Psychologist

Psychology covers several quite different jobs, and AI touches them differently. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) projects psychologist jobs overall to grow 6% from 2025 to 2035, faster than the 3% average, with about 11,300 openings a year. Inside that, clinical and counseling psychologists (the largest group) are projected to grow 12%. School psychologists are projected to grow only 1%, but BLS says that is because the number of school-age children is expected to fall, not because of AI. Industrial-organizational psychologists, who work on hiring, training and workplace problems, are projected to grow 6%, but it is a small field of about 4,000 jobs.

The workplace branch is the most exposed. Anthropic's March 2026 study, which tracks how much of each job's tasks people already use its Claude AI for at work, puts industrial-organizational psychologists at about 16%, against about 6% for clinical and counseling psychologists and 5% for school psychologists. Psychologists are adopting AI quickly, though few rely on it for complex clinical work: in the American Psychological Association's September 2025 survey of 1,742 psychologists, 56% had used AI for work in the past year, up from 29% the year before, and 38% worried it could make some of their duties obsolete.

We lower this from 3 to 2 (Low). The old 3 rested on figures that did not hold up and on the idea that research and workplace psychology are being automated, which we could not find evidence for. What we found is faster-than-average growth, a projected federal shortage of about 99,840 psychologists by 2038 (HRSA), and AI use that is mostly administrative. If you are drawn to the workplace side, expect to use AI heavily for data analysis and writing, and watch that side more closely than the clinical side.

What would change the score: evidence that employers are hiring fewer entry-level industrial-organizational psychologists because AI does the analysis, or a BLS projection cut that names AI, would move this back to 3.