Bots, Prescriptions, and P(doom): What AI's Rapid Rise Means for Pharmacy Practice

Harry Travis, MBA, president of The Travis Group LLC and the organizer behind the RX Roundtable, for pharmacy innovation, spoke about the ongoing AI revolution and what it means for pharmacy and beyond. He makes the case that pharmacy professionals cannot afford to sit on the sidelines of the AI revolution. "We're talking about the future of your job and your kids' jobs," he told the audience, "and this thing is moving real fast."

A Lot Has Happened in One Year

Travis framed the session as a follow-up to his talk at the same conference a year prior and gave some striking contrasts on where the AI market stands now, 12 months later. For example, Nvidia's stock has grown from $101 to today’s $216 and OpenAI introduced ChatGPT for Clinicians—a product specifically aimed at health care professionals—adding to an already expanding suite of health care-facing AI tools.

Travis also highlighted the work of Model Evaluation and Threat Research (METR), which he described as "the gold standard for evaluating the performance of AI models." According to METR's research, the performance of AI agents completing tasks with reliable accuracy “has been doubling practically every 4 months.”

The Oppenheimer Moment

Travis walked the audience through the three major camps of thought on AI: the accelerationists, who favor minimal regulation and rapid deployment; the doomers, led by figures like Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton, who warn that humanity must slow down; and the skeptics, most notably University of Washington linguist Emily Bender, whose landmark "stochastic parrots" paper argued that large language models are sophisticated pattern-matching systems. "They just predict the next word really well," Travis explained, "and we anthropomorphize it because we think it's talking to us."

Travis describes himself as a "worrier," positioned somewhere between the AI doomers and the skeptics. However, he did note that there are legitimate concerns about what is unfolding and how it might affect society on a large scale. He drew a comparison to the Manhattan Project and the Oppenheimer film, noting that we may be living through an analogous hinge point in history. "A lot of researchers say we are at the same point right now—that if one of these companies delivers super intelligence or artificial general intelligence, when that thing goes live, there's no getting it back."

He also introduced the concept of "P(doom)" which is the term adopted by researchers in the field to describe the probability that AI development will result in catastrophic harm to humanity. When queried across the research community, the consensus number lands around 14%. Travis put that in blunt terms: "If we asked aeronautical engineers what's the probability that a 737 is going to fall out of the sky and they said 14%, I suspect we would all be driving home." He noted that some prominent researchers place their individual estimates far higher. A Harvard physicist and well-known AI researcher interviewed on a podcast Travis cited put his personal P(doom) at 90%.

AI Is Already in Your Pharmacy

After setting the scene of where we are with AI in society, Travis pivoted to focusing on AI in the pharmacy workflow.

Every step in the prescription workflow including intake, benefit verification, prior authorization, financial assistance, dispensing, patient engagement, now has AI tools targeting it. Right now, he says that the field is in "Phase 1" by proving that these individual tools actually deliver on their promises.

Phase 2, he suggested, is coming quickly and would constitute of bots starting to talk to each other. "The intake bot hands off to the benefit verification bot that hands off to the financial assistance bot that hands off to the robot to dispense it." At scale, this interconnected system gives a pharmacy operation something Travis called a "brain”.

This trajectory is already beginning to materialize in the broader health care landscape. A 2025 review of AI and machine learning applications in pharmacy practice found that community pharmacies implementing AI technologies have seen meaningful improvements in drug adherence and reductions in missed prescription refills, underscoring the real-world impact that Travis described as inevitable for specialty pharmacy operations as well.¹

Utah, The Sandbox

During the talk, Travis used Utah as an example as earlier this year it became the first state to permit an AI platform to autonomously renew routine prescriptions for patients with chronic conditions within a regulatory "sandbox" framework. The AI tool, developed by health tech company Doctronic, is being used in this pilot program to cover approximately 80% of all medication activity and it marks the first state-approved program that allows AI to participate in medical decision-making.²

Travis described a scenario that is already playing out at the pharmacy counter where patients walking in asking for a refill on a medication and pharmacists are unable to help. "The pharmacist says, okay, take a phone, talk to the AI doc, and we'll get a refill." He noted the sharp irony: "If the patient walked into the pharmacy in Idaho, the pharmacist would be able to write that prescription."

The Utah example shows that AI is not waiting for the profession to catch up. "AI docs could be writing prescriptions well in advance of pharmacists," he noted. The patchwork of state pharmacy regulations, with some states operating under rulebooks exceeding 165 pages and others only 25, means the profession's response is fragmented at precisely the moment it needs to be coordinated.

Two Paths to ROI

Travis closed by stating that there are 2 paths to ROI with AI, and pharmacy leaders need to pursue both simultaneously.

The first is cutting, where AI is used to automate repetitive cognitive tasks, eliminate inefficiency, and reduce labor costs. The second is creating. "You need to get AI being ‘creative’ as well as productive," he said. "Because your competitors are working in that space, and we're seeing competitors come out of the woodwork, out of left field, into established markets."

To illustrate the creative potential, Travis showed a pharmaceutical marketing ad, now a year old, that was produced by a single person in 8 hours using AI video generation tools. The ad, known informally as the "Pupperman" ad, went viral in pharma marketing circles for the sophistication and humor it achieved with minimal human production effort.

The pharmacy profession has navigated seismic technological shifts before: From paper to electronic health records, from manual dispensing to robotics. What Travis made clear during this session is that the current shift is different in kind, not just degree. The speed is unlike anything the industry has seen and the stakes extend beyond operational efficiency.

REFERENCES

1. Alowais SA, Alghamdi SS, Alsuhebany N, et al. Clinical and operational applications of artificial intelligence and machine learning in pharmacy: a narrative review of real-world applications. MDPI. 2025. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11932220/

2. Utah Department of Commerce Office of Artificial Intelligence Policy. Utah and Doctronic announce groundbreaking partnership for AI prescription medication renewals. January 6, 2026. https://commerce.utah.gov/2026/01/06/news-release-utah-and-doctronic-announce-groundbreaking-partnership-for-ai-prescription-medication-renewals/