Jobs › Life, Physical, and Social Science

AI exposure report

Will AI replace Biochemists and Biophysicists?

Some of your tasks will be automated. People who use AI will have the edge.

Task exposure to today's AI

41/100

Moderate exposure

This is the occupation's typical task mix. Your own score can be up to 30 points higher or lower depending on how you work: routine share, people contact, judgment and how much you already use AI.

Get your personal score

Will AI replace Biochemists and Biophysicists?

Not entirely. Today's AI tools can take on about 41% of the typical work in this occupation, mostly: prepare reports or recommendations, based upon research outcomes. The parts that stay human include: Design or perform experiments with equipment, such as lasers, accelerators, or mass spectrometers.; Teach or advise undergraduate or graduate students or supervise their research.; Manage laboratory teams or monitor the quality of a team's work..

People who learn to use AI for the automatable parts keep the edge. The 3-phase plan below shows where to start.

Which tasks AI can take on

The largest tasks in this occupation, their share of the working week, and how much of each today's AI tools can do.

TaskAutomatable
Prepare reports or recommendations, based upon research outcomes.AI already used 78%
Share research findings by writing scientific articles or by making presentations at scientific conferences. 72%
Write grant proposals to obtain funding for research. 70%
Design or perform experiments with equipment, such as lasers, accelerators, or mass spectrometers. 20%
Teach or advise undergraduate or graduate students or supervise their research. 20%
Manage laboratory teams or monitor the quality of a team's work. 15%

+ 18 more tasks (50% of the week) in the full test.

Your human edge

  • Design or perform experiments with equipment, such as lasers, accelerators, or mass spectrometers.
  • Teach or advise undergraduate or graduate students or supervise their research.
  • Manage laboratory teams or monitor the quality of a team's work.

AI tools to try

ChatGPT / Claude for literature and writingAI research tools (e.g. Elicit, Consensus, Semantic Scholar)Copilot for data analysis code (Python, R)

Related roles

A 3-phase AI learning plan

Phase 1

Faster literature and writing

  • Literature search and summaries with AI, always checked against the papers.
  • Drafts of methods, reports and grant text.
  • Reference management and formatting.

Project

Use AI to draft a literature review and methods section for your next paper or grant, verify every claim against the source PDFs, and log hours saved versus your last draft.

Phase 2

AI for data analysis

  • Analysis code in Python or R written with AI help.
  • Visualisation and statistics explained step by step.
  • Reproducibility: version code and prompts.

Project

Rebuild one past mass-spec or spectroscopy analysis as an AI-written, version-controlled Python or R script with plots and stats, and confirm it reproduces published figures.

Phase 3

AI as a research method

  • Classification, extraction or modelling with AI on your data.
  • Validate against human labels or ground truth.
  • Ethics, data protection and disclosure of AI use.

Project

Train or prompt an AI model to classify or extract features from 200 of your own assay or imaging records, score accuracy against your manual labels, and write an AI-use disclosure.
Take the free 11-question test