Physician Assistants
AI is not doing this work today.
This occupation's activities barely register in measured AI usage. Generative AI is not doing this work today. The pressures that matter here are more likely economic or robotic than linguistic.
Where this occupation sits among all 785 measured. Bands are quintiles of the real distribution. Applicability measures task overlap with observed AI usage. It is not a probability of job loss.
What this job involves
Provide healthcare services typically performed by a physician, under the supervision of a physician. Conduct complete physicals, provide treatment, and counsel patients. May, in some cases, prescribe medication. Must graduate from an accredited educational program for physician assistants.
Where AI overlaps this work, activity by activity
The occupation's most important work activities (O*NET weights, normalized to this set), each with its measured AI performance across 200,000 real conversations: how often AI is used for it, how well it completes it, and how much of the activity it covers.
| Work activity | Share of role | AI performance |
|---|---|---|
| Maintain health or medical records. | 13.7% | Not observed 0.00 |
| Administer emergency medical treatment. | 11.6% | Not observed 0.00 |
| Administer basic health care or medical treatments. | 11.3% | Not observed 0.00 |
| Assist healthcare practitioners during medical procedures. | 10.0% | Not observed 0.00 |
| Prescribe medical treatments or devices. | 9.3% | Not observed 0.00 |
| Monitor health conditions of humans or animals. | 9.0% | Not observed 0.00 |
| Collect information about patients or clients. | 8.1% | Not observed 0.00 |
| Diagnose health conditions or disorders. | 5.6% | Not observed 0.00 |
| Examine people or animals to assess health conditions or physical characteristics. | 5.6% | Not observed 0.00 |
| Analyze health or medical data. | 5.6% | Moderate 0.49 |
| Order medical tests or procedures. | 5.3% | Not observed 0.00 |
| Advise patients or clients on medical issues. | 5.0% | High overlap 0.66 |
"Not observed" is a measurement, not missing data: that activity does not meaningfully appear in the usage sample. AI performance = completion × scope × coverage (user-goal view), 0–1.
What drives this score: the biggest AI-overlapped activity in this role is analyze health or medical data; the most important activity AI is not observed doing is maintain health or medical records. The plan below is built around exactly that split.
Low exposure is an asset. Spend it deliberately.
Next 30 days
- Don't buy the panic. This occupation's activities barely appear in AI usage data. Your near-term exposure is other people's headlines, not your tasks.
- Skim the gains anyway. Even here, an assistant helps with the thin admin layer: Analyze health or medical data is the one place the data shows any overlap.
Next 90 days
- Deepen the human core. Activities like Maintain health or medical records are measured as fully outside current AI. Mastery there is compounding, defensible value.
- Mentor the exposed. Colleagues in adjacent office-heavy roles are the ones facing redesign; understanding their tools makes you a better coordinator and leader.
The longer game
- Watch the actual frontier for this work: usually physical automation, demographics or regulation rather than language models. This dataset intentionally measures only generative AI.
- Revisit after major data updates. If this page's vintage changes and your band moves, the plan moves with it.
- AI applicability score and per-activity metrics: Tomlinson, Jaffe, Wang, Counts & Suri, Working with AI: Measuring the Applicability of Generative AI to Occupations, Microsoft Research 2025 (arXiv:2507.07935), data CC BY 4.0.
- Occupation description and activity structure: O*NET 30.0 Database, USDOL/ETA, CC BY 4.0.
- Bands, personalization weights and action plans are JobRiskAI editorial layers; method and limitations on the methodology page.