Genetic Counselor

Genetic counselors help patients and families understand genetic tests and inherited disease risk. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) projects the job to grow 10% from 2025 to 2035, much faster than average. It is a small field, with about 4,200 jobs and about 300 openings a year.

AI and automation already reach two parts of the work. The first is the education session before a genetic test. In a randomized trial at University of Utah Health and NYU Langone, published in JAMA Network Open in 2024, about 3,000 primary-care patients were offered either a chatbot education chat or an appointment with a certified genetic counselor. The two groups completed that step and went on to genetic testing at about the same rates. The second is sorting out what gene variants mean, which some counselors do in labs. A 2025 review in Briefings in Bioinformatics found that most automated tools handle over 60% of the steps in the official guidelines, but concluded that expert oversight is still needed, especially for variants whose meaning is uncertain.

Two AI-company studies of chatbot use at work disagree sharply about this job. Microsoft ranks genetic counselors 79th of 785 jobs for how much of the work AI can help with, in its top 10%. Anthropic's measure puts them at about 1%, 334th of 756. Both companies sell AI, so neither settles the question.

We keep this at 3 (Moderate). The trial shows software can take over one routine, high-volume conversation, so each counselor can serve more patients and fewer new hires may be needed for that work. But the field is growing fast, and in our view the hard conversations after a worrying result stay human. What would change the score: health systems replacing counselor visits with chatbots at scale, or BLS cutting its growth projection, would push it to 4. Evidence that chatbots only widen access while counselor hiring keeps rising would bring it to 2.