Surgeon

Surgeons operate with their hands, make judgment calls in the operating room, and carry legal responsibility for the result. AI cannot do that. What is changing is their tools. Surgical robots, which a surgeon controls from a console, are spreading to more hospitals and more kinds of operations: MedTech Dive reported in January 2026 that Medtronic won US approval for its robot in December 2025 and that Johnson & Johnson had applied for approval of its own, to compete with the long-time leader, Intuitive Surgical's da Vinci. A Yale surgeon told MedTech Dive that new robots "lower the bar of who can do very complex procedures," and a robot maker pitched its system as letting surgeons "do many more procedures." That is a story about each surgeon doing more, not about replacing them: these robots still need a surgeon at the controls.

Demand runs the other way. The American College of Surgeons notes that the Association of American Medical Colleges projected in 2024 a shortage of 13,500 to 86,000 doctors by 2036, of whom 10,000 to 19,900 would be surgeons. About 25.6% of US surgeons are 65 or older, and training takes 9 to 14 years after college, so the gap cannot close fast. BLS projects jobs for physicians and surgeons overall to grow 4% from 2025 to 2035, about as fast as the average for all jobs, with about 22,100 openings a year.

That is the rubric's "2 Low": AI and robots help, and a shortage absorbs the gains. Our read is that it is not a 1 because robots and AI planning tools raise how many operations one surgeon can handle, and over time that can mean fewer surgeons per operation.

What would change this score. If regulators approve robots that do parts of an operation on their own, or hospitals start training or hiring fewer surgeons because robots let fewer of them keep up, this goes to 3.