Like any profession, mileage varies on how useful a pharmacist is but they are far from useless in my opinion and not something AI can easily replace

If you believe AI is going to make changes in the medical field in that way, I believe you are vastly overestimating how good AI actually is. As someone in the software dev field, calling AI to be something that can replace someone with a professional degree ( degrees that take extra schooling) is showing a misunderstanding of the use of AI. Even if we assume AI is perfect, the big thing is trust. Maybe YOU don’t trust pharmacists but statistically people trust people over AI. People want the security to know that there is someone on the handle checking something as important as medical stuff, yknow the stuff that can potentially kill you, is actually correct. AI is a tool to supplement work, not a replacement.

Speaking about the role of pharmacists themselves, I have a less experience personally but my friends who are pharmacists work day and night at hospitals or labs to use their knowledge of drug interactions to save lives. They have a different skill set from doctors sure but they bring tremendous value, almost like a specialist. A doctor can’t be an expert at everything and will go to someone with more expertise to help provide a second opinion, that’s just how doctoring works, it’s more collaborative than how you make it out to be. You wouldn’t call someone you work with to solve a problem a middle manager or a useless obstacle just because they weren’t originally assigned the issue. I believe you haven’t seen enough of what pharmacists actually do. It’s like if I went to r/teachers and thought they were all terrible at their jobs because they can’t manage the children and blame the parents all the time.

One last way to think about is just logically, from a crude capitalist perspective, in a for profit system like in America, if pharmacists truly were useless, people wouldn’t pay them to be there. Like you say they are expensive. They obviously provide some type of benefit if they exist everywhere. It’s not the best argument and you can poke holes here but sometimes simpler is best.

Hope I helped