Job Check
Emergency Medical Technicians
Assess injuries and illnesses and administer basic emergency medical care. May transport injured or sick persons to medical facilities.
10 main tasks · most important first
Your main tasks and AI
Importance- 01Administer first aid treatment or life support care to sick or injured persons in prehospital settings.Mostly human for now
- 02Assess nature and extent of illness or injury to establish and prioritize medical procedures.Mostly human for now
- 03Attend training classes to maintain certification licensure, keep abreast of new developments in the field, or maintain existing knowledge.AI could speed this up a lot
- 04Comfort and reassure patients.Mostly human for now
- 05Communicate with dispatchers or treatment center personnel to provide information about situation, to arrange reception of survivors, or to receive instructions for further treatment.AI could speed this up, with extra tools
- 06Coordinate work with other emergency medical team members or police or fire department personnel.Mostly human for now
- 07Decontaminate ambulance interior following treatment of patient with infectious disease, and report case to proper authorities.Mostly human for now
- 08Drive mobile intensive care unit to specified location, following instructions from emergency medical dispatcher.Mostly human for now
- 09Immobilize patient for placement on stretcher and ambulance transport, using backboard or other spinal immobilization device.Mostly human for now
- 10Maintain vehicles and medical and communication equipment, and replenish first aid equipment and supplies.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
21%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 22% 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 61% 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.
- Administer first aid treatment or life support care to sick or injured persons in prehospital settings.
- Assess nature and extent of illness or injury to establish and prioritize medical procedures.
- Comfort and reassure patients.