judgment, and relationships.
- Capability is not adoption. A task that agents can do in a benchmark may still be done by people at work.
- Most results come from single runs. Reliability over many runs is often unknown.
Occupations in this family
Sorted by US employment (BLS OEWS May 2025). O*NET sub-occupations share the employment figure of their SOC group.
How to cite
Credit the original work first: the benchmarks listed on this page, and their institutions.
Then, if you used this page:
Can Agents Work. "Can agents do architecture and engineering work?." https://canagentswork.com/jobs/architecture-engineering/ (accessed 2026-09-24). CC BY 4.0.@misc{caw-jobs-architecture-engineering,
title = {{Can agents do architecture and engineering work?}},
author = {{Can Agents Work}},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {\url{https://canagentswork.com/jobs/architecture-engineering/}},
note = {Accessed 2026-09-24. CC BY 4.0}
}