Job Check
Pharmacists
Dispense drugs prescribed by physicians and other health practitioners and provide information to patients about medications and their use. May advise physicians and other health practitioners on the selection, dosage, interactions, and side effects of medications.
10 main tasks · most important first
Your main tasks and AI
Importance- 01Review prescriptions to assure accuracy, to ascertain the needed ingredients, and to evaluate their suitability.AI could speed this up, with extra tools
- 02Collaborate with other health care professionals to plan, monitor, review, or evaluate the quality or effectiveness of drugs or drug regimens, providing advice on drug applications or characteristics.AI could speed this up, with extra tools
- 03Work in hospitals or clinics or for Health Management Organizations (HMOs), dispensing prescriptions, serving as a medical team consultant, or specializing in specific drug therapy areas, such as oncology or nuclear pharmacotherapy.AI could speed this up, with extra tools
- 04Provide information and advice regarding drug interactions, side effects, dosage, and proper medication storage.People already use AI for this at work
- 05Provide specialized services to help patients manage conditions, such as diabetes, asthma, smoking cessation, or high blood pressure.AI could speed this up, with extra tools
- 06Analyze prescribing trends to monitor patient compliance and to prevent excessive usage or harmful interactions.AI could speed this up, with extra tools
- 07Maintain records, such as pharmacy files, patient profiles, charge system files, inventories, control records for radioactive nuclei, or registries of poisons, narcotics, or controlled drugs.AI could speed this up, with extra tools
- 08Prepare sterile solutions or infusions for use in surgical procedures, emergency rooms, or patients' homes.Mostly human for now
- 09Compound and dispense medications as prescribed by doctors and dentists, by calculating, weighing, measuring, and mixing ingredients, or oversee these activities.Mostly human for now
- 10Assess the identity, strength, or purity of medications.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 loss9%of this job’s work time goes to tasks that people already do with Claude at work, counting tasks where AI only helps as half (2026).Anthropic, 2026
43%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 85% 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 59% 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.
- Prepare sterile solutions or infusions for use in surgical procedures, emergency rooms, or patients' homes.
- Compound and dispense medications as prescribed by doctors and dentists, by calculating, weighing, measuring, and mixing ingredients, or oversee these activities.
- Assess the identity, strength, or purity of medications.