Job Check
Physical Therapists
Assess, plan, organize, and participate in rehabilitative programs that improve mobility, relieve pain, increase strength, and improve or correct disabling conditions resulting from disease or injury.
10 main tasks · most important first
Your main tasks and AI
Importance- 01Plan, prepare, or carry out individually designed programs of physical treatment to maintain, improve, or restore physical functioning, alleviate pain, or prevent physical dysfunction in patients.Mostly human for now
- 02Perform and document an initial exam, evaluating data to identify problems and determine a diagnosis prior to intervention.AI could speed this up, with extra tools
- 03Record prognosis, treatment, response, and progress in patient's chart or enter information into computer.AI could speed this up a lot
- 04Instruct patient and family in treatment procedures to be continued at home.Mostly human for now
- 05Evaluate effects of treatment at various stages and adjust treatments to achieve maximum benefit.Mostly human for now
- 06Confer with the patient, medical practitioners, or appropriate others to plan, implement, or assess the intervention program.Mostly human for now
- 07Administer manual exercises, massage, or traction to help relieve pain, increase patient strength, or decrease or prevent deformity or crippling.Mostly human for now
- 08Obtain patients' informed consent to proposed interventions.Mostly human for now
- 09Test and measure patient's strength, motor development and function, sensory perception, functional capacity, or respiratory or circulatory efficiency and record data.Mostly human for now
- 10Direct, supervise, assess, and communicate with supportive personnel.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 loss2%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
19%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 59% 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 44% 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.
- Plan, prepare, or carry out individually designed programs of physical treatment to maintain, improve, or restore physical functioning, alleviate pain, or prevent physical dysfunction in patients.
- Instruct patient and family in treatment procedures to be continued at home.
- Evaluate effects of treatment at various stages and adjust treatments to achieve maximum benefit.