AI Resilience Report forOccupational Therapy Aides

If you're thinking about becoming an occupational therapy (OT) aide, here's good news: most of your day-to-day job — physically helping patients, setting up equipment, and encouraging clients — is very hard to automate. Right now, AI is mainly showing up in the paperwork side of the role. A recent survey in the American Journal of Occupational Therapy found that nearly half (48.9%) of occupational therapy practitioners had used generative AI in the past six months, most often to answer work-related questions and generate clinical content ^[1].

AOTA reports OT teams are using AI to generate draft reports, summarize client data, and suggest relevant treatment approaches, saving time and improving documentation accuracy ^[2]. Hospitals are also rolling out ambient AI scribes that listen during sessions — an AHA review of a JAMA study found scribes cut EHR time by about 13.4 minutes and documentation time by 16 minutes per clinician ^[3]. That augments the reporting and record-keeping tasks aides support, but doesn't replace hands-on care.

Adoption will likely be steady but slow for aides specifically. On the "speed up" side, AI scheduling and billing tools are cheap and widely available, and Research.com notes that documentation, scheduling, and billing are increasingly streamlined through specialized software ^[4]. On the "slow down" side, aide labor is relatively affordable — the BLS reports a median wage of $39,160 for OT aides in 2025, with employment projected to grow 20% through 2035 ^[5] — so there's little pressure to replace them.

Ethical hurdles matter too: the AJOT study found only 6.2% of practices have formal GenAI policies and 42.2% of practitioners received no training ^[1]. The bottom line: AI will handle more of your clipboard work, but your empathy, hands, and encouragement remain irreplaceable.