AI Won’t Save Us…Yet: Reimagining AI’s Potential to Prioritize People

In every breathless conversation about artificial intelligence (AI), this technology has been heralded as a revolutionary force that will save healthcare by alleviating administrative burdens, enhancing diagnostic accuracy, and streamlining documentation. While AI is skilled in addressing specific task-oriented challenges, we assert that AI fails to tackle the deeper systemic issues plaguing the U.S. healthcare system and medical education. AI falls short in five people-focused areas and its current trajectory may exacerbate existing problems rather than solve them: 1. AI threatens medical education, 2. AI does not meaningfully address health equity, 3. AI may inadvertently increase physician workload, 4. AI does not address the intrinsic dysfunctions of the U.S. healthcare system, and 5. AI does not mitigate the clinical workforce crisis. For real transformational change in healthcare and medical education, AI efforts must address systemic flaws, innovate alongside medical educators, enhance workforce sustainability, and improve health equity. These changes must happen in concert with guidance from clinical experts and patients, instead of top-down approaches from corporate healthcare entities, insurance companies, and tech start-ups. We do hope that AI can save our broken and dysfunctional healthcare system, but until these people-focused shortcomings are addressed, AI won't save us yet.