Pharmacists will absolutely be needed in the future, and the profession is projected to grow. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates 5 percent employment growth for pharmacists from 2024 to 2034, faster than the average for all occupations, with roughly 14,200 job openings per year. But the role itself is changing significantly. The pharmacist of 2035 will look quite different from the one standing behind a retail counter today.
The Shortage Problem Is Real
Far from being overstaffed, the U.S. is heading toward a pharmacist shortage. The federal Health Resources and Services Administration projects a shortfall of 30,400 pharmacists by 2038. That gap reflects both rising demand for pharmacy services and a workforce where retirements and burnout are thinning the ranks. The question isn’t whether pharmacists will be needed. It’s whether there will be enough of them.
What AI Can and Can’t Replace
Artificial intelligence is getting better at tasks pharmacists have traditionally handled. A 2025 benchmarking study compared OpenAI’s o3 model against clinical pharmacists on pharmacy exam questions spanning drug interactions, dosing, and therapeutics. The AI scored 83.3 percent accuracy compared to 69.7 percent for the pharmacists, a statistically significant gap. That sounds alarming until you look at what it actually measured: answering multiple-choice questions in a controlled setting.
Real pharmacy work isn’t a quiz. It involves interpreting a patient’s full medical history, catching the detail a tired prescriber missed, explaining a complicated regimen to a 78-year-old with five chronic conditions, and making judgment calls when the textbook answer doesn’t fit. AI tools will increasingly handle the routine, pattern-matching side of the job: flagging drug interactions, checking dosages, running medication reconciliation. But the clinical reasoning, patient communication, and collaborative decision-making still require a human pharmacist. The most likely outcome is that AI becomes a powerful assistant, not a replacement.
The Shift From Dispensing to Clinical Care
The biggest change in pharmacy isn’t technology. It’s scope of practice. Pharmacists are rapidly gaining authority to do things that used to be reserved for physicians and nurse practitioners. As of mid-2025, 211 bills related to pharmacist scope of practice and payment for patient care services had been introduced across 44 states, with 16 bills in 12 states already signed into law. These laws expand what pharmacists can do: prescribing certain medications, adjusting dosages, ordering lab tests, and managing chronic diseases like diabetes and hypertension.
This shift is driven by a simple reality. The U.S. doesn’t have enough primary care providers, and pharmacists are among the most accessible healthcare professionals in the country. Most Americans live within a few miles of a pharmacy. Letting pharmacists handle more clinical tasks puts healthcare where people already are.
Pharmacists Keep People Out of the Hospital
One of the strongest arguments for expanding the pharmacist’s role comes from hospital readmission data. When pharmacists actively manage patients’ medications at discharge, the results are striking. A scoping review of pharmacist-led interventions found that 30-day hospital readmission rates dropped by 10 to 20 percent depending on the intensity of the intervention. Patients who received three follow-up phone calls from a pharmacist saw a 20.6 percent reduction in 30-day readmissions and a 24.2 percent reduction at 90 days.
Perhaps most impressive: one study found that medication-related readmissions fell by 80 percent over a full year when pharmacists managed the transition from hospital to home. A broader meta-analysis pegged the average reduction at 19 percent. These aren’t marginal improvements. Hospital readmissions cost the U.S. healthcare system billions annually, and pharmacists are proving they can meaningfully reduce that burden. Health systems and insurers are paying attention, which means more pharmacist positions in clinical settings, not fewer.
Genetic Testing and Personalized Medicine
Pharmacogenomics, the science of how your genes affect your response to medications, is creating an entirely new lane for pharmacists. Some people metabolize certain drugs too quickly, making them ineffective. Others metabolize them too slowly, leading to dangerous side effects. Genetic testing can reveal these differences before a patient ever takes the first dose.
Pharmacists are increasingly the ones running this process. In clinical programs already operating in the Netherlands and Switzerland, pharmacists order pharmacogenomic tests, interpret the results, adjust medication plans accordingly, and counsel patients on what the findings mean for their treatment. The American Society of Health-System Pharmacists has formally positioned pharmacists as the professionals who should lead clinical implementation of pharmacogenomics, serving as the go-to experts on drug-gene interactions for both patients and other healthcare providers. As genetic testing becomes cheaper and more common, this role will only expand.
Telepharmacy Is Opening New Markets
Remote pharmacy services are growing fast, with projections estimating roughly 20 percent annual growth between 2025 and 2031. As of 2025, 28 states permit some form of telepharmacy, where a licensed pharmacist at a central location supervises medication dispensing at remote sites through live video. Technicians or automated systems handle the physical dispensing while the pharmacist manages prescription verification, drug reviews, and patient counseling from a distance.
This model is particularly valuable in rural areas where the nearest brick-and-mortar pharmacy might be dozens of miles away. States like Kansas, Oklahoma, and California have set specific distance requirements, and some states like Arkansas and Montana explicitly limit telepharmacy to underserved areas to avoid competing with existing pharmacies. For pharmacists, telepharmacy means new job opportunities that don’t require relocating to a rural town. For patients in those areas, it means access to pharmaceutical care that didn’t previously exist.
How the Day-to-Day Work Is Changing
Much of what pharmacists spend their time on today, counting pills, processing insurance claims, managing inventory, is gradually being handed off to pharmacy technicians and automated systems. Technicians already collect patient information, measure and package medications, label prescriptions, process payments, and enter data. This delegation is intentional: it frees pharmacists to focus on the clinical work that actually requires their doctorate-level training.
The pharmacist’s future looks less like a retail job and more like a clinical one. Verifying and approving prescriptions, adjusting medication dosages, providing direct patient counseling, administering vaccines, managing chronic disease, interpreting genetic test results, and collaborating with physicians and nurses on care teams. These are tasks that can’t be automated, outsourced, or handled by someone with less training. The dispensing side of pharmacy may shrink. The clinical side is expanding rapidly.