How is AI re-shaping pharmacy practice?
On Friday, May 1, 2026, the Ontario Pharmacists Association brought together early-career pharmacists and students for its first-ever in-person LEAD event, an evening of expert insight about how AI is disrupting pharmacy.
The throughline is reassuring: AI won’t replace pharmacists. But how pharmacists work (and think) is changing fast.
That was the central message of The AI Advantage, OPA’s first in-person LEAD event on May 1, 2026. With speakers from Manulife and Aiskyra, OPA CEO Justin Bates, and over 40 early-career professionals, the evening explored everything from clinical decision support tools to the question of what pharmacists’ expertise will look like in an AI-assisted world. Here’s what we took away.
AI suggests, YOU decide
Jamie Campbell, Vice President and Head of Artificial Intelligence at Manulife Canada, opened the conversation with a grounded, honest look at where AI stands today, and what pharmacists need to understand about its limitations.
He acknowledged that we’re still in early days.
“There’s a lot of nuance, a lot of ambiguity, and we’re doing a lot of work to add transparency,” he said. For pharmacists, that ambiguity isn’t just a technical challenge — it’s a patient safety issue.
So where does AI genuinely help? According to Jamie, two areas stand out:
- Documentation and administrative tasks. AI is very, very good at the tedious, repetitive tasks like documentation. In many practices, it’s already being used for transcription, but the potential extends further.
- Clinical decision support and medication safety. This is especially valuable in managing polypharmacy, where keeping track of complex drug interactions across multiple medications is both critical and cognitively demanding.
But Jamie was clear-eyed about the risks. AI can produce confident but inaccurate answers. It can miss rare or complex cases. It relies heavily on the quality of the input it receives and struggles with ambiguity.
“Responsible AI use is about validating that we understand those limitations,” he said.
The takeaway: for pharmacists, safety and safeguarding patients remain paramount.
“We need to be vigilant and we need to take accountability for the outcomes of AI,” he said.
AI is a powerful tool, but the professional judgment and accountability remains yours.
Technology as an opportunity
Justin Bates, OPA’s CEO, brought an advocacy lens to the evening, situating AI within the larger transformation underway in pharmacy and healthcare.
His message was direct: the challenge isn’t the technology itself. The tools exist, and their potential is powerful. The question is whether the profession, and the patients it serves, are prepared to embrace them.
For Justin, the stakes are high.
“If we don’t start serving our patients where they are, we’re going to miss opportunities,” he said.
The fundamental value of pharmacy hasn’t changed, but the business model that supports it must evolve.
“We need to prepare the business model for disruptors,” he said.
Rather than treating AI and other technological shifts as threats, OPA is encouraging pharmacists to see them as opportunities.
“OPA is preparing pharmacists for the future model that will evolve. Let’s use these disruptors, and see them not as a threat but as an opportunity,” he said.
To that end, Justin shared that OPA is making significant investments in innovation, including the development of an innovation centre and work toward acquiring a pharmacy — tangible steps toward understanding and shaping the future of practice firsthand.
Faster, safer, more confident decisions
Kenny Chan, co-founder of Aiskyra, brought the practitioner’s perspective. With over a decade of experience as a community pharmacist before co-founding his AI-driven pharmacy platform, Kenny spoke from lived experience about the pressures pharmacists face, and what purpose-built AI tools can do to help.
The core tension he identified: pharmacy scope is expanding, but time isn’t.
That pressure creates gaps: rushed decisions made under time constraints, or decisions made without complete information. These aren’t failures of skill; they’re failures of capacity.
AI tools built specifically for healthcare, Kenny argued, can help pharmacists make faster, safer, and more confident drug decisions. Crucially, he distinguished purpose-built healthcare AI from general-purpose tools. General AI stores information and creates significant privacy risks. Purpose-built tools are constrained by design, limiting what data is used and how.
He also addressed a concern that comes up frequently in conversations about AI in clinical settings: the worry that over-reliance on AI might lead to cognitive deficits among clinicians over time. Kenny’s take was thoughtful. Yes, pharmacists may become less reliant on rote memorization. But that’s not necessarily a loss.
“You may be less effective at rote memorization, but you will learn to ask better questions and become a better clinical detective,” he said.
That reframing — from memorization to clinical reasoning — aligns with what Jamie described later: the future belongs to pharmacists who can think critically, connect information, and solve complex problems.
The Bigger Picture
What united the evening’s conversations was a consistent, clear message: AI is neither a saviour nor a threat. It’s a tool, and its value depends entirely on how it’s used and by whom.
Pharmacy professionals aren’t passive recipients of technological change. They’re the ones who will shape how AI gets adopted in practice, what safeguards get built in, and what the pharmacist-patient relationship looks like in the years ahead.
“In our careers now, we not only have to navigate the pure sciences and the life sciences, we need to navigate these technological disruptions as well. That’s the new reality,” said Jamie.
“It is a re-wiring of the type of work that we are doing. This happened in the industrial revolution as well. It’s the problem-solving and making connections that will be critical.”
In other words, what makes a great pharmacist isn’t going away — it’s evolving.
OPA’s first LEAD event was a strong start to that navigation, and a reminder that early-career pharmacists don’t just have a stake in the future of the profession. They’re building it.
OPA LEAD is a professional development and networking series designed for early-career pharmacy professionals and students. Stay connected with OPA for upcoming events.
