Will AI replace Nurse Anesthetists?

What this score means

Nurse Anesthetists is among the least exposed roles in Healthcare. Most of what the job involves still sits outside what current AI can do, even as the tools around it keep changing. At 21 out of 100 it scores 5 points below the Healthcare average of 26. Across the 3 sources behind this baseline, individual estimates run from 13 to 32, so the score is a weighted consensus rather than any single figure.

The number is a consensus estimate for the typical version of the role, built from published academic and industry research scored occupation by occupation. It is not a prediction about any individual. How scoring works

What this job actually involves

Exposure follows the work itself rather than the job title, so it is worth seeing what the role is made of. These are the tasks O*NET records for Nurse Anesthetists, most central first, showing 12 of 24.

• 01Manage patients' airway or pulmonary status, using techniques such as endotracheal intubation, mechanical ventilation, pharmacological support, respiratory therapy, and extubation.
• 02Respond to emergency situations by providing airway management, administering emergency fluids or drugs, or using basic or advanced cardiac life support techniques.
• 03Monitor patients' responses, including skin color, pupil dilation, pulse, heart rate, blood pressure, respiration, ventilation, or urine output, using invasive and noninvasive techniques.
• 04Select, order, or administer anesthetics, adjuvant drugs, accessory drugs, fluids or blood products as necessary.
• 05Select, prepare, or use equipment, monitors, supplies, or drugs for the administration of anesthetics.
• 06Assess patients' medical histories to predict anesthesia response.
• 07Perform or manage regional anesthetic techniques, such as local, spinal, epidural, caudal, nerve blocks and intravenous blocks.
• 08Develop anesthesia care plans.
• 09Obtain informed consent from patients for anesthesia procedures.
• 10Prepare prescribed solutions and administer local, intravenous, spinal, or other anesthetics, following specified methods and procedures.
• 11Perform pre-anesthetic screenings, including physical evaluations and patient interviews, and document results.
• 12Calibrate and test anesthesia equipment.

Task statements from O*NET by the National Center for O*NET Development, used under CC BY 4.0. The tasks are descriptive; the exposure score above is ours.

The research behind this score

This baseline aggregates 3 research sources that scored Nurse Anesthetists for AI and automation exposure. More recent, higher confidence studies carry more weight in the final number.

• 01Anthropic Economic Index 2026 - AI Task Exposure · 2026
• 02GPTs are GPTs: Labor Market Impact Potential of LLMs · 2024
• 03AI Occupational Exposure to Language Modeling · 2023

Also covers

Anesthesia Physician · Certified Nurse Anesthetist · Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetist (CRNA) · Nurse Anesthetist · Staff Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetist (Staff CRNA) · Staff Nurse Anesthetist

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